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Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

Cycles & Supply

The gain from each cycle low to its high

Every completed advance in Bitcoin's record, measured from the closing low that ended the previous decline to the closing high that ended the advance. The multiple and the duration are shown together, because the two have moved in opposite directions.

2011-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2011-2014Advances are bounded by closing-price lows and highs on the daily record.

Advances measured

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Completed low-to-high moves

Largest gain

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Fastest advance

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The advances in order

The low in each row is the closing price at the bottom of the decline that preceded the advance, and the high is the closing price at the top of the advance itself. The gain is measured between those two points, and the multiple restates it as a factor rather than a percentage — a 900 per cent gain is a tenfold move, and the two framings are worth keeping distinct. The duration column is the number of days between the low and the high, which is the part of the table most readers skip and the part that has changed the most.

Bitcoin cycle low-to-high advances with the low and high dates and prices, the gain, the multiple and the duration in days.
CycleLow dateLowHigh dateHighGainMultipleDuration
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2011-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2011-2014

What bounds an advance. The low is the lowest closing price between the previous high and the start of the advance; the high is the highest closing price before the next decline began. Both are identified in retrospect, which is the only way they can be identified. A reader should not read the table as a set of entry and exit signals, because neither point was knowable on the day it occurred.

Size and speed have moved in opposite directions

The earliest advances in the table are the largest by a wide margin. That is partly a statement about the asset and partly a statement about arithmetic: a market capitalised in the millions can multiply many times over on a modest inflow, while a market capitalised in the hundreds of billions cannot. The percentage gain and the dollar gain are different quantities, and the table reports the first because it is the one that is comparable across cycles.

The duration column tells the other half of the story. The early advances were compressed into a short span; the later ones took considerably longer to complete. A larger market absorbs flows more slowly, and the instruments through which those flows arrive — spot venues, futures, exchange-traded funds — spread the buying over a longer period. The result is an advance that is smaller in percentage terms and longer in duration, which is what a maturing market looks like from the inside.

What the table cannot show is the path within each advance. A move that gained several hundred per cent over two years almost certainly contained declines of thirty per cent or more along the way, and those interruptions are not visible in a low-to-high figure. The drawdown record supplies that missing detail, and the cycle comparison page places these advances beside the declines that followed them.

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