Marc Hochstein is the managing editor for CoinDesk and a former editor-in-chief of American Banker.

In this opinion piece, Hochstein takes a quick look at the current state of the bitcoin markets, finding that just because there's smoke, there's not necessarily fire.

Tl;dr: this ain't Mt. Gox – and bitcoin survived that, too.

With all the panic selling following the Chinese government's renewed crackdown on bitcoin exchanges, it's important to remember that the country is no longer the trading hub it once was.

All else equal, that means the market may take less time to recover from the latest sell-off than from the one that took place in 2013 (you know, when the People's Bank of China suddenly declared that bitcoin was not a currency and ordered payment processors to stop accepting it).

Just a reminder of how bad the fallout from that that really was, during the three years it took bitcoin to recover from those bombshells, it lost nearly half its value, dropping from an all-time high of $1,150 to under $500.

But that was at a time when Chinese bitcoin trading accounted for as much as 90% of global volume (as shown in the chart below from CoinDesk's second-quarter State of Blockchain report.)

This state of affairs persisted until as recently as January of this year: