Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycle

Following this pattern is simple—just look at the calendar.

Looking at the timeline, it marks the peak dates of each BTC bull market.

December 17, 2017; November 10, 2021; October 7, 2025

The bottom dates of each BTC bear market.

January 14, 2015; December 15, 2018; November 22, 2022

It’s always about 4 years apart, so we define it as a 4-year cycle.

Why does this kind of cycle pattern exist?

Because Bitcoin is different from traditional assets. Stocks can be issued more, and money can be over-issued—at the core, humans can control the supply. But Bitcoin isn’t like that. It’s mined through global miners competing using computational power, and no one can simply print an extra coin.

The rule is written in from the start: every time 210,000 blocks are mined, the reward halves—roughly once every 4 years. This is what’s called the halving.

The core of the 4-year cycle is essentially that the rate of supply growth keeps slowing down.

At first, so much is produced each day; after the halving, it’s cut in half immediately. If demand stays the same—even if it’s still growing—prices naturally get pushed upward. That’s also why, in several past cycles, after each halving, the market has gone on to deliver a major rally.

Just like the four seasons of the year, there are cold periods and hot periods, with planting as well as harvest. The market is the same: bull markets and bear markets, times when things are undervalued, and periods when emotions run wild.

What you really need to do isn’t to predict every fluctuation, but to position yourself in the right cycle as much as possible.

Slowly build your positions at low points, and gradually realize profits at high points—it sounds simple, but over the long term, this is one of the few truly effective things to do.

Many people keep losing money because they always want to buy at the lowest and sell at the highest, but in reality, such perfect execution almost never exists.

And the meaning of the cycle is that it gives you a rough framework—you don’t have to get every step right. As long as you don’t make mistakes with the big direction, you’ve already beaten most people.

Whether the 4-year cycle can help you depends on one thing: whether you believe it.

I know there will definitely be people who don’t believe, and there will definitely be people who do believe.

For example, those who called for a “slow bull” in 25 and a “super cycle” in 26 January—they don’t believe. If they truly practice what they preach, they should already be down by now.