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Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

Research hub

Editorial standards

This site publishes reference material about Bitcoin, and reference material is only worth reading if you know how it was made. This page sets out how the writing is sourced, what the site will and will not claim, why it presents analysis rather than prediction, and what happens when it gets something wrong.

What this site is for

Bitcoin Data Guide exists to keep an accurate, well-labelled record of Bitcoin's price history, issuance schedule and market cycles, and to explain that record in plain language. It is a reference publication, not a news service and not an investment service. It does not tell you what to buy, when to buy it, or what the price will do next. It tries to make the past legible and to be honest about the limits of what the past can tell you.

That purpose shapes everything else on this page. A publication that aims to be checked rather than trusted has to show its sources, state its vintages, and be specific about the difference between a fact, an estimate and an opinion. Where the site cannot meet that standard, it says so rather than papering over the gap.

How the writing is sourced

Every figure that appears in an article is traceable to a dataset on this site, and every dataset is traceable to a published source. The source register on the data sources and methodology page lists each one, with its vintage and, where the source is public, a link to it. A reader who wants to check a number can follow that chain from the sentence to the table to the upstream record.

Where a claim rests on a protocol fact rather than a market figure — a block height, a subsidy amount, a halving date — the site treats it as verifiable against the block chain itself and states it without hedging. Where a claim rests on a market figure, the vintage is given on the page, because a price is only meaningful in relation to when it was observed. Where a claim rests on interpretation, it is written as interpretation, with the reasoning shown.

The site does not use anonymous sources, does not report rumours as fact, and does not repeat a figure it cannot attribute. When two sources disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than averaged away, because the fact that a number is contested is itself useful information.

What the site will and will not claim

The line between what can be stated and what cannot is the most important editorial decision this site makes. It is drawn here explicitly so a reader can hold the writing to it.

The site will claim

  • What a published source recorded, with the source named and the vintage stated.
  • What the arithmetic of the record shows — a return over a defined window, a drawdown measured peak to trough, a recovery time counted in days.
  • What the protocol fixes: the issuance schedule, the halving cadence, the supply cap, the block interval.
  • Where the record is thin, contested or simply absent, and what that means for the confidence a reader should place in it.

The site will not claim

  • What the price will do next, or when a cycle will turn, or where a top or a bottom lies.
  • That any past pattern will repeat, or that a halving causes a rally, or that a four-year rhythm is a law rather than an observation.
  • That Bitcoin is a suitable investment for any particular person, or that a return achieved in the past is available in the future.
  • That a compiled figure is an audited one, or that a number here is precise beyond the source it came from.

The review process

Nothing is published without passing a review gate, and the gate is the same for every page. Writing and checking are separate steps even when the same people perform them, because a figure that has only ever been read by the person who entered it has not been checked at all.

  1. 1. Compile against a source

    A figure is entered only with the source it came from and the period it covers. A figure with no traceable source is not published.

  2. 2. Cross-check where possible

    Where two independent sources cover the same period, they are compared. A disagreement is recorded rather than resolved by averaging.

  3. 3. Review before publication

    Every page is read by a second person on the team against the sourcing standard and the fact-versus-forecast rule before it goes live.

  4. 4. Revisit on a schedule

    Curated material is reviewed each quarter and whenever a source is revised. A material update moves the vintage forward and is dated.

The method behind the review — how the canonical dataset is assembled and how derived series are computed — is set out on the methodology page, and the review status of every published page is recorded on the content quality page.

Why analysis rather than prediction

Financial writing that predicts is easy to produce and almost impossible to hold to account. A forecast can be wrong for years without anyone noticing, and by the time it is tested the reader who acted on it has already paid for the error. This site takes the opposite approach. It describes what has happened, measures it carefully, and leaves the inference to the reader.

That is not a claim to neutrality about facts. The record is what it is, and the site states it plainly, including the parts that are uncomfortable: the drawdowns that took three years to recover, the years that ended lower than they began, the volatility that has repeatedly halved a portfolio in a matter of months. A reference that only showed the good years would be a marketing document, not a record.

Analysis also means showing the reasoning. When the site draws a conclusion from the data — that volatility has fallen as the market has deepened, that the four-year cycle has been descriptive rather than mechanical — it sets out the evidence and the counter-argument alongside it. A reader should be able to disagree with the conclusion while still finding the page useful, because the underlying figures are there to be read independently.

The update policy

A reader should never have to guess whether a page is current. Every research page carries the date it was last reviewed and the cadence on which it is revisited, and every dataset carries a vintage: the period it covers and the point at which it was last republished. A material update — a revised source, a corrected figure, an added year — moves that vintage forward and is dated.

Curated material is reviewed each quarter and whenever a source is revised. The live series are the exception, and the site is explicit about it: the spot price and the daily candles are readings fetched from the Coinbase Exchange public API, cached for a few minutes and re-fetched on demand. They change between visits and are not stored as history, so they carry a fetch timestamp rather than a vintage.

The vintage of every dataset, and the periods where the compiled record is genuinely uncertain, are set out in full on the data sources and methodology page.

Corrections

The site will be wrong sometimes. A source will be revised, a transcription will slip, a figure will be attributed to the wrong year. When that happens the correction is made on the page and described, rather than applied silently. A reader who quoted the old figure deserves to know it changed and why.

Corrections to data move the vintage label on the affected table forward, so the version a reader is looking at is always identifiable. Corrections to prose are noted in the text where the error was material to the argument, and made quietly where it was not — a typo does not need a correction notice, but a wrong percentage does.

The standard the site holds itself to is simple: a reader should never be misled by something here, and should never have to guess whether a number is current. Where those two things come into conflict with making the writing look tidy, the writing loses.

How an error is reported, reviewed, verified and published is set out in full on the corrections policy page.

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