June just closed as the worst month in the history of Bitcoin funds. More money left them than in any month before, and the funds are now sitting underwater on what they hold.

That sounds like a reason to run. Most people are reading it exactly that way.

We are not.

The worst data you have ever seen has an uncomfortable quality to it. It is the raw material every bottom is made of. Floors do not get built on good news. They get built on the day the news could not be worse and the price stops falling anyway. So the record-bad month is not the answer. It is the question. And the question is which kind of bad this is.

Because a market that is bottoming and a market that is breaking look almost identical from the outside. Both are pages of red. The funds bleed in both. The holders are underwater in both. Stand far enough back and the two are the same picture.

That is why June's record tells you almost nothing on its own. It is a fact about what already happened, not a forecast of what comes next. The forecast lives one layer down, in the things the screens do not show.

The difference is underneath, in what the selling actually is. At a bottom, the selling is exhaustion. The people who were going to panic have mostly panicked, old holders are handing their coins to new ones, and each round of selling is a little smaller than the last. In a breakdown, the selling is acceleration. Each drop sets up the next one, sellers beget sellers, and the rounds get bigger.

You cannot tell which one you are in from the price. The price looks the same either way. You read it from who is selling, who is quietly buying underneath, and one specific mark a genuine bottom almost always leaves behind.

Right now two of those three are pointing one way and the third has gone silent. And the silent one is usually the one that settles the argument.

So before you read June's record as the start of something worse, it is worth knowing exactly how we separate a floor that is forming from a floor that is giving way. What follows is not a forecast. It is a method.

Telling the two apart comes down to three things we watch, and this week they do not agree.