PictureRoom

Photography

Weekend Meandering

Only shot one wedding in my life. Will never do it again lol

Just a few from yesterday.

What’s funny is that while I was meandering around downtown, I accidentally walked into what seemed like a private party happening outside the pavilion by the river. It was for some law firm or something - must’ve been about eighty people there.

But there was free wine, food, and oysters being served… so naturally I figured I’d squeeze in and see if I could enjoy myself.

I had my camera with me, of course, and happened to be wearing a collared T-shirt, so I blended in well enough.

The oysters were amazing - something I haven’t had in a while - even though they’re from the very river you see in the photos here.

![](https://m.stacker.news/133579)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133580)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133581)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133582)

SATURDAY SHARE!

Beautiful! Def on my list to visit one day.

history

Top 50 must hated people in history

jakoyoh629

I know maybe half of this list. Interesting G Khan is last though

You (Probably) Don't Need An f/1.2 Lens

zuspotirko

Every Saturday I'd like to round up the photographers here in the SN community and open the floor to share some work. It could be something you photographed this past week, a recent project you’re excited about, or even an all-time favorite image that still means something to you.

The idea is simple: create a space where photographers can show what they’ve been working on, discover new perspectives, and connect with others who share the same curiosity for photography.

![](https://m.stacker.news/133407)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133408)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133409)

HealthAndFitness

I remember back in middle school telling my mom that I was having trouble seeing the whiteboard in class. At the time she worked in ophthalmology (and still does today actually), so naturally I ended up getting a prescription for contacts to wear at school.

I wore them for maybe eight months to a year. But toward the end of that time I started noticing something strange - when I took the contacts out, my vision actually seemed worse than before. Not to mention the pure agony of dealing with them every day. Getting them in and out of my eyes was such a pain.

Around that time I somehow came across the work of Aldous Huxley, specifically his book The Art of Seeing. What many people don’t realize is that Huxley was nearly blind by the age of 18. He later worked with a doctor Bates, who developed methods aimed at restoring vision through natural practices.

The book goes into techniques meant to reduce strain on the eye muscles and allow the eyes to relax and function properly again. This stood in stark contrast to the general consensus in the ophthalmology world, which tends to treat declining vision as something permanent that simply needs correction with lenses.

Reading that book completely changed how I thought about vision.

I stopped wearing contacts and began practicing some of the ideas Huxley discussed. Over time my eyesight improved. I haven’t worn contacts in well over a decade now, and my vision has continued to get better. It’s not perfect 20/20, but it’s very close and ophthalmology tests have verified that my vision is solid.

The bigger point for me is this: the body has an incredible ability to heal itself when you give it the right conditions. Curiosity matters. Questioning orthodox assumptions matters even more so. 

Sometimes the solutions aren’t about adding more intervention, but they’re about removing stress and allowing the body to do what it already knows how to do.

![](https://m.stacker.news/133354)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133355)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133356)

Vision and questioning orthodox assumtpions

bitcoin

Strike is now available in New York

1GLENCoop

Huge, this has been in the works for way too long so happy to see this. 
Never withdrew to cold storage directly with Strike, nor have I used it in a while to buy, but still love the app. Slickest Ui

ideasfromtheedge

# I Tested Whether Terence McKenna's "Timewave Zero" Predicts Bitcoin's Price Cycles — Here's What I Found

*A curious experiment at the intersection of psychedelic philosophy and on-chain math.*

---

## The Setup: Two Weird Theories Walk Into a Bar

A few months ago I found myself down a rabbit hole with two ideas that, on the surface, have no business being in the same sentence:

**Bitcoin's Power Law Theory (PLT)** — the observation, championed by analysts like Harold Christopher Burger and PlanB's predecessors, that Bitcoin's price has followed a remarkably consistent power law since its first traded days. Plot log(price) against log(days since genesis block) and you get a nearly straight line with R²≈0.94. The booms and busts are just oscillations around this trend. The trend itself is eerily stable.

