Bitcoin: The Four Year Cycle Is Not Dead

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, and thanks for jumping back into the cryptoverse.

[00:00:04]Today, we're going to talk about Bitcoin, and we're going to be providing the evidence for why the 4year cycle is not dead. If you guys like the content, make sure you subscribe to the channel, give the video a thumbs up, and also check out the sale on Into the Cryptoverse Premium at into the cryptoverse.com.

[00:00:24]Let's go ahead and jump in. So, over the last year or so, there's been a lot of discussion as to why people think that the 4-year cycle is dead. Some of the reasons include the ETFs, obviously, at one point it was talk about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, companies buying Bitcoin, etc. And so, a lot of people have taken that to believe that the 4-year cycle was broken. But I'd like to provide the evidence for why it actually hasn't broken and also refute some of the main points that people provide for why it why it will fail this time by looking at data but not for Bitcoin but for the S&P 500 going back in other cycles. Okay. So, the idea behind the four-year cycle for Bitcoin is that there's this cycle that exists where Bitcoin finds a low approximately every four years. You'll find a low near the end of 2014.

[00:01:28]Technically, it was the very beginning of 2015, but more or less the end of 2014, the end of 2018, the end of 2022.

[00:01:39]And I've I've speculated for a while now that the next low would probably be near the end of 2026. Okay, so we've talked about that a lot and who knows exactly where the low would be, but it's not really a price. It's more so a time that's important. It's a time that you have to look at in terms of the four-ear cycle. The four-year cycle does not predict where the price will be. It predicts when the price will likely bottom. Now, the 4-year cycle is not really about TOPS, but Bitcoin has operated under a fairly similar four-year cycle with TOPS as well. And so far, it has been right translated cycles. Now, in every cycle, you could have a left translated cycle or you could have a right translated cycle. A left translated cycle would mean that Bitcoin would top out sooner than it normally does and then spend more than one year going down. But throughout all of Bitcoin's history, it has topped in the fourth quarter of the post having year. You'll see it very clearly. the fourth quarter of 2013, the fourth quarter of 2017, and of course the fourth quarter of 2021, and most recently the fourth quarter of 2025. And again, the lows generally Q4 of 2014, though technically you could argue it was Q1 of 2025, Q4 of 2018, Q4 of 2022, and what we're speculating is Q4 of 2026. Okay? So, you should know though that when we talk about the four-year cycle, we're not actually referring to the highs. In fact, had Bitcoin topped in say late 2024, it could have still had a four-year cycle where the low still occurs near the end of the midterm year. Now, one of the most popular things that people do in in crypto and all markets is they they search for narratives to explain price action. And one of the narratives that I think a lot of people were hopeful for last year was that because of the ETFs and because of Micro Strategy buying Bitcoin and because of a potential strategic Bitcoin reserve that the 4-year cycle would break and that we wouldn't actually top out and go into a bare market. Now, on this channel, we said, look, we likely will have a toin Q4 and then we're likely going to see Bitcoin bleed going into at least the first half of the midterm year, and my guess is it'll extend into the second half as well. So, what I want to do is talk about some of the main criticisms.

[00:04:36]One of the main criticisms of why the four-year cycle will fail is because Bitcoin this cycle topped on apathy rather than euphoria. Okay. Now, this is something that we flagged years ago. For years, we have stated that the bull market that Bitcoin has been in was actually a lot more similar to the 2019 bull market where Bitcoin topped two months before quantitative tightening ended, just like it did this cycle. The main difference between this cycle and the 2019 top is that this top happened to correspond at a 4-year cycle top where the 2019 top was more of a midcycle top. Now, you could argue that maybe this was a midcycle top, but even in that case, it just coincidentally happens to line up that the postappathetic top digestion phase happens to line up in 2019 happens to just line up with 2026, which is a midterm year, which historically is a bearish year for crypto. Okay. So I would say this, all the narratives that were given last year as to why we wouldn't go into a bare market, they all failed and Bitcoin actually went into a bare market anyways.

[00:05:49]Nothing is different this time with the exception that Bitcoin topped on apathy rather than euphoria.

[00:05:57]But just because an asset tops on apathy rather than euphoria does not mean that it can't enter into a bare market regardless. If you look at the S&P 500 right now it's still putting in new all-time highs and the cycle goes on. If you go back to many decades ago and you look at the S&P 500 you'll notice the four-year cycle pattern also intact where lows in the market occurred approximately every four years. 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, um, 1978, 1982. So, you can see the lows occurred approximately every four years, but the highs did not always occur approximately every four years.

