Bitcoin Cycle Altitude

Cycle Altitude is the site's headline number, the two lenses fused into a single 0-100 read: how stretched Bitcoin looks (Risk) and how far through the cycle clock it is (Time).

Plotted across history, it shows the full arc of each cycle in a single line, from the lows at each bottom to the highs at each top.

Altitude is not a price level. A low reading does not mean Bitcoin is cheap and a high one does not mean it is expensive; Risk is the valuation reading. Altitude gauges how likely the current bull or bear market is to be nearing its end, based on how past cycles have played out.

It follows whichever lens is currently more extreme, not an average of the two: the higher of Risk and Time on the way up, the lower of the two on the way down. Only one lens has to reach an extreme to move the reading.

Time advances every single day; Risk does not always reach an extreme. So when Risk stays quiet, Time acts as the fallback, driving the reading toward the top or bottom on the calendar alone. That trades precision for a better chance of being directionally right.

Because Altitude is a summary, when it surprises you, the Risk and Time histories show which lens is driving it.

The history is drawn from what was known on each day, not from hindsight, so it holds at an extreme through the three weeks a turn takes to confirm and steps when the new cycle is marked. The step can be large: Altitude follows the lower of the two lenses on the way down and the higher on the way up, so marking a bottom switches which lens it reads in a single day.

Fusing two lenses into one number is a convenience that hides which one is driving the reading. When Risk and Time diverge, the single altitude figure cannot show it; the two underlying histories can.

It inherits the limits of both lenses, including that all of it is calibrated on a short history of completed cycles.