**Timewave Zero (TWZ)** — Terence McKenna's psychedelic-era mathematical theory that *time itself has structure*. He proposed that history moves in fractal waves of "novelty" — periods of increasing complexity and connectedness — and that these waves were converging toward a singularity point he called the "zero date." He originally pegged this to December 21, 2012 (the Mayan calendar end date). His collaborator John Meyer later recalculated it to July 8, 2018. The waveform is derived from the *I Ching*'s 64 hexagrams, recursively self-similar across timescales.

Both theories make a similar structural claim: *time has a shape, and that shape governs big events.* So I thought — what if I actually tested whether McKenna's waveform correlates with Bitcoin's deviations from its power law trend?

---

## Why This Is Actually a Reasonable Question (Sort Of)

I want to be upfront: I didn't expect to find anything. This was a curiosity experiment, not a belief. But the question is at least *well-formed*:

- Bitcoin's PLT residuals (the boom/bust cycles above and below the trend line) are real, measurable, and not fully explained by the power law itself
- TWZ produces a deterministic mathematical waveform — it's not vague, it generates specific numbers for specific dates
- If TWZ had *any* relationship to Bitcoin's timing, it would show up as a statistical correlation between the waveform and the residuals

The honest version of this question is: **does TWZ's specific phase structure correlate with Bitcoin's price cycles better than random noise?**

---

## How I Did It (The Methodology, Plain English)

I had Claude write ~1,500 lines of Python to do this properly. Here's the pipeline:

**Step 1 — Get the data.** Pulled Bitcoin daily prices from Blockchain.com (going back to 2010) merged with Yahoo Finance. 3,790 trading days from August 2010 to December 2020 as the training set.

**Step 2 — Fit the power law.** Fit a log-log regression of price vs. days-since-genesis. Got slope = **5.68** (the theory predicts ~6.0), R² = **0.937**. Extracted the residuals — the daily log-difference between actual price and what the power law predicts.

**Step 3 — Generate the TWZ waveforms.** Implemented McKenna's actual algorithm (from the published source code) for three candidate "zero dates":
- **TWZ-A**: McKenna's original 2012-12-21
- **TWZ-B**: Meyer's recalculated 2018-07-08  
- **TWZ-C**: An arbitrary future date 2025-01-01

**Step 4 — Test the correlation.** For each TWZ waveform, computed the Pearson correlation with the PLT residuals at every lag from -180 to +180 days (361 lags × 3 signals = 1,083 comparisons).

**Step 5 — The critical part: the null test.** This is where most amateur analyses go wrong. A correlation being "statistically significant" (p < 0.05) means almost nothing with 3,600 data points — even r = 0.03 gives p ≈ 0.05. The real question is: **does TWZ beat random signals with the same spectral shape?**

I generated 10,000 "surrogate" signals — random waveforms that have the *exact same frequency content* as TWZ but with randomized phases. Then I asked: does the real TWZ waveform correlate with Bitcoin's residuals better than these random look-alikes? The 95th percentile of this null distribution was **r = 0.473**. That's the bar TWZ needs to clear.

---

## The Results

Here's the honest summary:

| Signal | Best Correlation | Beats Random? |
|--------|-----------------|---------------|
| TWZ-A (McKenna 2012) | r = 0.180 | ❌ No |
| TWZ-B (Meyer 2018) | r = 0.317 | ❌ No |
| TWZ-C (2025 date) | r = 0.143 | ❌ No |
| **4-year halving cycle** | **r = 0.662** | **✅ Yes** |
| Solar cycle (~11 years) | r = 0.142 | ❌ No |

**None of the pre-registered TWZ variants beat the null threshold of r = 0.473.**

The best TWZ signal (Meyer's 2018 date, TWZ-B) achieved r = 0.317 at a lag of +133 days. That's real — it's not zero — but it's only 67% of what you'd need to beat a random signal with the same spectral shape. It doesn't clear the bar.

Meanwhile, a simple **4-year halving sinusoid** — just a sine wave with a 4-year period anchored to Bitcoin's first halving in November 2012 — achieved r = **0.662**. That's 40% above the null threshold and more than twice as strong as the best TWZ signal.