[00:06:42]Sometimes the bare market was only about a year, like from late 1965 into October of 1966.

[00:06:52]But there are examples where you only had a 2-year bull market followed by a 2-year bare market. And what you'll notice is that when you look at the high that was set by the S&P 500 in 1966, it was about 93.

[00:07:09]The next high that occurred a couple of years later, or sorry, this was 1965.

[00:07:14]The next one late 1968 was not that much higher than the prior high, right? right? It was only about 15% higher. And then the high that came a few years after that was only about 11 or 12% higher. And in both cases, you still had a 2-year bare market. You had a left translated cycle and you had a 2-year bare market. Now, the first one was a one-year bare market, and then the next two were two-year bare markets.

[00:07:44]Both of them theoretically topped on apathy, right? I mean, I can't imagine going 12% above a high from 3 years earlier would have been classified as a euphoric top. If you bought the S&P in 1965, by 1973, 8 years later, you were only up 28%, but yet the market still sold off 50% into a bare market. So, one of the reasons why I would say that the four-year cycle is still alive is that topping on apathy doesn't mean you don't have a bare market because you can see how in the past the stock market topped on apathy arguably and it still had a bare market.

[00:08:31]So, I think that's a major point in favor of the 4-year cycle. Now, let's suppose you don't want to measure this from the low, but instead you want to look at the actual entire cycle, like from the low to the high instead of low to low. If you go from the low to the high, what you'll see is that Bitcoin actually topped when it always does in terms of time. You could even take a bar pattern from the low we had in 2015 and then overlay it to the last cycle and see how the tops line up in time almost to within a week of each other. You could also look at it from the 2018 bottom and see the same thing that if you actually overlay these bull markets, they topped all around the same time. And so there's a chart that looks at this. It's this one. This one does it a little bit more precisely. You can see that the last two cycles topped on day 1,059 and 168. And yet the current cycle topped on day 1 162. So Bitcoin topped within one week of when it historically tops despite the narratives for calling the four-year cycle dead.

[00:09:55]If you extend it out to the next low, it would suggest that there is still some bare market ahead of us.

[00:10:05]That doesn't mean that Bitcoin has to go to $10,000. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that in terms of a timebased capitulation component, I would expect a another sell-off by Bitcoin as we get, you know, as we continue on through the year. Now, other people have speculated that the reason why the four-year cycle is broken is because the current rally is actually different than all the rallies we had in prior bare markets.

[00:10:33]And I would push back on that as well.

[00:10:35]When you're living through a bare market rally, it always feels different than prior bare market rallies and prior cycles because it's hard to sort of confront the emotions that come with it, especially if you didn't buy it, right?

[00:10:47]So, if you didn't buy Bitcoin at 60K and you just sat in cash, then you might experience that FOMO. But if you did buy Bitcoin at 60K, then obviously you're all bowled up. You're ready to go.

[00:10:59]You're ready for the super cycle. The problem is that when you look at this objectively, this rally by Bitcoin is actually one of the weaker rallies that Bitcoin has had in midterm years. If you look at the one we had last cycle, Bitcoin actually rallied about 46% off the low. The current rally off the low is only about a 35 to 36% rally. So, the rally we had in 2022 was actually much more impressive. Now, if the argument is we've never had, you know, it's never looked quite like this, look at how similar they are. Look at 2022. You'll see we had a 52% drop. This cycle before the current rally also a 52% drop. After we had that, right, Bitcoin came up, it came back down, and then it went up even higher. It's the same pattern, right?

[00:11:53]It's the same pattern. And this is not just something we saw in 2022. We saw some similarities as well in 2018. A little some differences. I will give you that. But in the sense of you had a low in February of 2018 just like you had a low in February of 2026. You then set a higher low in April of 2018 just like we set a higher low in late March or April of 2026.

[00:12:23]The high was then set in early May of 2018, just like we set a high in early May of 2026. So for me, I remember vividly the bare market rally we had in 2022 and I remember vividly the bare market rally we had in 2018. Okay? And when that happened, it felt different, right? And by the way, in 2018, the support level was around $6,000, about onetenth of the current price. You know, in fact, the higher low in late April or sorry, late March, early April of 2018 was around 6,500. In 2026, it was around 65,000.

[00:13:07]So, what's interesting is just how similar it actually is. In 2014, you will also find very convincing rallies by Bitcoin where we even got above the bull market support band for a couple of months. Yet, it still did not mean that the four-year cycle wouldn't ultimately play out or or begin, I guess, back then.

