Time in Band

Time in Band re-reads the Rainbow chart as a residency distribution. The Rainbow draws price as a line moving through nine log-spaced valuation bands; this page collapses the time axis and asks a single question instead — of every day Bitcoin has traded, what fraction was spent in each band? Each bar is one band, its width the share of historical days, scaled so the most-lived-in band reads as full. Bars stack from band 9 (Euphoric) at the top to band 1 (Capitulation) at the bottom, matching the Rainbow’s vertical ordering.

Today Bitcoin sits in band 2 · Deep Value at $65,837.03. Across its 5,810 daily closes since first listed trade, the most-lived-in band is 3 · Accumulation, which has hosted 16.2% of the record.

Every figure on this page reduces to assigning each daily close a band, then counting. The assignment is three steps, all reproducible from public data:

centreLog(t) = a · ln(days_t) + b
logDev(t) = log10(price_t) − centreLog(t)
band(t) = bandIndex(logDev_t)

First, compute the regression centre at every historical day under today’s Rainbow coefficients (a = 2.4608, b = -16.4312). Second, subtract the centre log from the actual log-price to get the log-space deviation. Third, bucket the deviation into one of nine bands using midpoint thresholds between the canonical −0.4, −0.3, …, +0.3, +0.4 offsets. The page then aggregates three ways: the all-time histogram (every day since 18 July 2010), the current-cycle histogram (since the 2024 halving), and the per-cycle distribution table below (sliced at every halving block-confirmation date).

The live-fit caveat that matters most. Because the bands are defined by the live Rainbow fit, every nightly refit shifts the per-band counts by a few days. The shape of the distribution is stable; the specific shares are not pinned to any historical fit. We render the live distribution rather than a frozen snapshot so the lens tracks the current Rainbow on this site — the trade-off is documented in the “where it breaks” section and on the methodology page.

The headline shape is asymmetry. The lower bands (1–4) host roughly half of every historical day; the upper bands (7–9) host roughly a quarter; band 5 and band 6 together pick up the remainder. This is not a uniform 11%-per-band distribution, and it is not because price spends equal time below and above trend. It is because the upper bands are exit ramps — rare, brief, late-cycle states the chart visits and leaves. The lower bands are accumulation zones, and Bitcoin lives in them longer than it spends anywhere else. Band 9 is the partial exception: its all-time share is inflated by the saturated 2013 and 2017 tops, which a flatter modern fit would no longer place that high.

Reading every cycle anchor against the live fit keeps the lens internally consistent across rows — the band column below uses one set of coefficients for all eight dates, so the readings are comparable. The tops held in band 9 through 2021, then the 2024 pre-halving high stepped down materially — the same compression visible on the Rainbow chart itself: the 2013 and 2017 peaks saturate band 9; the 2021 peaks still read band 9 but at shallower offsets; the 2024 pre-halving high registers materially lower. The troughs print the mirror pattern in the lower bands.

This is the page’s one genuinely distinctive exhibit. The pipeline ships the all-time aggregate plus the current-cycle counts; slicing every prior cycle into its own column is computed here, inline against the live coefficients. The clearest pattern is the Euphoric band’s frequency dropping off its Cycle-2 peak. Cycle 2 spent 26.3% of its days in band 9; Cycle 3, 11.8%; Cycle 4, 12.9%; Cycle 5 to date, 0.0%. The same compression shows up on NUPL’s “Euphoria” band, which is keyed off realized cap rather than log-regression — two different lenses converging on the same regime pattern.

Two patterns emerge, and they deserve different levels of trust. First, the structural shift: the lower bands (1–3) have hosted a shrinking share of each cycle. Cycle 2 spent 45.3% in the accumulation zone; Cycle 5 to date sits at only 17.1%. Read that low Cycle-5 figure with care: the young cycle’s days sit overwhelmingly in the mid bands (4–6 hold roughly 82.9% of them so far), not because price has stopped visiting the accumulation zone but because it has not yet returned there this cycle.

Second, the headline one, which is partly an artefact: the Euphoric band has all but vanished from recent cycles. Some of that is real and some is mechanical, and the table cannot fully separate them. The mechanical part is the Rainbow regression itself — as more years of data arrive, the slope flattens, so the upper band that hosted 2013- and 2017-era prints now sits further above today’s price level than it did in real time. A live-fit chart cannot help but discount the past’s most extreme prints. With only three closed cycles, a drop off the Cycle-2 peak is a suggestive small-n pattern, not a tested effect — it has no t-stat to lean on, the path is not even monotone (Cycle 4 edged back above Cycle 3), and a single future blow-off would reverse it.

The deeper question — is Bitcoin’s per-cycle blow-off structurally smaller? — cannot be answered from this chart alone. But the direction is consistent with the parallel evidence on NUPL, MVRV-Z, and Puell Multiple: the topping signals of the 2010s no longer fire on the same canonical thresholds. Four independent lenses leaning the same way is more persuasive than any one of them.

The band-9 decay is half lens, half market — and you can date the seam. The 17 December 2017 top at roughly $19.5k printed deep in band 9 under the fit that was live in 2017. Re-read under today’s shallower coefficients, that same close lands lower, and so does the 2013 saturation. So the all-time band-9 share is dragged down by every nightly refit, independent of anything the market does. The 14 March 2024 pre-halving high near $73k registering well below band 9 is the clearest case: it was a genuine all-time high, yet the live fit scores it as routine. Anyone citing “the Euphoric band is shrinking” as pure market evidence is over-reading a partly mechanical effect.

Halving-day cuts can misattribute a top to the wrong cycle. The slices use canonical halving block-confirmation dates as edges. That is the most durable cycle landmark, but it is a choice. The November 2021 top fell inside Cycle 4 (post-2020 halving) cleanly; but a top that lands close to a halving — as the 2013 December peak did relative to the November 2012 halving — can shift between columns under a top-to-top or low-to-low slicing instead. The cut here is consistent with our halving-cycle overlay and is the cut most readers expect, but it is not the only defensible one.

An in-progress cycle’s shares are unstable. Cycle 5 grows by one day each refresh, so its band-9 share can only rise from here, never settle, until the next halving closes it. Comparing a live cycle’s residency to a closed one is apples to oranges: had you measured Cycle 4 in mid-2021, before the November blow-off, its band-9 share would have looked far thinner than its final figure. The current cycle’s 0.0% is a partial count, not a verdict.

The guard rails almost never fire. The band assignment skips any row with a non-positive days-since-genesis or price, but the first listed close (18 July 2010) is already 561 days past genesis, so in practice no row is excluded — the all-time histogram counts every daily close on file. The guard is a definitional safeguard, not a live cut, and it leaves the per-cycle shares untouched.

If you accumulate on a schedule, the asymmetry is already doing the work. A steady weekly buy across the post-2015 history lands disproportionately in the lower bands, simply because that is where Bitcoin spends the bulk of its days. There is no entry to time — the band structure tilts a dumb schedule toward the cheap end by construction, and the all-time skew toward the lower bands above is the reason it keeps working.

If you are timing the cycle, use Time in Band as a rarity gauge, not an entry signal. A print in band 8 or 9 is rare but says nothing about how long it persists; the 2013 and 2017 cycles spent weeks in band 9 before topping. Pair it with Pi Cycle for the turn and MVRV-Z for confirmation — and do not size a trade expecting a 2017-style band-9 top, both because the band is thinning and because part of that thinning is the chart re-scoring itself.