Bitcoin bull market on track to be second longest on record

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

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 that a “bull run” 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.