[00:13:32]So, the other argument is that it's never gone on this long, right? that we've not had bare market rallies that lasted this long before and that's why the four-year cycle is broken. And if you look at kind of how long this one's been going on for is about 16 weeks now.

[00:13:47]That includes the fact that we just dropped for 2 weeks and now we're in a third week after that drop. That's 16 weeks. But the point is we haven't put in a new low in 16 weeks. If you look though in 2022, you'll see it took 21 weeks from June of 2022 to then put in a new low. From the low that Bitcoin put in in um in January, it didn't take as long. It only took about 15 weeks. We're only one week past that, right? So, it's not that different in my opinion. If you look at 2018 from the February low, it took 19 weeks to put in a new low. From that low, it then took 21 weeks. So, you have a lot of bare market rallies where they take about 20 weeks or so. In 2014, from the April low to the October low, it took about 25 weeks. So, when you look at this cycle and say, "All right, well, it's been about 16 weeks.

[00:14:48]Therefore, this time is different.

[00:14:49]That's actually very much ignoring the bare market rallies we had in the past.

[00:14:54]And and I think that's an important thing for people to realize because, you know, I've been putting out a lot of bearish videos for the last 6 months on Bitcoin. And every time we have a counter trend rally, a lot of people come out to dunk. Um, and that's fine.

[00:15:09]They have their their their absolute right to do that. And there's always a chance that I'm wrong about this being a bare market rally. But I have to ask myself, is this time really different?

[00:15:21]Or is it just doing the same thing that it always does, where it draws people back in over a long enough period of time to make them think it's different, but then it ends up actually not being different. One of the arguments as to why the four-year cycle is breaking is that the stock market keeps putting in new all-time highs. But you could easily refute that by noting that in 2018, the stock market actually put in all-time highs and Bitcoin still went down. And in fact, it was an early correction in the stock market that led to Bitcoin's first drop to 6K. And it was a second correction in the stock market in the second half of the midterm year that led to a subsequent drop by Bitcoin. Now, if you look at this cycle, you can see that Bitcoin's first drop corresponded to a drop in the S&P 500. So perhaps there will be another drop in the S&P 500 in the second half of the year, which will then lead to Bitcoin putting in a low at the end of the midterm year, which is when it always does, sometime the fourth quarter of the midterm year. In 2015, it actually ended up being January of the preh havinging year. So again, it's hard to know exactly, but Q4 of the midterm year seems like a a fairly likely outcome.

[00:16:43]So there's a lot of reasons why people will say it. And then another one is the rally that Bitcoin just had to its 200 day moving average. That feels like a pretty impressive rally, right? Like it it does. Bitcoin just had a massive rally to the 200 day moving average. Now imagine in 2022 when Bitcoin rallied to the 200 day moving average and people were saying that the cycle would continue and then what happened? It didn't and the four-year cycle prevailed. What happened in 2018 after Bitcoin rallied to the 200 day moving average and people thought it was different and that the super cycle would happen. It didn't and the four-year cycle prevailed in 2014. What happened when Bitcoin rallied off even slightly above the 200 day moving average and people thought the cycle would continue?

[00:17:32]It failed.

[00:17:35]So, you'll have to forgive me for for being objective in this way. I could be wrong. Like, I absolutely could be wrong. I don't want to imply that that this cycle has to follow the prior cycles, but to pretend like it's different this time because of some narrative on Wall Street would be the same mistake that people fell for last cycle and the cycle before that. So, I think it's important to remain objective and to say, you know what, obviously things could evolve differently, but at this point, we don't really have enough evidence to suggest that that's the case.

[00:18:11]One of the weaker times for Bitcoin in midterm years is going into the summer months. That's one of the weaker times.

[00:18:19]If you look at stable coin dominance, stable coin dominance is doing what it tends to do in midterm years. And almost exactly what it does in midterm years.

[00:18:29]If you look at USDT dominance plus USDC dominance, what you'll see is that it just had a weekly close below the 21week EMA, but then it's rallied back up. Now, is that different or is it exactly how it played out in 2022 where it would get closes just below the bull market support band? give people a false sense of security that the cycle would continue only before the 4-year cycle ultimately prevailed. Anyways, so when I looked at the data in its entirety, I still see plenty of evidence for why the four-year cycle will likely prevail.

[00:19:16]If you ask me to basically play devil's advocate and find reasons for why it won't, I could, right? I'm not I'm not saying there's absolutely nothing that would suggest it. But even in that case, I would still argue there would be a very likely chance that Bitcoin would still at least return back down to 60K sometime later this year and then sort of confirm it as support kind of like how it did in 2018.