---

## What This Actually Means

**The boring but important answer: Bitcoin's boom/bust cycles are explained by the halving cycle, not by Timewave Zero.**

This makes intuitive sense. Every ~4 years, the block reward halves. This creates a supply shock. Miners sell less, scarcity increases, price rises. The market overshoots, corrects, and the cycle repeats. This is endogenous to Bitcoin's design — Satoshi literally programmed it in.

TWZ, by contrast, is an external signal derived from the I Ching. There's no mechanism by which it would influence Bitcoin's price. And the data confirms: it doesn't.

**A few nuances worth noting:**

1. **The tiny p-values are misleading.** TWZ-B's correlation of r = 0.317 has a Pearson p-value of ~10⁻⁸⁴. That sounds insane — but it just means "this correlation is distinguishable from exactly zero." With 3,600 data points, even a trivially weak correlation looks "significant" by that measure. The surrogate null test is the right test, and TWZ fails it.

2. **The optimized TWZ date is interesting but circular.** When I ran a grid search to find the *best possible* TWZ zero date (not pre-registered, just exploratory), the algorithm found **December 16, 2022** — right near the FTX collapse bottom — with r = 0.520. That *does* beat the null. But this is pure data mining: I searched 522 candidate dates and picked the best one. That's not a discovery, it's overfitting.

3. **TWZ-B's +133 day lag is curious.** The best correlation for Meyer's 2018 date occurs when the TWZ waveform *leads* Bitcoin's residuals by 133 days. I don't know what to make of this. It could be noise. It could be a coincidence of the waveform's shape. It's not strong enough to act on.

4. **The training set starts in 2010, not 2009.** The first 592 days of Bitcoin's history had zero-price entries (pre-exchange era). This means McKenna's 2012 zero date (TWZ-A) only has about 2 years of pre-singularity data in the training set — not ideal.

---

## The Philosophical Footnote

McKenna was a brilliant, strange thinker. Timewave Zero was his attempt to mathematize a mystical intuition — that history accelerates toward moments of maximum novelty. Whether or not the math works, the *idea* resonates with anyone who's watched the pace of change in the last decade.

Bitcoin itself is arguably one of the most "novel" things to happen in human history — a spontaneous, decentralized monetary network that emerged from the internet and has grown by 10 orders of magnitude in 15 years. If McKenna's theory had any empirical traction anywhere, Bitcoin seems like a reasonable place to look.

It doesn't have traction here. But the question was worth asking, and now we have a clean answer.

---

## The Code

Everything is open and reproducible:

- **TWZ generator**: Implements McKenna's published algorithm, verified against his original outputs
- **PLT fitter**: Log-log OLS regression with residual extraction
- **Correlation engine**: Pearson cross-correlation with Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction
- **Null testing**: 10,000 spectrally-matched surrogates (Theiler et al. 1992 method)
- **Pre-registration**: Hypotheses were locked before touching the data

The pre-registration document was written and committed before any real data was analyzed — this prevents the common failure mode of "I found something interesting, let me call it a hypothesis."

---

## Figures

*(Four charts are attached — descriptions below)*

---

**Figure 1 — Bitcoin's Power Law: 15 Years of Eerily Consistent Growth** (`share_fig1_power_law.png`)

This is the foundation of the whole experiment. The top panel shows Bitcoin's daily price on a log₁₀ scale (y-axis) plotted against calendar year (x-axis), with the orange power law fit running through it (slope = 5.68, R² = 0.937). The shaded band is ±0.5 log units — roughly a 3× price range in either direction. The grey dashed vertical lines mark the three halvings in the training set (Nov 2012, Jul 2016, May 2020).

The bottom panel is what we actually tested: the **residuals** — the daily difference between actual log price and the power law prediction. Positive (green) = above trend (bull market). Negative (red) = below trend (bear market). You can see the four distinct boom/bust cycles clearly, each one triggered by a halving. This residual series is what we tried to predict with Timewave Zero.

---

**Figure 2 — Does Timewave Zero Predict Bitcoin's Boom/Bust Cycles?** (`share_fig2_results.png`)

The main result chart. Each bar shows the peak absolute Pearson correlation (|r|) achieved by that signal against Bitcoin's residuals, across all tested lags. The red dashed horizontal line at r = 0.473 is the **random noise threshold** — the 95th percentile of 10,000 spectrally-matched surrogate signals. Any bar below this line is indistinguishable from random noise.

