What the halving does to Bitcoin's price

What a halving is and why it gets so much attention

Bitcoin has a rule built into it that cannot be voted away or postponed: roughly every four years, the reward miners receive for adding a new block is cut in half. New bitcoins therefore appear more slowly.

The interesting part is that this is an entirely predictable event. The market knows about a halving years in advance. By textbook economics that information should long since be priced in, and nothing remarkable should happen on the day itself.

In practice it does not look that way.

What we did

Instead of repeating the familiar claim that “the price goes up after a halving”, my co-authors and I asked a more precise question: when exactly the move happens. We examined price behaviour around the 2012, 2016 and 2020 halvings and looked for a relationship between the number of days since the halving and the moment the market reached its peak and its trough.

We used a combination of tools ordinary traders also know — RSI and MACD — together with regression analysis.

What came out of it

Comparing the three past cycles gave us a simple timing model: the peak arrives roughly 19 months after the halving, and the trough roughly 31 months after it. For the 2024 halving that meant an estimated peak in November 2025 and a trough in November 2026.

How to read this

Here the caution owed to any cyclical model is in order — and I am saying this about my own work. Three halvings are three observations. On a sample that small, regularity can be found in almost anything, and it cannot be turned into statistical certainty.

More useful than the resulting dates is what the model forces you to do: stop asking “will the price go up?” and start asking “where in the cycle are we, and what would have to be true for this pattern to break?”. That is a question you can actually test.

This text is a plain-language summary of an academic study and serves educational purposes. It is not investment advice.