Bitcoin’s Post-ATH Crash Follows Historical Pattern

There are many theses out there: for some people, Bitcoin is a kind of tech stock that moves with the ups and downs of the tech world. Or the price of BTC is influenced by major economic and political events like Trump’s tariffs. Or Bitcoin sometimes rides the wave – for better or worse – along with precious metals. And so on and so forth.

What is definitely fixed in the Bitcoin world, however, quasi carved in code, is the halving. The Bitcoin halving is an event anchored firmly in the code that approximately every four years (every 210,000 blocks) reduces the reward for miners – and thus the issuance of new bitcoins – by exactly 50%. This mechanism is the cornerstone of Bitcoin’s monetary policy: it simulates the increasing difficulty of gold mining, irreversibly limits the total supply to 21 million units, and protects the network from inflation in this way.

Does the 4-year cycle repeat itself?

Since the supply of new coins shrinks while demand in recent years has often remained the same or increased, the halving historically acts like a regular supply shock that sets in motion the typical four-year market cycles and the associated price increases.

If one now looks at the time spans between the Bitcoin halvings and the subsequent price peaks, one thing becomes apparent: usually between 12 and 18 months elapsed between these two events:

After the ATH came the crypto winter

As Bitcoiners have painfully experienced again and again, it has always dropped sharply after these all-time highs. The crypto winters of 2014/2015 (-85%; Mt. Gox exchange hack, ban in China), then 2018/2019 (-84%, ICO bubble burst, advertising bans) and then 2022 (-77%; interest rate turnaround, Terra/LUNA crash, FTX collapse) are still fresh in (painful) memory for many.

Currently, it looks as though the next crypto winter is approaching. Bitcoin has fallen approximately 50 percent since the ATH on October 6, 2025, and it could get worse if one looks at the losses of 70 to 80 percent from past crashes.

Whether it was ultimately the halving effect or not is currently unclear (and perhaps generally so); in any case, one can already say now that Bitcoin has not reached a new stage in a super-cycle and is growing steadily; rather, Bitcoin has at least proven one thing: that it can crash again and again, and very hard.