Bitbull warns against paper trading to avoid crypto losses

Bitcoin briefly touched $85,000 before tumbling toward $80,000 last week, leaving leveraged traders facing a sharp wave of liquidations as spot buying faded and futures open interest climbed to $37.5 billion, it.beincrypto.com reported.

The swift reversal highlights how quickly market conviction can evaporate when leverage remains high. According to market data from Glassnode, open interest in Bitcoin futures rose from $36.5 billion to $37.5 billion over the same week, while bullish traders continued to pay elevated funding rates even as prices declined.

Why Bastian Keller Warns Against Paper Trading

For Bastian Keller, better known as Bitbull, this environment exposes the dangerous gap between simulated practice and real capital. Speaking with BeInCrypto at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore, Keller argued that paper trading builds an unrealistic sense of ability because users face zero financial danger.

“When it’s come then to real money, yeah, it’s completely different,” Keller said. “Emotions coming in, FOMO coming in, and then end of the day your your brain decide what you’re doing.”

While mock accounts help beginners learn platform navigation, Keller advised traders to start with tiny sums of genuine capital—such as $10 or $50—to experience the real psychological pressure of potential losses.

The Revenge Trading Loop That Destroys Accounts

Keller’s perspective stems from his own early financial setbacks in Forex trading prior to entering the cryptocurrency market in 2018. He recounted being scammed during his Forex days, an experience that forged what he calls the trading “circle of death.”

In this destructive cycle, a trader records a loss and immediately opens a fresh position to claw it back rather than accepting the setback. When that attempt fails, the risk escalates further.

“Then you’re going to your revenge trading, you lose more, you lose more, you lose more, and then everything is gone,” Keller explained. “I was one of these guys before.”

The danger multiplies when traders use leverage to control positions far larger than their actual deposits, allowing modest market swings to wipe out their entire accounts.

How Artificial Intelligence Aims to Catch Behavioral Traps

To combat these recurring psychological mistakes, Keller’s trading community and software platform, TradeMania, is developing tools designed to analyze historical trading data and provide artificial intelligence-generated feedback on user behavior, it.beincrypto.com reported. TradeMania maintains a commercial partnership with Bitunix as its primary exchange partner.

Despite these technological additions, market observers note that traders face an increasingly volatile macro landscape. Glassnode reports that spot buying has softened while investors turn toward options for protection ahead of two major upcoming catalysts: the Federal Reserve interest-rate decision scheduled for October 28 and the United States midterm elections on November 3.