Halving-Cycle Overlay

Four lines, one per halving cycle. Each is a running multiple of the cycle's day-0 close: price(halving + d) ÷ price(halving). The x-axis runs from the halving day forward to 1,460 days (≈ four years); cycles that have not yet run that long simply end early. The y-axis is logarithmic — both because peak multiples span two orders of magnitude and because cycle-to-cycle comparison is only honest in log space, where a doubling looks the same whether it starts from $12 or from $63,000.

The 2024 cycle is drawn thicker and in the accent colour. Spot is currently 1.04× the day-0 price of $63,461.59 at day 787. The 2020 cycle at the same days-elapsed stood at 2.35×; the best-performing cycle at this day was the 2012 cycle at 20.1×.

Inputs: the merged Bitcoin daily-close history and the four halving dates from consensus block heights:

2012-11-28 (block 210,000) · 2016-07-09 (block 420,000) · 2020-05-11 (block 630,000) · 2024-04-19 (block 840,000)

For each cycle i we take the close on the halving date as p₀ᵢ, then for every day d from 0 to min(1,460, today − halvingᵢ) we emit multiple(d) = price(halvingᵢ + d) / p₀ᵢ. Where the requested day falls between two daily closes (or after the last close), the most recent prior close is used; that nearest-prior policy keeps the line continuous on the chart even when the underlying series has gaps. Full derivation, including the block-height-to-date mapping, sits on the methodology page.

The day-0 anchor is the daily close on the halving date — not the halving-week median, the 30-day mean, or the day-0 open. Each of those alternatives shifts every line by a few percent; the shape of the comparison barely moves. We use the close because it is the most objective single number, and because anchoring to the block confirmation rather than an eyeballed "cycle start" is the one methodological choice that materially changes who you can argue with.

The chart answers one question: at the same days-elapsed, how does the active cycle compare to the previous three? A line above 1.0× means price is above its halving-day close; below 1.0× means it has fallen back. Read each cycle's shape end-to-end — the common pattern is a slow drift higher for the first six to twelve months, an acceleration into the cycle peak in the back half of year one or early year two, then a year or more underwater. The phase table below maps each window to a regime, but read it as a description of three past cycles, not a schedule the fourth has agreed to follow.

Snapshotting each cycle at fixed days-elapsed makes the diminishing-returns pattern unambiguous. The peak-multiple column is the headline: ≈ 91× → 30× → 8× → the current cycle, still in progress. The 365-day and 730-day columns capture how each cycle compounded along the way — and they do not move in lockstep, which is the first hint that "the cycle" is a looser object than the peak numbers alone suggest. Multiples are computed from each cycle's day-0 close using our daily-close history, with no smoothing.

Stack the four cycles by peak multiple alone:

• 2012 cycle — halving close $12.33 on 28 Nov 2012; peak 91.4× on day +367 .
• 2016 cycle — halving close $653.87 on 09 Jul 2016; peak 30.1× on day +525 .
• 2020 cycle — halving close $8,752.62 on 11 May 2020; peak 8.35× on day +1403 .
• 2024 cycle — halving close $63,461.59 on 19 Apr 2024; peak 1.97× on day +536 (still in progress).

The drop is monotonic and it is mechanically plausible. The cleanest explanation: it is far easier to multiply a $12 asset by 90× than a $63,000 asset by even 10×; the marginal capital required to move the market grows super-linearly with market cap. Layer on a one-time adoption premium in the early cycles — a population pricing Bitcoin for the first time — and a decaying peak multiple is what you would expect even if the halving itself did nothing.

The honest counterweight: three completed cycles is not a sample you can fit a decay curve to. Four points (counting the live one) will always look like whatever curve you draw through them, and there is no test that returns a meaningful p-value at n = 3. Notice too that the peak day is not stable — the 2012 cycle topped on day +367, the 2016 cycle on day +525, and the 2020 cycle's running-max multiple was not set until day +1403, when price finally cleared its November-2021 high in early 2024. The peak level falls cleanly; the peak timing does not, which is precisely why "cycle peak around day 525" is a forecast with very wide bars.

The 2020 cycle already broke the timing half of the pattern. If the halving cycle were a clock, the running-max multiple would land in a consistent window. It does not. The 2012 and 2016 peaks came inside the first 18 months; the 2020 cycle's highest day-0 multiple was not printed until day +1403 — early 2024, days before the next halving — because the November-2021 top (~$69k) sat just under the price level reached in the March-2024 surge. Read literally, the overlay says the 2020 cycle "peaked" almost four years in, which is true on a day-0-multiple basis and misleading as a cycle narrative. Any signal that depends on the peak landing in a fixed window has already failed once.

The 2024 cycle changed the regime underneath the chart. Three concrete events have no analogue on the 2012, 2016, or 2020 lines: the launch of US spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 (IBIT and peers absorbed flows the prior cycles never saw); the corporate-treasury bid led by Strategy and its imitators through 2024–2025; and a US regulatory posture that shifted sharply from the 2021–2022 enforcement era. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan's December 2025 memo "The Four-Year Cycle Is Dead. Welcome to the Ten-Year Grind" (Bitwise, 23 Dec 2025) puts it plainly: “the bitcoin halving is by definition half as important as it was four years ago.” Lyn Alden makes the parallel case that the four-year framing “doesn't really have a reason to exist anymore other than some degree of self-prophecy” (Crypto Briefing, 2025), pinning the real driver to the global liquidity cycle. If either is right, the day-0-normalised shape on this chart stops being predictive — the 2024 line could keep grinding flat instead of folding into a 2025–2026 capitulation, and the overlay would have no way to flag it.

The early multiples ride on thin, noisy data. The 2012 cycle's 91× peak sits on Mt. Gox-era closes with wide spreads and a single dominant venue that later proved insolvent. A few-percent error in the 2012 day-0 anchor moves the whole line; the same error on the 2024 anchor is rounding noise. Treat the oldest cycle's peak as the least reliable point on the chart, not the most impressive.

Anchoring is a choice, and other honest choices tell other stories. Researchers have anchored cycles at successive all-time highs, at 200-week-MA crossings, or at calendar quarters instead of at the halving block. Nico Cordeiro of Strix Leviathan framed the underlying trap in his 2020 critique of cycle-extrapolation work: “Bitcoin grew by X in the past, it will grow by X in the future. One should remember that past results are not representative of future returns” (Strix Leviathan, 30 Jun 2020). The halving anchor is defensible because it is objective; it is not the only one.

If you accumulate on a schedule, the overlay is an orientation tool, not a trigger. It tells you whether you are early in a cycle (low multiple, slow drift) or late (high multiple, sharp acceleration). The one actionable takeaway is the diminishing-returns pattern: if you believe it, anchor your forward-return expectation to a fraction of the last cycle's, not a repeat of it — and size for the possibility that the pattern itself is ending.

If you are trying to time the cycle, the overlay is too coarse to use alone — the peak day has ranged from +367 to +1403 across three cycles, so any single-date forecast carries enormous error. Pair it with a dated top signal like Pi Cycle and a valuation read like MVRV‑Z, and treat the overlay only as the slow backdrop that says which third of the cycle you are plausibly in.