- **TWZ-A** (McKenna's 2012 date): r = 0.180 — well below threshold
- **TWZ-B** (Meyer's 2018 date): r = 0.317 — the best TWZ variant, still only 67% of what's needed
- **TWZ-C** (future 2025 date): r = 0.143 — near-zero
- **Solar cycle** (~11 years): r = 0.142 — also near-zero
- **TWZ-D** (hatched bar, exploratory only): r = 0.520 — this *does* beat the threshold, but the zero date was chosen *after* seeing the data via grid search, so it doesn't count as a valid result
- **4-Year Halving Cycle** (green): r = 0.662 — clearly above the threshold, the dominant signal

The annotation on TWZ-B says "FAILS: Doesn't beat random noise." The annotation on the halving bar says "PASSES: Beats random noise by 40%."

---

**Figure 3 — Correlation at Every Time Lag (−180 to +180 days)** (`share_fig3_lag_profiles.png`)

This shows *how* the correlations were computed. Rather than just testing at zero lag (simultaneous), we tested whether TWZ *leads* or *lags* Bitcoin's cycles by up to 180 days in either direction. Positive lag = the signal predicts Bitcoin's future. Negative lag = Bitcoin's past predicts the signal.

The left panel shows all three TWZ variants. The orange line (TWZ-B) is the strongest, peaking at r = 0.317 at lag +133 days — meaning TWZ-B correlates best when it leads Bitcoin by about 4.5 months. But even at its peak, it never crosses the red dashed threshold lines.

The right panel shows the 4-year halving cycle for comparison. The green line rises steadily and peaks at r = 0.662 at lag +149 days, clearly above the threshold. The contrast between the two panels tells the whole story visually.

---

**Figure 4 — How the Null Test Works** (`share_fig4_null_explainer.png`)

This figure explains the methodology for anyone unfamiliar with surrogate testing. The left panel shows the actual TWZ-B waveform (orange, thick) alongside 6 example random surrogate signals (grey, thin). The surrogates have the *exact same frequency content* as TWZ-B — same power spectrum, same overall shape — but with randomized phase. They look similar to TWZ-B but are definitionally random.

The right panel shows the lag-profile correlations for those same signals against Bitcoin's residuals. The grey lines are the surrogates; the orange line is real TWZ-B. The red dashed lines are the 95th percentile threshold from all 10,000 surrogates. You can see that TWZ-B (orange) stays well within the cloud of random signals — it's not doing anything the random look-alikes can't do. This is the core of why H1 fails.

---

## TL;DR

- I tested whether Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero waveform correlates with Bitcoin's price cycles
- Used 10 years of training data (2010–2020), 10,000 random surrogate signals as a null test
- **Result: TWZ doesn't beat random noise.** Best TWZ signal: r = 0.317. Null threshold: r = 0.473.
- **The 4-year halving cycle does beat random noise**, at r = 0.662 — more than twice as strong as TWZ
- Bitcoin's timing is explained by its own supply schedule, not by McKenna's I Ching mathematics
- Null results are results. The experiment was worth doing.

---


![](https://m.stacker.news/133094)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133095)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133096)

![](https://m.stacker.news/133097)

Timewave Zero vs Bitcoin: The Halving Wins (with data)

New NOICE Magazine website live (now accepting bitcoin)

Update*

Added multi language support. Check it out on the header, let me know if you encounter any issues. Cool little animation to heh

https://noicemagazine.com/

![](https://m.stacker.news/132006)

New NOICE Magazine website (help me test)

Dude the SE is one of my favorites. Love the small factor. I rock a 13 mini myself. and cheers for the troubleshoot!

Atm, no the last issue we printed was of 500 copes. You can see a flip-through video here of it. Truly one of a kind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAjHWKfzIgM

but, other releases will soon be on the horizon. And now that I have btc lightning enabled, you can bet you'll be able to buy anything on noice with it :)

Awesome, thank you!! Feedback is always welcomed