The Four-Year Cycle, and Whether It Still Holds

Bitcoin's issuance halves roughly every four years, and its price has moved in a rhythm around those events three times running: a long rise, a peak seventeen or eighteen months after the halving, then a year-long fall. Whether that rhythm is a mechanism or a coincidence repeated three times is the most consequential open question on this site.

The timings are remarkably consistent

Measured from each halving to that cycle's highest daily close:

2012-11-28 halving → peak 2013-12-04, 371 days
2016-07-09 halving → peak 2017-12-16, 525 days
2020-05-11 halving → peak 2021-11-08, 546 days
2024-04-20 halving → peak 2025-10-06, 534 days

The last three landed within three weeks of one another. For a market this volatile, that is a striking regularity — and the 371 days of the first cycle is the reminder that the pattern has already been different once.

The declines are equally regular. Each of the three completed bear markets bottomed between eleven and thirteen months after the top: 406 days from the 2013 peak, 364 from 2017, 366 from 2021. You can see all of this on the cycle chart, which marks the halvings directly on the price line.

The magnitudes are not consistent at all

This is the part usually left out. Peak to peak, the gains have collapsed:

2013 → 2017: $1,135 to $19,641, 17.3×
2017 → 2021: $19,641 to $67,542, 3.4×
2021 → 2025: $67,542 to $124,824, 1.9×

Each cycle has delivered roughly a fifth of the previous one's multiple. Any projection built on the average of past cycles — including the one this site publishes on its own cycle page — is therefore anchored on returns that have never repeated. We say so on the chart, and it is worth repeating here.

The drawdowns have compressed too, though far less dramatically: −84.5%, −83.8%, −76.7%. From the October 2025 peak, the deepest close as of this writing was $58,525 on 2026-06-30, a fall of 53.1% and 267 days in — shallower and shorter than any completed cycle, but not a completed cycle.

Where the halving explanation gets weak

The supply story is intuitive: less new issuance meeting steady demand should push price up. The trouble is that the effect ought to shrink each time, and sharply. The 2012 halving cut daily issuance by 25 BTC per block against a circulating supply around 10.5 million. The 2024 halving cut it by 3.125 BTC per block against nearly 19.7 million coins. As a fraction of existing supply, the 2024 halving was roughly a fortieth of the shock the 2012 one was.

A halving is also the most widely known scheduled event in the asset's existence. It is on every calendar, years in advance. A supply reduction that everyone can see coming is exactly the kind of information an efficient market prices before it happens, not eighteen months afterwards.

The competing explanation is that the four-year rhythm is really a credit and liquidity cycle that happened to line up with the issuance schedule. That story fits the 2020–21 cycle uncomfortably well, and it predicts that the pattern breaks whenever the two calendars diverge.

Locating yourself without relying on the calendar

If the halving clock is unreliable, the useful question becomes where the market is by other measures. Three that do not depend on the date:

Valuation against cost basis. MVRV below 1 has marked every major bottom — 0.56 in January 2015, 0.69 in December 2018, 0.75 in November 2022. It has never been below 1 at anything other than a bear-market low.

What patient holders are doing. Long-Term SOPR below 1 means people holding for months or years are selling at a loss. It read 0.50, 0.42 and 0.44 at those same three bottoms. It is the single most consistent signal in this collection, and notably its upside has decayed to uselessness while its downside has not.

Cohort cost basis crossing. Realized price for short-term holders has fallen below the long-term holders' figure exactly four times, and each spell sits inside a bear-market bottom — including 109 days beginning on 2022-11-09, the precise day of that cycle's low.

None of those tell you what happens next. What they do is describe the present in terms that have meant something at past turning points, which is a more modest and more defensible claim than a date.

The position we take

The timing regularity is real and worth knowing. The magnitude decay is also real and is the more important fact, because it means every model calibrated on the early cycles now overshoots — a pattern visible in Pi Cycle Top, which has missed the last two cycle peaks outright, and in the power-law rainbow, whose top band price has not touched since May 2021.

Three observations of a four-year pattern is three observations. We publish the projection because it is the honest historical analogue, and we label it a naïve one because that is what it is.

Last updated 2026-08-10.