The sum from halving to peak works three times out of three, and it still isn’t a law

How tightly it works, precisely

21 days of spread between the shortest and the longest, on a wait that runs to almost eighteen months. Put another way: if in May 2024 somebody had written “the peak arrives around October 2025”, they would have been right to within three weeks. There is nothing vague about this regularity, and it is something the people who mock it have never counted.

The reason I open here is that this piece’s argument only works if you start from the strongest case on the other side. The sum works. The question isn’t whether it works: it is what a sum that works three times entitles you to do.

What a sample of three can carry

And the three points aren’t even comparable with each other, which is the bigger problem. In 2016 this market was worth a few billion and was made of enthusiasts; in 2020 there were the first funds and a pandemic filling the world with liquidity; in 2024 there are exchange-listed instruments, companies with the coin in the treasury and authorities writing its rules. Calling three situations that different “the same experiment” is the part that doesn’t hold.

Then there is the third variable, which is the most boring explanation and the most likely. Global liquidity has a cycle of its own, and in all three cases it moved in a way compatible with what the price did. If a third thing moves both, the coincidence between halving and peak is true and useless at the same time — like ice cream and sunstroke, which go together without one causing the other.

What the halving does, and what gets attributed to it

Everything else is inferred, and nobody has proved any of it: that the cut causes the rise, that the rise lasts about eighteen months, that the fall begins twelve or eighteen months after the peak, that the sequence repeats. Those are four different claims, of which the first is arguable and the other three are descriptions of what happened, passed off as rules for what will happen.

And there is a piece that has moved and that almost nobody updates: whoever produces the blocks no longer sells the way they used to. The flows from their wallets show ways of realizing gains that differ from past cycles — they finance themselves on the markets, they hold, they sell in advance. If the only plausible causal mechanism has changed, the theory resting on it should at least be re-examined.

The halving reduces the issuance of new coins by fifty percent, and therefore the amount whoever produces blocks has to sell: those are checkable facts. That it causes a rise, that the rise lasts eighteen months, that the fall arrives a year later and that the sequence repeats are, by contrast, unproven inferences.

And the altcoins, which were somewhere else in the meantime

The interesting part isn’t the level but the sequence. In classic bear markets bitcoin fell first and the others followed it more violently, but over the same period. Here the others had been falling for months while bitcoin held: two markets with two clocks, not one with two speeds.

The simplest explanation is that the money that came in from the listed instruments and the corporate treasuries came in on bitcoin and nothing else, while the others were left hanging on retail money, which withdrew. If that is right, the single cycle is neither over nor alive: it is that there is no longer one cycle, and asking where we are in it becomes a question with no subject.

What I watch instead of counting the months

Those limits have to be stated, because whoever sells onchain certainties never states them. A wallet isn’t a person: a transfer between two addresses of the same entity reads as a sale when it isn’t, and over a single week that noise is worth as much as the signal. It works on large numbers and long horizons, as a category, not as Tuesday’s horoscope.

And above all of it sits the thing nobody wants to be told: none of these measures forecasts. They say what condition the market is in now, which is already far more than a countdown does. Knowing where you are and knowing where you are going are two different things, and telling them apart is the whole difference between a method and a faith — and this market, on the second, is doing splendidly.

Put bluntly: the sum works three times out of three, and three times is exactly the number of observations that convinces everyone and proves nothing.