Remember when everyone swore the Bitcoin four-year halving cycle was written in stone? I certainly do. For years it felt almost magical—halving comes, price moons, euphoria peaks, then the inevitable 80% crash. Like clockwork. Except… maybe it never actually was the clock.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks digging through old charts, central bank balance sheets, and macro data, and something became painfully obvious. The halving narrative was comforting, simple, and—most importantly—coincided with three perfect cycles. Three. That’s barely enough data to call anything a law of nature. And right now, that story is starting to crack.
The Halving Was Never the Real Conductor
Let’s be brutally honest for a second. The halving reduces new supply. That’s undeniable. But supply shocks alone don’t send an asset from $10 to $69,000. Something much bigger has to pull demand into the market. And when you overlay every major Bitcoin bull run against one single metric—global liquidity—the alignment is almost spooky.
Every single time Bitcoin went parabolic, central banks were flooding the system with freshly printed money. Every single time it crashed, that tap was being turned off. The halving just happened to ride shotgun.
2012–2013: The First “Coincidence”
Bitcoin’s first halving landed in November 2012 when the coin was barely $10. Within 12 months it touched $1,250. Impressive, right? Except the Federal Reserve was pumping $85 billion per month into markets through QE. Over a trillion dollars flooded the system. When the Fed started talking taper in 2013, Bitcoin topped and bled all the way to $150. The halving calendar lines up perfectly—yet liquidity was doing the heavy lifting.
2016–2017: The Global Money Printer Goes Brr
Second halving, May 2016. Bitcoin around $650. By December 2017 we were kissing $20,000. Again, the timeline fits the four-year religion. But dig a little deeper: the European Central Bank was running massive bond-buying programs, the Bank of Japan was buying ETFs like they were Pokémon cards, and China unleashed the largest credit impulse in recorded history. Global M2 money supply was exploding. Coincidence? Hardly.
2020–2021: The Mother of All Liquidity Tsunamis
Third halving, May 2020. Bitcoin around $9,000. Eighteen months later: $69,000. The halving cult was in full celebration mode. Meanwhile, central banks added more than $20 trillion to their balance sheets in response to Covid. The Fed alone grew its balance sheet by over $5 trillion in less than two years. That wasn’t a halving bull market. That was the biggest monetary stimulus in human history, and Bitcoin surfed the wave.
We have literally never seen a Bitcoin bear market during an expanding global liquidity environment. Not once.
2024–2025: When the Clocks Finally Diverged
Here’s where it gets interesting. The fourth halving arrived in April 2024. According to scripture, we should be deep into euphoria right now, with altcoins printing 100x and everyone quitting their jobs. Instead, Bitcoin is trading roughly where it was a year ago, and most retail traders are exhausted and scared.
Why? Because for the first time in history, the halving clock and the liquidity clock are completely out of sync. The Fed spent the last two years doing quantitative tightening—sucking liquidity out of the system—while the global Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) languished below 50. No wonder the “post-halving bull run” never showed up. There was no fuel.
PMI: The Unsung Hero of Crypto Cycles
If you’ve never looked at the global PMI, you should. It’s basically a monthly health check on worldwide manufacturing. When it’s below 50, the economy is contracting. Above 50, expanding. Above 55? Things are getting hot. And Bitcoin has an almost obsessive relationship with it.
- PMI bottoms → Bitcoin usually finds a macro low
- PMI crosses 50 → liquidity returns, risk-on assets wake up
- PMI above 55 → altcoin season goes nuclear
- PMI near 60 → pure euphoria (2017 and 2021 peaks)
Right now PMI is flirting with 50 again after two years of stagnation. Central banks have signaled the end of tightening. Rate cuts are coming. Balance sheets will stop shrinking and eventually start growing again. In other words, the real cycle—the liquidity cycle—is about to restart.
The Institutional Playbook Doesn’t Care About Rainbows
Picture Larry Fink or Stanley Druckenmiller sitting in a boardroom. Do you think they have a halving countdown on their Bloomberg terminal? Of course not. They watch Fed balance sheets, M2 growth, PMI diffusion indexes, and credit spreads. That’s the real dashboard.
While retail traders panic-sell because “the four-year cycle says we’re supposed to crash now,” institutions are quietly accumulating. Spot Bitcoin ETFs already hold over a million coins. MicroStrategy isn’t slowing down. Sovereign wealth funds are dipping toes. They’re not selling the bottom—they’re buying it from you.
So When Does the Real Bull Actually Start?
We’re likely in the calm before the storm. The Fed is expected to cut rates multiple times in 2025. China is rolling out fresh stimulus. Europe is easing. Global M2 is already showing early signs of reacceleration. Once PMI breaks decisively above 52–53 and stays there, the algorithms flip to full risk-on.
That’s when Bitcoin leaves $100k in the rear-view mirror. That’s when altcoins that have been dead for two years suddenly 20x in a month. That’s when people will look back and say “wait, the halving was a year ago—why is everything exploding now?”
This cycle isn’t over. If anything, the real cycle hasn’t even begun yet.
Look, I’m not saying the halving is meaningless. Reducing issuance matters long-term, especially as we approach absolute scarcity. But pretending it’s the primary driver of multi-year price cycles is like believing the Earth is flat because it looks flat from your backyard.
The data is crystal clear: Bitcoin is a macro asset disguised as digital gold. It dances to the tune of global liquidity, not calendar dates. And right now, the orchestra is warming up for the biggest performance we’ve ever seen.
If you sell now because some rainbow chart says the party is over, you might just become the exit liquidity for the smartest money on the planet. Personally? I’m not planning on handing over my coins that cheaply.
The four-year halving myth gave us comfort in an uncomfortable market. It’s time to graduate to the real driver: liquidity. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once the liquidity floodgates open again, the next leg up could make everything that came before look like the warm-up act.
