"Only coins with utility will survive a bear market" is just another lie people tell themselves, trying to make sense of an irrational market

Earlier today, I made a post analyzing how many coins from the top of the 2017 bull run reached a new ATH after 2018 (about 20%). And I should have seen it coming: quite a few people commented some variation of "only coins with utility/solid fundamentals will survive a bear market!!1!". And well - I disagree.

I would argue that's just another lie people tell themselves to reassure themselves they'll make a profit. It's a bit like TA: trying to find patterns that aren't there to make sense of a mostly irrational market.

You know which coin survived the last bear market and reachead a new ATH about 42 times as high as the old one? DOGE, the coin famously without a real utility that you all hate so much for some reason. You know which coins never got even close to their old ATH after the bear market? Well, dozens. Former sub favorites like Monero or IOTA that supposedly had huge utility never got close to their former prices again. Others, like Nano, got hit even harder - it's not even in the top 200 anymore! And that one doesn't just have the promise of future utility, it already did what it was supposed to do back then - which isn't a lot, but it did that pretty well.

But that's another thing: even today, few coins really have all that much utility, most just promise they will be super useful in the future. That was even more so in 2017/18 - if we're honest, how many of the coins and tokens that survived really had utility back then? Many with the promise of future utility died, others promising the same things survived. I'm not saying it's completely random, absolutely not, but marketing, hype, random factors we don't think about and well, luck, make up a huge part of the equation.

Don't get me wrong, it still makes sense to try to stick to projects with solid fundamentals. What that means is still somewhat subjective, but it's one of the few factors that might influence the success of a project that we can measure at least a little bit. But utility/ good fundamentals are not a guarantee those coins will survive - while, I am convinced, some random memecoins/shitcoins will.

tl;dr: The market is unpredictable and very random at times. Only a Sith deals in absolutes, so don't do that.