Bitcoin's price on a logarithmic scale, with every halving marked. Some people see a repeating pattern after each line. Others see coincidence. Look for yourself — hover any point for its date and price.
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Every 210,000 blocks — roughly every four years — the number of new bitcoin created with each block is cut in half. It started at 50, then 25, 12.5, 6.25, and since April 2024 it's 3.125. Nobody decides this; it's written into the protocol and has been public since 2009. It's the mechanism that caps supply at 21 million.
Why it might move the price. Miners receive those new coins and must sell a portion to pay for electricity and hardware. A halving cuts that steady flow of new supply to the market in half, overnight. If demand stays the same, less new supply meeting the same demand is a plausible reason for a price response — and each of the four halvings has been followed, within a year or so, by a sharp rise.
Why it might not. The schedule is known years in advance, so a rational market should price it in long before the day arrives. Each halving is also a smaller shock than the last: the first removed 25 new bitcoin per block from a supply of 10.5 million; the fourth removed 3.125 from 19.7 million. And the rises after each halving coincided with other things — the 2013 exchange boom, the 2017 retail wave, the 2020–21 monetary expansion, the 2024 ETF approvals — which a single chart can't separate from the halving itself.
Both arguments are reasonable. This chart is where you test them against the record.
Daily price in US dollars since exchanges began quoting Bitcoin in 2010, with each halving marked and the cycles between them lightly shaded. The scale is logarithmic, so a move from $1 to $10 has the same height as $10,000 to $100,000 — that's what lets 2011 and 2025 sit on the same chart.
Whether the pattern will continue. Four halvings is a very small sample. The next one, at block 1,050,000, is drawn as a dashed estimate that moves slightly as blocks arrive. For how the issuance rate itself changes over time, see the supply schedule chart.