Written by Matt Morgan at The Daily Bell:
For over a decade, Bitcoin has run on a simple clock. Every four years, the halving cut the supply of new coins in half. Prices ran hard for about 18 months, crashed for about a year, and then the whole thing started over.
Everybody learned the pattern. And that’s exactly when it started to fall apart.
The calendar, to be fair, still roughly works. This cycle’s peak landed about 18 months after the 2024 halving, right on schedule. Except, the payoff didn’t.
Since 2015, the payoffs on Bitcoin’s cyclical return have continued to decrease. From its 2015 low, Bitcoin multiplied about 110 times. The next run managed 21 times. The last one, from the 2022 low to the October 2025 peak, made about 7.9 times.
Data: Yahoo Finance
This is what happens when an asset grows up. A bigger market needs a lot more money to move it, and people buying ETFs through their brokerage don’t trade like the early crowd did.
Right now, the old clock is mostly telling holders to be sad, lonely, and miserable.
Here’s Blockhead this morning:
“Bitcoin has posted five straight weekly losses since a weekly close of $86,507 on October 4.”
However, things change when you look at Bitcoin from a different perspective. Bitcoin set its dollar record in October 2025, but priced in gold, it peaked ten months earlier, in December 2024.
So a chunk of that dollar “record” was really the dollar losing value. At the top, one bitcoin bought almost 40 ounces of gold. Today it buys about 18.
That sounds awful. It can also be useful though, because gold gives you a much cleaner clock.
This is where Mark Jeftovic, Publisher of The Daily Bell, and The Sovereign Capitalist, comes in. Back in February, while gold bugs were taking victory laps, he pointed his readers to a different clock:
“But there’s another four-year cycle that seems to be in place since around 2015, and we’re in the zone now where we’re about to find out if this one continues for at least another iteration.”
That cycle is the 200-week moving average of Bitcoin priced in gold.
Here’s how it works. Track how many ounces of gold one bitcoin buys, then draw its 200-week average. Bitcoin’s real bear markets tend to end down below that line.
In June 2022, Bitcoin dropped below the line and spent most of the next 16 months under it, bottoming near 9 ounces. In October 2023, it climbed back above. Fourteen months later, it was worth almost 40 ounces.
The latest break came in November 2025, and it’s been stuck under the line for a year. The low so far was about 12 ounces, back in February, the same month Mark flagged the pattern. Today it sits around 18, with the line near 22.
This is a test for Bitcoin, not a guarantee. Over the next few months, we’re about to find out if the cycle holds for another round.
But if the gold clock roughly follows the way it did last time, the signal to watch isn’t the halving calendar or the next scary headline. It’s whether Bitcoin can climb back above roughly 22 ounces of gold.
Until then, expect more chop and more “Bitcoin is dead” stories. And when the line finally gets reclaimed, almost nobody will believe it.
Every month, Mark Jeftovic breaks down Bitcoin, gold and the wider macro picture in The Sovereign Capitalist, including the charts he’s watching and his model portfolio.
Take The Sovereign Capitalist for a $7 test drive on your first month with promo code SOVTRIAL.
