Bitcoin's 4-year cycles

Roughly every four years Bitcoin goes through a "halving", where the reward miners get is cut in half. Historically each halving has kicked off a boom and bust cycle. I plotted all four cycles aligned to their halving day so you can compare them directly, on a log scale.

Each line is one cycle, normalised to its own halving-day price, so a cycle that started at $12 and one that started at $65,000 become directly comparable. Day 0 is the halving.

The story the chart tells is diminishing returns. Peak multiples each cycle: 2012 did 92x, 2016 did 30x, 2020 did 7.9x, and 2024 has done 1.9x so far. Each cycle's peak has been roughly a third of the one before. That makes sense, since a $1.2T asset simply can't 30x again the way a $200M one could. The current cycle is the weakest yet, and right now is even trading below its halving-day price.

Here is the full price history on a log scale. Green shaded bands are bull and accumulation phases, red are the end-of-cycle bear markets (peak to trough). The dashed lines connect the cycle tops and bottoms into a channel, and the right edge is the projected next cycle.

A few things stand out. Timing is remarkably consistent: every cycle since 2016 has peaked around 17 months after the halving, and bottomed around 12 to 13 months after the peak. Magnitude keeps shrinking, as Bitcoin matures from a moonshot into something more like digital gold: high volatility, but no more 30x runs. If the pattern holds, the next accumulation phase begins in late 2026, heading into the April 2028 halving.

None of this is a prediction. Past cycles do not guarantee future ones, and "the cycle is dead" gets said every cycle. But the shape is hard to ignore: same rhythm, smaller and smaller waves.