Bitcoin's Four-Year Cycle: Myth or Reality?

Bitcoin's price movements have often been linked to a supposed four-year cycle tied to its halving events. However, recent analysis suggests this cycle is more of a myth than a reality. Critics argue that the idea of a predictable four-year pattern is based on flawed statistics and selective data. The halving events, where the reward for mining new blocks is cut in half, have been known in advance. This means markets continuously adjust to this information, rather than reacting in a cyclical manner every four years. The notion that Bitcoin resets every four years ignores how investors price information into markets daily. The critique highlights that Bitcoin's history contains only four such "cycles, " which is too little data to confirm a repeating pattern. Treating these four observations as a robust statistical sample creates a false sense of reliability. A key flaw in the cycle theory is the multiple testing problem. With enough backtesting across thousands of potential timeframes, some periods will appear statistically significant by chance. Analysts note that many cycle proponents cherry-pick the periods that look cyclical while discarding the rest, creating a false sense of predictability. Survivorship bias also plays a role. Popular models like PlanB's Stock-to-Flow gained prominence when the price happened to align with their forecasts, only to fail in later periods. As those models break, new ones emerge, giving the illusion that the cycle persists even as predictions repeatedly shift. Critics also point to non-stationarity—the idea that the statistical behavior of Bitcoin changes over time. Factors like liquidity, derivatives structure, institutional participation, regulatory landscape, and miner economics have all evolved dramatically since 2009. A pattern observed during Bitcoin's early low-liquidity era is unlikely to apply to its current market structure. Most visual cycle charts rely on curve fitting. Analysts can adjust log scales, trendline angles, smoothing functions, and starting points to make nearly any upward-drifting asset appear cyclical. When the price deviates, the cycle is often "re-drawn" rather than abandoned, making the hypothesis non-falsifiable. Bitcoin is attempting to stabilize after defending support at the $86, 700 area. Buyers have pushed the price back above $91, 500, although the rebound remains corrective while Bitcoin trades below the 20-day and 50-day EMAs at $93, 200 and $100, 500. The broader structure remains capped by a descending channel that has rejected every rally since the $124, 000 peak.