BTC Bear Lows vs Last Peak: $77,690.03
For fifteen years every bear market bottomed **above** the price the previous cycle topped at. The grey line is that level; the price line is bitcoin. This cycle the low came in 3% below it — the first miss on record.
The price line is bitcoin's **monthly closing** price. The grey step line is what the **previous** cycle closed at its highest — the level this rule says a bear market should never lose. The red band marks the months price spent below it.
Read the gap between the lines at each bottom. It has shrunk every cycle:
**2015** low $226 against the 2011 peak of $17 — **13 times** above it. **2019** low $3,470 against $1,134 — **3.1 times**. **2022** low $16,433 against $12,613 — **1.3 times**. **2026** low $60,136 against $61,731 — **0.97 times**, three percent short.
So the honest reading is not that a law held for fifteen years; it is that a comfortable margin became a thin one and then went negative. Whether that matters is a separate question: three percent on a monthly close is inside the noise of any single month, and the sample is four bottoms.
Monthly closes only — the last daily close of each calendar month. A wick is not a price the market held. A **cycle peak** is an all-time-high monthly close that then stands nine months. For each peak, the lowest monthly close before the next peak is that cycle's bear low. The grey line, from each peak onward, is the price of the peak before it; the red band is every month whose close sits under that line. The same rule on daily closes fails twice (2022 and 2026), which is why the claim is always stated on monthly closes, and why this chart is too.
Only completed UTC calendar months are included. A month missing its final daily close is omitted; the current month is not a confirmed monthly reading.
**Four bottoms is not a pattern, it is four numbers.** Nothing in bitcoin enforces this rule, and a shrinking margin was visible for two cycles before it broke. The current low is also provisional: a peak is only confirmed nine months after the fact, and a lower low would change the reading. Read it as a measurement of how each cycle compares with the last, not as a floor anyone is obliged to defend.
Our own full BTC price history (btc_price_daily: blockchain.info daily closes, 2010-08 to today), reduced to monthly closes here. No external API at request time.
Own compute · monthly closes from our full BTC price history 2010+ (no external API)