Is it really true, that "almost all alts die in a bear market"? I analyzed some data to find out.

I've only gotten into crypto in 2020, so I haven't been around the last big bull run in 2017. I therefore don't really know first hand how a transition to a bear market looks like. Sure, I know how BTCs price tanked and recovered again over the years, but what about alts?

"Almost all alts die in bear markets" or some variation of it is repeated on here again and again, especially now that many expect a bear market around the corner. So I wondered: is that actually true or is it exaggarated and repeated by people who either can't remember it exactly or, like me, never experienced it?

I wanted to find out. So I took a historical snapshot of the market almost exactly 4 years ago, at the top of the 2017 bull run, scraped the data of all coins in the top 200 back then, and then scraped current prices for these coins. Here's a quick and ugly visualization how the prices of these coins developed in these for years, sorted by rank in 2017. Here are some of the main results:

• 31 out of 200 coins are now worth more than 4 years ago
• 95 out of 200 are worth less than 10% of what they were worth back then
• 33 out of 200 are worth less than 1% of what they were worth back then
• 18 out of 200 are not tracked by CMC anymore (Bitconnect is not one of them, so that means they're DEAD)
• there definitely is a correlation between market cap back then and performance, those outside the ~top 70 were far more likely to die than those inside - even though many top coins also lost a LOT of value
• AAVE is the best performing coin in this time frame, it is now worth 2583 times as much as back then EDIT: no it isn't, it "did a redenomination 100x, so that 2528x is actually 25.28x". Thanks u/petanibulan . The real best performing coin is BNB, which is now worth 98 times as much. AAVE still did great, though.
• XLM is the best stablecoin! It's now worth 1.003 times as much as 4 years ago

So what's the conclusion? Well, I guess many coins from the last bullrun indeed died or at least lost the vast majority of their value since then, but by far not all of them. There is a lot more money in the market now than back then, so sure, it might be different, but most likely many projects will die again once the bear market starts and projects will be replaced by newer projects in the next bull run. But hey, maybe you're holding this run's AAVE BNB!

Edit: as some of you have criticized that I'm comparing to the top of the market, I compared it to the bottom of the bear market (after which the bear market still continued for quite a while) as well in another post