On 7 October 2025 bitcoin closed at $124,774. No day in its history had ever closed higher. This site carries four indicators built for exactly that moment, each one meant to go loud when a cycle runs hot, and on that day all four were quiet. The loudest of them had reached about three quarters of the way to its trigger, ten months earlier, and turned back.
A warning light that stays dark has two readings. Either it is broken, or the thing it watches for stopped happening. Every one of these indicators is calibrated: somewhere inside each sits a number, taken from what bitcoin used to do, that decides when the alarm sounds. Those numbers were set in the years when a good run could multiply the price twentyfold. If bitcoin's swings have been shrinking cycle by cycle, a line drawn in 2013 may be out of reach today. Four quiet indicators would then mean the market changed, not that the tools failed. Which of the two it is decides whether a silent dashboard should reassure anyone.
A pre-print posted on 28 July 2026, a research paper circulated before other researchers have reviewed it, argues that the silence was scheduled. Its claim is that every well-known bitcoin cycle indicator worked for a decade and then failed in one fixed order: accurate, then too early, then silent. It also claims something steadier sits underneath them, tied not to price but to the halving, the moment roughly every four years when bitcoin's software cuts in half the reward paid to the computers that secure it.
This article covers three things. Whether the paper's timings survive a rerun on this site's own price history. Whether these four indicators faded in that order. And the single judgement call that decides both answers.
The Four Indicators, and the Fifth
The paper names four, and all four are on this dashboard. Each one is a way of asking whether bitcoin is expensive, and each has its own trigger.
The Mayer Multiple is the price divided by its own average over the past 200 days: how far above its recent trend bitcoin is trading. This site calls a top reading anything above 2.4. MVRV compares what holders paid for their coins to what those coins are worth today, which is the market's unrealized profit margin; the top reading is 3.5 and above. The Puell Multiple takes the day's newly mined coins, valued in dollars, against what a day's worth fetched on average over the past year: how good a day the miners are having. Three and above is the top reading.
Pi Cycle Top works differently, on two averages of the price, one fast and one slow. When the fast one crosses above the slow one, it has called a top. That crossing has happened four times in sixteen years.
A fifth belongs here too. The paper's alternative is a model built on time rather than price, and this site already runs one. Power Law Position is a trend line fitted to bitcoin's whole life, on the idea that price grows with age. Its top reading is a price sitting above the highest 2.5 percent of readings ever recorded against that line.
Two things were rebuilt rather than looked up. The halving dates come out of the mining data itself. Miners are paid in new coins, in batches called blocks. Divide the coins issued in a day by the blocks found that day and the result is the reward per block. The halving is the day that number first drops below the standing reward. It fires on exactly four days in the whole file: 28 November 2012, 9 July 2016, 11 May 2020 and 19 April 2024. On no other day does the reward stray from its era.
Every indicator reading is then rebuilt as it would have looked on the day, using only what was known by then. The trend line for the fifth indicator is refitted daily from the data available up to that date, so no reading borrows from a future the market had not yet seen.
The Clock Keeps Good Time
Dating a peak sounds trivial and is not. The obvious rule is the highest price between one halving and the next. It breaks immediately. Bitcoin's March 2024 run passed the November 2021 record three weeks before the next halving arrived, so that rule dates the 2021 peak to 2024. Useless.
The rule used here is the textbook one. A peak is a day that sets a record and is then followed by a fall of at least a set depth before any higher price. Take the deepest falls, over 60 percent, and bitcoin has five such peaks since 2011.
Line those up against the halvings and the paper's arithmetic holds up. The December 2017 peak came 525 days after its halving. The November 2021 peak came 547 days after its own. The October 2025 peak came 536 days after the April 2024 halving. The paper reports 525, 546 and 534. The abstract does not say which cycle produced which figure, so no attempt is made here to match them up one by one. Every number in this site's set still lands within two days of a number in the paper's.
The falls are closer still. Measured from each peak to the lowest price before the next record, bitcoin's last three completed declines ran 410 days, 364 days and 366 days. The paper reports 406, 364 and 366. Two are identical. The third is four days apart, which is roughly what two different price sources will disagree by on a single day's low.
That is a genuine replication, and it was not expected. On this site's own data, with halvings derived from mining output and peaks dated by a rule chosen before the answers were known, the halving clock keeps time to within a few days across a decade.
The Alarms Got Slower, Then Stopped
Now the indicators. For each cycle, the question is simple: how many days before the peak did each one first reach its top reading?
Before the April 2013 peak, all five went off, and all five went off late in the climb. Mayer led by 36 days, MVRV by 31, Puell by 30, Power Law by 7, and Pi Cycle crossed 3 days before the peak itself.
Before December 2017, the picture had stretched. Mayer and MVRV first hit their top readings on 6 June, 193 days ahead. Puell got there on 3 June, 196 days ahead. Anyone acting on them would have sold in June and watched the price quadruple. Pi Cycle, alone, crossed on 16 December 2017: the day of the peak, to the day.
Before November 2021, the stretch had doubled again. Mayer went off on 4 January 2021, 309 days early. MVRV and Puell followed two days later, 307 days early. Pi Cycle crossed in April, 211 days early. Power Law never reached its trigger at all.
And then October 2025, with nothing. Not one of the five reached its top reading at any point after the April 2024 halving. Mayer peaked at 1.53 against a trigger of 2.4, in December 2024, and never came back. MVRV peaked at 2.74 against 3.5, in November 2024. Puell peaked at 1.68 against 3.0. Power Law came closest in December 2024 and was still short by a factor of more than three: bitcoin would have had to trade three times higher, on that day, to touch its band. Pi Cycle has not crossed since 12 April 2021.
