Bitcoin, wound onto its four-year clock

The vertical gap between the lines is the decay. At the same elapsed day, each cycle has traded at a smaller multiple of its own halving-day price than the one before. The current cycle is the first to sit below one, meaning Bitcoin is cheaper today than it was on halving day, two years into the epoch and after the cycle top has already passed.

The halving-day price stopped being a floor. Cycles 1 and 3 never once closed below it. Cycle 2 did, but only in its first hundred days, before the advance began. This cycle has spent time below it both early and late, which no earlier cycle did at all.

The halving is converging on exactly four calendar years. Read where each coloured tick on the baseline falls: 1,319 days, then 1,402, then 1,440, and the next one due at about 1,458 against a 1,461-day calendar. Blocks have been arriving closer to the ten-minute target as hashrate growth decelerates, so from the next epoch onward the halving is a four-year calendar event to within days.

The first year is where the cycle is decided. Switch to the indexed view and the divergence in year one is stark. That is also where the spot-ETF break shows up: the previous record high was taken out 30 days after the 2024 halving, against 90, 229 and 203 days in the three cycles before it.

This bear is not just shallower, it is the slowest. Days elapsed before -25% was reached: 3, 6, 5, 24, then 42. Days before -50%: 3, 86, 46, 180, then 242. Every prior decline reached its milestones faster than the one before it did not — the sequence is monotonic in the other direction, and the current cycle is the slowest at every level. A grinding decline with no capitulation candle is a different animal from 2011 or 2018.

At the same elapsed day the gap is stark. Read the dashed line: at this point past bears were down 84%, 63%, 65% and 70%. This one is down 49%. That is the one-sided compression finding again, seen from the other end.

The bounce off the low has been dying. Measured from the low to the year-end boundary: +130% in 43 days in 2011, then +19% in 16 days in 2018, then +3% in 39 days in 2022. The 2013 cycle is not comparable because its low landed in January, giving it 351 days to recover before its window closed — which is also why its line runs 761 days here against 206, 379 and 416.

One number to treat with suspicion. The front-loading table says 84% of this decline was delivered by day 180, close to 2011's 87%. But the denominator is a provisional low. If price makes a new low the figure falls, so read it as a description of what has happened rather than evidence that the decline is nearly over.

Not a second exponential. The growth rate itself decays. Trend growth measured between cycle tops, with the change in overshoot stripped out, has run 132%, then 69%, then 47% a year. The forward path starts from the decay of that series and falls toward a floor. On a log axis that is a line that keeps bending down, not one that re-steepens. A genuine second exponential needs a discrete regime event, not more of the same adoption.

Cycles survive, but only on one side. Distance from trend at cycle tops has collapsed from about +4σ to roughly zero. At cycle lows it has not moved. Manias are being arbitraged away by ETFs, listed options and a professional supply of volatility; capitulations are not, because forced selling still happens. That lowers expected return without removing the drawdowns.

The assumption doing the heavy lifting. Price currently sits about a sigma below the fitted trend. The headline horizon value assumes that gap closes. The no-reversion figure, which assumes it never does, is published beside it, and the implied CAGR quoted in the tiles is the blend of the two. Read all three, not just the big number.