[00:19:44]So the argument would be that you know what if it plays out like 2018 but yet you just don't get the crash at the end of the year. In that case it still held 6K for months. And if you think it's different because we haven't revisited 60K again we visited 6K in February of 2018. We didn't revisit it until the end of June.

[00:20:06]So February is not even June yet. So again, I still think there's time that has to play out before we can really expect a durable bull market by Bitcoin.

[00:20:17]That doesn't mean you have to sit on your hands and do nothing. There's bull markets elsewhere. Obviously, the stock market continues to do well.

[00:20:23]International funds continue to do well.

[00:20:25]The manufacturing sector does well.

[00:20:28]Metals, some of them have still been doing well. Energy stocks still doing well. Right? Just because Bitcoin is in one of these patterns doesn't mean you have to get very emotional about every counter trend rally. You can just recognize that, hey, there's other parts of the of the markets that can make some sense. And by having exposure to that, then it it makes dealing with these counter trend rallies somewhat bearable and it doesn't feel like you're just missing out on everything because because of this. So, my guess is that the four-year cycle remains intact because at this point, I just don't feel like I have enough evidence to suggest that it won't. And yes, I might have to continue to to, you know, deal with with people that that are are dunking on me because of of rallies. But I even said at the beginning of this year and even late last year that there would be several counter trend rallies by Bitcoin, but there was a fool's errand trying to time them. Even the current one, if you think about it, a lot of people thought the bounce would have happened at around 75K, but instead Bitcoin sold off all the way down to 60K before bouncing. So perhaps some of the resistance we're seeing in here is is from the people that bought at 75K back in January thinking that that would be support.

[00:21:52]Now if you look at the ROI after the cycle peak, we're holding up a little bit better this cycle than in prior cycles, but we are still drifting downward, right? Like it it it generally is not that different. In fact, if you look at this drop compared to say the one from 2014, it's not that different. In fact, as measured from the high at this point in 2014, not as measured from the high, as measured from the yearly open, because there was a big drop in late 2013, but as measured from the yearly open, Bitcoin back then was down was at 0.54.

[00:22:28]We're currently at 62. It's not really that different. And if this lines up, then the next low could be around the October time frame, maybe a local low in June, uh, and then another low in October. So, we'll just have to wait and see. You know, I know everyone's kind of yelling at each other on Twitter about what's going to actually happen. But the point is is the evidence is there. There's still enough evidence to suggest that the four-year cycle is not dead. And if we look back on this cycle in in a few years, could we really say it was different in the sense of when Bitcoin topped? Because it topped when it always does at the end of the post-h having year. And if it bottoms when it always does at the end of the midterm year, then we'll look back and be like, "All right, people just spend all of that midterm year fading the four-year cycle, but it ended up working out anyways." Now, it raises another question. Will the 4-year cycle last forever? Probably not. Okay, it will probably break at some point and then it might start working again, you know, after that. At some point, the four-year cycle will likely break, but my point is this. You're probably going to do better in the markets assuming it doesn't break and being right all those times. anyone who assumed it was right at the end of 2025 did themselves a favor, you know, and I think the people that are the most outspoken about it being broken are the ones that faded it back in late 2025 and were calling for much higher prices. So, that's not entirely true, but I think a majority of the people that are are completely unopen to the bare market continuing were the same ones that told you it wouldn't happen in the first place. So, let's see how it plays out for the rest of this year. If it plays out, how it historically has, then it means there likely will be another drop by Bitcoin um as we go into the summer months, potentially finding a low sometime in the fourth quarter. My guess is October, but it doesn't have to be. That would be my guess. And we will see. If you look at the data, there's still plenty of data that suggests the four-year cycle is intact. And I think a lot of the people that are saying it's not intact are kind of ignoring what's actually happened. Bitcoin topped when it always tops.

[00:24:56]Why Why are we over complicating it when all the data would suggest, maybe not all of it, but most of it would still suggest that the bare market could in fact continue? So, I believe the four-year cycle is still alive and that saying it is dead is actually ignoring a majority of the data. If you guys like the content, make sure you subscribe to the channel, give the video a thumbs up, and again, check out the sale on into the cryptoverse premium at into the cryptoverse.com. We do have the direct access option as well if you guys would like that. But also check out benjaminc.com.

[00:25:28]We've been putting out a lot of reports over there. We're going to be putting out some more soon, so make sure you check that out. Links in the description below. Thank you guys for tuning in. And I will see you next time. Bye.