What's Really Going On With Bitcoin Price and the BTC 4-Year Cycle?

Equities are grinding near record highs. Gold printed an all-time high above $5,500 earlier this year. But

? It's trading near $62,000, down roughly 50% from its October 2025 all-time high of $126,198, with the Fear & Greed Index recently printing 15, nearly its lowest reading of 2026.

So what's really going on? The answer is part capital rotation, part broken narrative, and, if one eerily accurate anonymous forecast is right, part schedule.

How Has Bitcoin's Price Performed?

In relative terms, Bitcoin has performed pretty poorly. While BTC has shed roughly 30% year-to-date, gold is up around 80% since the start of 2025, leaving crypto deeply out of favor compared to traditional safe havens and high-growth tech sectors.

The long-term charts capture the moment. On the rainbow chart, price has slipped into the bottom blue and purple bands, territory historically labeled "fire sale" that was last visited at the 2022 bear market bottom.

Source: Blockchaincenter (Bitcoin Rainbow Chart)

On the long-term Power Law channel, BTC is pressing right against the red support line that has held every cycle since 2011.

Source: Bitbo (Bitcoin Long-Term Power Law Chart)

Notably, this drawdown has been relatively orderly. "This cycle Bitcoin is a 40 vol asset, last one it was 60 and time before that it was 80," Schwab's director of crypto research Jim Ferraioli