There's a social media groundswell predicting bitcoin above $90,000. That might be a problem.

The retail crowd has spoken: Bitcoin’s BTC$77,074.61 price is headed above $90,000 in the days ahead in a move that would flip the year-to-date return from negative to positive. What's in doubt is whether the market plays ball.

Analytics firm Santiment scanned thousands of crypto social media posts across X, Reddit, Telegram and other platforms and found that over the past week, calls have skewed heavily toward BTC price trading above $90,000. Mentions of the $50,000–$59,000 range are being dismissed as expressions of fear, uncertainty, doubt or their acronym, FUD.

Clearly, the crowd is expecting the slow recovery from the February low of around $60,000 to extend well into May. And why not? Flows into exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are back, and bitcoin has held up through weeks of Iran-related conflict, oil price surges and a string of DeFi hacks that once again highlighted the risks embedded in blockchain infrastructure.

What do you call a market that doesn’t fall on a stack of bad news? Bullish, right? That’s what the crowd seems to be pricing in.

Santiment says this bullishness as precisely the reason to be cautious.

“Price predictions of a coin are a great way to see what the OPPOSITE likely path for prices will look like,” the firm said on X, implying that overly bullish social sentiment can act as a contrarian indicator for a potential bearish performance.

As American poet Charles Bukowski put it, although he wasn't talking about markets: “Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.”

Contrarian traders in traditional markets use similar sentiment gauges, including the AAII Investor Sentiment Survey, which tracks retail investor bullishness versus bearishness. There's also the CNN Fear & Greed Index, which aggregates market momentum and positioning signals into a single sentiment barometer.

Interestingly, BTC’s recovery rally has already stalled this week, with prices pulling back to $77,000 from highs above $79,000 on Monday. Whether this is just a pause, or the start of a broader reversal, remains to be seen.