36 days, then 193, then 309, then silence. That is the paper's sequence, reproduced on this site's own indicators, with its own triggers, over its own data.
The same thing happened at the bottoms. In the 2018 decline, MVRV and Puell both reached their bargain readings 26 days before the low. In the 2022 decline, both reached them again, 150 days early. Since October 2025, neither has, and the price has fallen 53 percent.
One Judgement Call Decides Both Answers
Here is the part that changes the story.
Bitcoin peaked twice in 2021. On 14 April it reached $63,577 and then fell 52.9 percent. On 9 November it reached $67,617 and then fell 76.7 percent. Both are records followed by a serious decline. Whether April counts as a cycle top is a choice, and it is the only choice in this test that matters.
Set the bar at a 60 percent fall and April 2021 is not a top. The 2021 peak is November, 547 days after the halving, and the alarms fired 309 days early. Everything above holds.
Set the bar at 50 percent instead and April 2021 is a top. The 2021 peak is now April, 338 days after the halving, and the clock has lost seven months. The warning times become 36 days, then 193, then 100. The tidy progression is gone. On the same data, with the same indicators, one line moved by ten percentage points.
Neither bar is right. Both are arbitrary. Which is the point. A claim that bitcoin's turns land on a fixed schedule is only as fixed as the rule that decides what counts as a turn, and no such rule falls out of the data by itself. The paper's numbers are reproducible here, precisely, but only under one of two defensible conventions.
The 2025 peak carries the same problem in live form. Its decline stands at 53.1 percent, so it is a top under the looser bar and not yet a top under the stricter one. This article cannot settle that, and does not try. One thing the choice cannot touch: under either bar, through the highest price bitcoin has ever reached, the alarms never went off.
What Does Not Depend on the Choice
One finding is untouched by any of it. Whether or not April 2021 was a top, and whether or not October 2025 turns out to be one, the readings themselves are the readings, and in this cycle they never came near the triggers. Mayer got to 64 percent of the way. MVRV to 78 percent. Puell to 56 percent. The fifth indicator was short by a factor of three, and the crossing indicator has not crossed in five years.
That has never happened before in this data. In every previous cycle, at least four of the five reached their extremes, usually together, usually within days of each other. This time none did, through a rise to $124,774 and a fall to $58,566.
Drop the triggers altogether and the point gets sharper. Forget whether anything tripped, and ask only how hot each indicator ran at its hottest, cycle by cycle. Mayer's best reading went 8.24, then 4.07, then 2.84, then 1.53. MVRV's went 5.88, then 4.72, then 3.96, then 2.74. Puell's went 10.49, then 6.62, then 3.46, then 1.68. Twelve readings, three indicators, four cycles, and not one exception: every peak is lower than the peak before it, and roughly by half. No trigger, no drawdown rule and no opinion about April 2021 enters that table. It is the plainest thing in this article and the hardest to argue with.
A caution belongs here. The mining and ownership data behind MVRV and Puell stops on 23 May 2026, two months before the price record ends, so "never" for those two means never through May. Neither was remotely close by then, and neither has a plausible path to its trigger in a falling market, but the gap is real and it is stated rather than papered over.
Why This Does Not Contradict an Earlier Finding
An earlier piece on this site ran a different test on the same dashboard and came to what looks like the opposite conclusion. Holding each calendar year constant, three of these four pointed the right way more strongly, not less. When Mayer's readings were high, the next month was an up month less often than when they were low, by 28.0 percentage points. MVRV showed 26.5 and Puell 11.1. Pi Cycle Top was not among the indicators in that test, so it says nothing about the fourth.
Both results are true, because they measure different things. That test asked whether high readings lean bearish across all days. This one asks whether the readings ever get high enough to trip a trigger. An indicator can keep leaning exactly the right way while its extremes stop arriving. That is what these three appear to be doing.
Which suggests the plainest explanation for the silence has nothing to do with the indicators. They did not break. The cycle got smaller. A rise that used to carry bitcoin four times above its 200-day average now carries it one and a half times above it, and a trigger set on the old swing is out of reach. Whether that is the arrival of large, slow buyers, or a market too big to move the way it used to, this data cannot say.
What to Take Away
Three things, and one date.
The halving timings are real and reproducible. Peaks 525, 547 and 536 days after a halving. Falls of 410, 364 and 366 days after those peaks. Computed here from mining output and closing prices, they land within four days of a paper that used neither this site's data nor its methods. Independent arithmetic agreeing to that precision is worth noticing.
The decay is real, and so is its dependence. Warning times of 36 days, 193 and 309, then nothing, is exactly the pattern claimed. It also evaporates if one peak in April 2021 is counted rather than discarded. Any published version of this finding that does not state which convention it used has left out the part that matters.
The silence is the finding that stands alone. Through the largest price in bitcoin's history, five alarms built to detect exactly that never went off, and the nearest miss was 78 percent of the way to a trigger. Behind it sits the one table in this article that no convention can move: twelve peak readings, three indicators, falling at every halving without exception. Every figure here comes from one pass over the daily price and mining history, including the figures that argue against this article's own headline.
The date is not this site's. The paper commits itself to a window for bitcoin's next low, between 5 October and 16 November 2026. That is an unusually brave thing for a paper to do, and the reason it is worth taking seriously at all. This site does not adopt that call, has no position on it, and is not repeating it as a view. It is noted because a dated claim can be checked, and this one will be, within months, by anyone who cares to look.