Bitcoin (BTC +0.75%) investors once treated the coin's four-year price cycle like scripture. The popular plan was to buy during post-crash despair, hold through the halving, sell a few coins somewhere near the euphoric peak, and repeat. But now, one of the asset's most prominent advocates says the pattern is obsolete -- and that it's a good thing, because it means the coin's painful bear markets won't sting as much moving forward.
Michael Saylor, the founder of Strategy (MSTR +4.46%) (formerly MicroStrategy), predicted on social media in early April that the four-year cycle is "dead," arguing that price is now driven by capital flows rather than halving-mediated supply shocks. That's a prediction with enormous consequences for anyone deciding when and how to buy the coin, so let's dig into where the evidence stands.
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Institutional accumulation might be making halvings less relevant
Saylor's logic is that Bitcoin's halvings, which are the pre-programmed events that cut the rate of new Bitcoin creation from mining in half roughly every four years, used to be the primary driver of each market cycle. But now there's another (and more important) factor: the asset's high degree of institutionalization among major banks and corporations.
That's quite a plausible line of argument, as spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) absorbed around 50,000 Bitcoin in a recent 30-day stretch, whereas daily mining output is only about 450 Bitcoin. For reference, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT +1.02%) alone holds more than 784,620 of the currency. So there are certainly plenty of supply dynamics affecting this asset's price, which simply didn't exist before the ETFs were approved in 2024.
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Furthermore, corporate treasuries now control over 8.5% of all Bitcoin in circulation, and they are unlikely to be trading in and out of their positions, which took many quarters to accumulate. Strategy itself holds about 766,970 BTC, nearly 3.8% of the asset's circulating supply. These are financial allocators with multi-year mandates whose presence changes the character of every drawdown, and likely by making those drawdowns less intense than in prior epochs. The benefit of trying to time investments with cyclical lows is thus probably much lower than before these players arrived on the scene.
But recognize who is really making this argument.
Saylor presides over the largest corporate-held Bitcoin position on the planet, and he wants more people to feel free to invest in the coin, because doing so is directly financially accretive to his business. If the four-year cycle is dead, his leveraged accumulation strategy looks prescient, but if it's still alive, his company has been buying an asset near the top of yet another price cycle.
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Cycle theory isn't dead just yet
There is more than one counterargument to what Saylor is saying. One important factor is that the October 2025 all-time high of roughly $126,000 per Bitcoin fits the historical four-year cycle pattern very closely. That would make 2026 a bear-market phase.
Today Bitcoin is near $68,300, down roughly 44% from that all-time high. That's less severe than the nearly 80% crashes of 2018 and 2022, but it's still a bear market by any conventional definition.
Another complication with declaring that Bitcoin cycles are over is that we only have four completed cycles to study, which is a small data set. Some argue that the real driver of the coin's multi-year price action was never the halving, but instead, global liquidity in the form of central bank rate cuts and money-supply expansion that repeatedly happened to coincide with the halving schedule. If that's true -- and it certainly might be -- the "broken cycle" effect might just be Bitcoin responding to a different monetary environment, with the halving acting as an anchor for sentiment rather than as an actual catalyst for price.
The evidence to settle this debate won't arrive for years. The good news is that you can confidently take action, no matter who ultimately turns out to be correct.
Don't try to time your Bitcoin purchases. Set up dollar-cost averaging and make regular small purchases regardless of the price. Keep a small cash reserve to deploy during sharp dips, if you'd like that option. That way, as the coin's institutional adoption and reducing supply play out over the coming years, you'll get the upside benefit of whichever thesis is correct, as well as the benefit of any other as-yet-undiscussed pressures on its price.
