Bitcoin Rainbow Chart & 4-year cycles
Long-term price history, halvings and how past cycles compare with today. Educational, not a forecast.
Bitcoin Rainbow Chart
Price on a log scale with colour bands around a long-term trend line fitted to the whole price history.
The rainbow is an internet meme, not a model. The bands are drawn to fit past prices, so they will look right in hindsight and can stop working at any time. Band names are the original joke labels, not signals.
Method: least-squares fit of log10(price) on log10(days since 3 Jan 2009); 9 equal-width bands span the lowest to highest deviation since 2011.
4-year cycles and halvings
About every four years (every 210,000 blocks) the reward miners get for a block is cut in half. So far, each halving has been followed by a big rise, a peak and then a deep fall.
- 2012: 18.62× ($233)
- 2016: 5.49× ($3,639)
- 2020: 2.38× ($20,816)
- 2024: 1.29×
| Cycle | Price at halving | Peak (daily) | Peak × halving price | Days halving→peak | Low after peak | Drop peak→low |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 1st halving | — | $33.8 · 11 Jun 2011 | — | — | $2.3 · 22 Nov 2011 | -93% |
| Halving 28 Nov 2012 | $12.5 | $1,137 · 5 Dec 2013 | 91.0× | 372 | $172 · 15 Jan 2015 | -85% |
| Halving 9 Jul 2016 | $663 | $19,280 · 17 Dec 2017 | 29.1× | 526 | $3,232 · 16 Dec 2018 | -83% |
| Halving 11 May 2020 | $8,754 | $67,562 · 9 Nov 2021 | 7.7× | 547 | $15,760 · 22 Nov 2022 | -77% |
| Halving 20 Apr 2024(current, so far) | $63,824 | $124,777 · 7 Oct 2025 | 2.0× | 535 | — | -34% (now vs peak) |
Cycles side by side: price as a multiple of the halving-day price
Peaks and lows use daily closing prices (blockchain.info), so intraday highs were a bit higher. Halving dates are protocol events; the next date is an estimate at 10 minutes per block. Four cycles are a tiny sample: the past is not a forecast.
Educational, not investment advice.