Golden-Ratio Multiplier

The chart plots Bitcoin's daily close as a single line, with seven Fibonacci-multiple bands of the 350-day moving average laid behind it. The lowest band starts at the 350DMA itself; six more rise from there at multiples of ×1.6, ×2, ×3, ×5, ×8, ×13, and ×21. Because every band is a fixed multiple of the same slow-moving average, the picture is scale-free: it reads the cycle by distance above the baseline, not by dollar price, so the ×1.6 boundary means the same thing at $300 in 2015 as it does at $90,000 today. The colour ramp runs cool to warm — lower bands read as accumulation regimes, upper bands as late-cycle excess.

Today's spot is $65,837.03 against a 350-day MA of $92,082.83 — a multiple of 0.71×, which places the network in the Below ×1.6 band.

The input is the daily Bitcoin USD close history (see data sources). For every day t:

350DMA(t) = mean(price[t−349..t])
band_k(t) = m_k × 350DMA(t) for m_k ∈ {1.6, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21}

Band assignment at any date is the largest multiple m_k the live price is at or above. The chart's underlying data file ships only the 350DMA series; the band lines are reconstructed client-side from the seven multipliers, so a reader can swap the multiplier set without re-fetching. Full derivation lives on the methodology page.

Two choices are Swift's, not the data's. The 350-day window was selected because it gave the cleanest band alignment for the 2013 and 2017 tops at the time of publication (April 2019) — it is not optimised, just inspected. And the multiplier set ×1.6/2/3/5/8/13/21 is the Fibonacci sequence with the golden ratio (≈ 1.618) rounded to ×1.6 at the lower end. Both are heuristics. The model has no parameters fit to a loss function; it has two numbers a person liked the look of.

The cycle-by-cycle peak multiplier is the chart's defining quantitative observation. The table below computes each cycle peak's price ÷ 350DMA from our own daily-close history. One caveat sits at the top: the 2011 figure rests on a 350-day average still filling its first window (our price series begins mid-2010), so read its multiple as indicative rather than exact. The later peaks sit on a fully warmed average and carry the pattern Swift first noted in 2019, now extended through the two cycles he had not yet seen.

By peak multiplier, cycle by cycle:

• 08 Jun 2011 · Mt. Gox-era — spot $29.03, 350DMA $1.38, multiple 21.0× — band 7.
• 10 Apr 2013 — spot $161.19, 350DMA $19.70, multiple 8.18× — band 5.
• 29 Nov 2013 — spot $1,101.83, 350DMA $127.41, multiple 8.65× — band 5.
• 17 Dec 2017 — spot $19,423.58, 350DMA $3,563.12, multiple 5.45× — band 4.
• 14 Apr 2021 — spot $63,576.68, 350DMA $22,910.04, multiple 2.78× — band 2.
• 10 Nov 2021 — spot $67,145.37, 350DMA $43,926.00, multiple 1.53× — band 0.
• 14 Mar 2024 — spot $73,097.77, 350DMA $34,933.85, multiple 2.09× — band 2.

The mechanism is adoption maths, not magic. Each cycle adds capital against a larger base, so the same dollar inflow buys a smaller percentage move — and the 350DMA the price is measured against has itself climbed to a structurally higher level. That second effect is stark in the list above: by the November 2021 retest the 350DMA had risen so far that a roughly $67k price registered below the ×1.6 line entirely, landing the double-top's later peak in the accumulation band rather than a cycle-top band. Swift's June 2019 work framed the same observation forward-looking — “each cycle peak has been reaching a lower multiplier band” — and the two cycles completed since publication have held the line. Extrapolated naïvely, the next peak would land lower still. That is also exactly the assumption the chart could be wrong about: a geometric decay fit to a handful of points is a fragile thing to bet a cycle on.

The ×1.6 line — the golden-ratio band — does double duty. It marks both the upper edge of accumulation territory (when spot is below it) and the lower edge of the bull-cycle envelope (when spot is above it). Crossings in either direction have been sticky: the 2015 upcross preceded the 2017 cycle peak; the 2018 downcross marked the cycle bottom; the 2019 upcross preceded the 2021 cycle peak; the 2022 downcross marked the post-FTX bottom. Single-quarter whipsaws are rare on a 350-day MA — the slowness that makes the chart a poor entry timer is exactly what keeps the ×1.6 line free of false signals.

The other six bands carry far weaker signal as cycle markers. Each was useful in one cycle and silent in the next. Treat the ×1.6 line as the most durable threshold on the chart and the higher bands as risk-framing rather than as triggers.

The upper bands have priced nothing since December 2017. Swift's original mapping ran ×21 / ×13 / ×8 / ×5 across the 2011, 2013 and 2017 tops — but on our recomputed history the 2021 April peak topped in the ×2–×3 band and the 2024 pre-halving high in the same band, with the November 2021 retest slipping below ×1.6 outright. No cycle has touched ×5 since 2017, so the ×5, ×8, ×13 and ×21 bands are decoration, not operational thresholds. Anyone who set a sell at an upper-band touch held through both the November 2021 top and the early-2024 high without a trigger. Matt Crosby noted the same category failure for 2024–25: the long-cycle top indicators simply “remained untested” this cycle (Crosby, Dec 2025).

The window and ladder are post-hoc fits, not derivations. Swift's June 2019 piece (Medium, 17 Jun 2019) presents the multipliers as “the mathematically organic nature of Bitcoin adoption”, but the 350-day window and the Fibonacci ladder were chosen because they fit two or three cycle tops — curve-fitting on a tiny sample, not a model derived from first principles. Tim Stolte of Amdax made the category critique bluntly for Bitcoin power-law fits: “there's no logic or wisdom there, just pure guesswork and picking whatever looks nice” (Amdax / Medium, 2 Sep 2022). Pretty bands fit on four points do not survive forever.

The four-year cycle scaffolding may be ending. The chart's central premise — that there is a recurring cycle whose tops can be ranked — is itself in question. If Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan is right that Bitcoin's price drivers are shifting from issuance halvings to ETF flows and global liquidity (Bitwise CIO memo, 23 Dec 2025), the band-decay pattern may continue all the way down until the framework collapses into the ×1.6 line as a lone regime-marker and the higher bands are purely decorative. That is a future this chart cannot rule out, and the one its own diminishing-tops trend quietly points toward.

If you accumulate on a schedule, the sub-×1.6 band is the discount the chart surfaces and the ×1.6 to ×3 range is the hold band. Most of Bitcoin's history has been spent below ×3, so weekly buys naturally pile up in the lower bands without any timing on your part — the band structure does the tilting for you.

If you are timing the cycle, the ×1.6 cross is the one signal worth tracking, and even then only as the slow backdrop. Let faster instruments call the turn: pair it with Pi Cycle for tops, MVRV‑Z for cost-basis context, and the 200-week MA for floors. Given the band-decay trend above, treating an upper band as a price target is the single mistake the chart most actively argues against — three cycles running, the target was never hit.