It makes a big difference. Denial is early in the bear trend, where panic is late and typically below the mean. That makes denial a bad time to buy but panic a good time to buy.
Denial is stuff like "Zoom out the chart and look at the bigger picture, we're still up!" or "The fundamentals are still strong, this drop is irrational"*. I am seeing a lot of posts like this right now, particularly for Bitcoin.
Panic is pretty self explanatory, the sense is that everyone else will capitulate so you need to quickly get out first. It does feel like this, but I'm not seeing many people express it yet.
My sense is that we're only somewhere around denial/fear right now. It was literally two days ago that people were joking about "China Ban Bitcoin", lo and behold China did in fact effectively ban Bitcoin (for now), perhaps that was the height of denial and we've moved on only slightly from there.
* Nobody is fully aware of all fundamental factors, and the market is least cognizant of fundamentals while at the extremes. Positive fundamentals are under-weighted at the bottom and negative fundamentals are ignored at the top.
