The price chart of bitcoin can only be understood in logarithmic terms.

Read that sentence again. Inscribe it indelibly into your prefrontal cortex.

Because it’s the most important thing, financially-speaking, you’ll ever read:

The price chart of bitcoin can only be understood in logarithmic terms.

Every other chart in market history is readily understood in normal, linear form -- where the number lines go from, say, 10 to 20 to 30 to 40, and so on.

With bitcoin, that doesn’t work. We can only understand bitcoin by switching to the logarithmic view, where the number lines go from 10 to 100 to 1000 to 10,000, and on from there.

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This is a first in the history of financial markets. It’s a seemingly simple thing, but the implications are profound.

Bitcoin is different. It’s unfolding on a much bigger and grander scale than any other market in history.

If we look at the logarithmic chart of bitcoin since the beginning in 2010, it does indeed pass the eyeball test on looking much different than other charts. After all, it has gone from 1 cent to the current $16,250 in 12 years.

Most people on a lengthy perusal of this chart will get a sense that there may be an underlying pattern in the way the bitcoin price is developing over time. But it’s hard to pin down.

There IS a long-term price structure here. It’s just a bit difficult to tease out. But once you see it, it’s obvious.

We’ll start with the most apparent feature, the periodic long corrections.

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The first correction took place when bitcoin was just getting rolling on its logarithmic path and was steeper and more exaggerated. But it’s shape and timing are similar to ensuing trends, it just happened at double-speed. This first trend took 3 years, and covered a massive distance, from 1 cent to just under $1,200.

With the bottom in late 2011, the natural rhythm of the bitcoin market emerged, with the trends doubling in length to 6 years.

The next chart highlights these trends from the lows to the highs. This is where it gets a little tricky, because the corrections (red lines) are only at the half-way point to the spike top.

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Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is that the red corrections are the top of the uptrend that started about 6 years prior, and the halfway point to the top that’s coming in about 3 years.

It’s worth a bit of time and attention to understand how these 6-year uptrend lines form on the bitcoin price chart. It’s the main characteristic of the price structure.

The propagation line for the 6-year trend is established at the very beginning, as the eigenvector that defines the path to the eventual spike top.

In other words, the initial market action at these massive bottoms tells us how it’s subsequently going to develop. We don’t have to guess.

The first trend happened when bitcoin was new and illiquid, so events happened more quickly and with exaggerated effect. But interestingly, the underlying structure was still there – only at double speed, with massive volatility.

The second trend started at the low in late 2011 and ended at the famous spike top in Dec 2017, the one that stretched up to $20,000.

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The third trend went from the 2015 double bottom, around $200, up to the May 2021 peak around $65,000.

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We are currently in the fourth of these major trends, and well past the halfway point.

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The top of this 6-year trend should arrive in late 2024, and should come in around $160,000 per bitcoin.