📅 Day 952

We don’t know each other personally. I’d still bet that Bitcoin walks a similarly fine line in all of our psyches.

Bitcoin is valuable for reasons that are mostly unquantifiable. No doubt that the many people who have escaped hyperinflation, for example, by swapping their rapidly degenerating fiat for bitcoin could easily point to how much value they might’ve saved. 

But in the most apocalyptic of economic terms, Bitcoin’s overarching value is that it’s available to every person on the planet whenever they might need it most. If the entire global economy implodes and all fiat currencies go to zero, or close to, then Bitcoin is the Universal Safety Net.

How do you put a price on that? Well, right now, the market says almost $108,000 per coin.

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Time to check in on the bull market.

There are no formal definitions for when bitcoin bull markets start and end. The old-world says one begins once an asset has risen at least 20% from the local trough, and ends when it’s retraced by the same amount from a recent peak.

It goes without saying, but those are rookie numbers. Let’s just start bull markets from the bottom of the previous bear cycle and go from there.

In that case, bitcoin has now been in a bull market for 952 days, starting on November 21, 2022, when BTC/USD hit a low of $15,504. 

At $107,500, bitcoin has rallied by 590% over the bull market to date.

Does it compare to prior bull markets? Yes and no. Ignoring the initial price discovery that ran from the genesis block until mid-2011, the first bull market from late 2011 onwards topped out at 620x, sometime around day 750.

The second bull market, from late 2015, managed over 100x in less than 850 days.

It took around 1,060 days, close to three years, for bitcoin to pop nearly 22x in its third up cycle between late 2018 and 2022. 

This time around, bitcoin has reached 6.2x at most, which is more-or-less in line with the historical rate of diminishing returns of bull cycles. You can see that on the log scale chart above. Notice that the distances between the lines are relatively constant.

If we’re indeed looking at a similar bull market to the last one — a big if as three bull markets are not enough for any legitimate trends to emerge — then we would have another 110 days or so before bitcoin reaches its cycle peak. 

Awkwardly, the US dollar has lost about 10% of its value since November 2022, at least using the DXY index as a proxy. Which means that bitcoin’s price right now, in November 2022 dollars, is actually closer to $97,700.

Nevermind that. We can instead definitely say that bitcoin is on track for its second-longest bull market so far. 

And if bitcoin peaks sometime after mid-October, then this one will officially be an all-timer, at least in terms of duration.

— David

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• Michael Saylor’s Strategy has been added to the Russell Top 200 Index, a move that comes amid anticipation that it will soon qualify for the S&P 500. Both moves will bring added exposure to BTC in the form of passive flows.

• Metaplanet bought 1,000 more bitcoin today, a move that brings it up two spots in the Bitcoin treasury company rankings, with the Japanese hotel company leapfrogging both Galaxy Digital and bitcoin miner Cleanspark. 

• Kazakhstan has become the latest country to signal a willingness to adopt BTC as a strategic reserve asset, a move that adds to the speculation as to when nation states will begin accumulating.