Bitcoin Cycle Glossary

A running high or low does not become a pivot the day it prints. It arms first, which starts a 14-day count, and it is marked only once that count completes. Both dates are published alongside the extreme date itself, because the gap between them is a property of the confirmation rules rather than of the market.

Arming can also un-arm. If the leg extends past the candidate before the count finishes, the count restarts on the new extreme, and nothing is marked.

Beta is about size, not direction. A beta of 2 says that on a day Bitcoin moves one percent, this asset has tended to move about two. It says nothing about whether the two moved together on any particular day, which is what correlation answers.

An asset can carry a high beta and a weak correlation at the same time. That combination describes something that moves violently but not in step, which is a different thing from a leveraged proxy.

Every coin accrues one coin day for each day it goes unmoved. When it moves, those accumulated days are destroyed. The figure answers how much dormant supply is waking up rather than how much volume traded, which is why a quiet day of long-held coins moving registers more strongly than a noisy day of the same coins changing hands repeatedly.

It is the mechanism behind the indicators that separate long-term holders from recent buyers.

A correlation of 1 means the two moved in lockstep, 0 means their moves were unrelated, and -1 means they moved opposite each other. It describes direction only. Two assets can be perfectly correlated while one moves ten times as far, which is what beta measures.

A correlation is always a statement about a window. The same pair can read tightly correlated over three months and loosely over three years, so the window is published alongside every coefficient on this site.

Altitude takes the Risk lens and the Time lens and reads one against the other. That is why it can express something neither input can: that valuation is running ahead of where the clock says the cycle should be, or lagging behind it.

When the two lenses agree, Altitude sits near both of them. When they diverge, it reflects the gap.

A reading inside a band is not a pivot. It is the condition under which the detector is willing to start looking for one, which is why entering a band and confirming a turn are tracked as separate events with separate dates.

The detector's own arming gates sit further out than the display bands: Altitude at or above 100 arms a peak and at or below 6 arms a bottom.

The block subsidy started at 50 BTC and halves on a fixed schedule written into the protocol. It currently stands at 3.125 BTC. Because the schedule counts blocks rather than days, the date of a future halving is an estimate that moves slightly with how fast blocks are found.

The halving is the anchor for one of the three timing indicators, and the rhythm the four-year cycle framing is built on.

Every coin falls into an age band set by the last time it moved between wallets. Stacking those bands shows how the ownership base is composed: how much is in recently traded hands and how much has not moved in years.

Weighting each band by what its coins were worth when they last moved gives realized value HODL waves, which is the form the ratio indicators are built from.

Grading reads a window rather than a single day, and latching is what that window buys. An indicator that touched its edge inside the window stays marked as having touched it, which keeps a one-day spike from vanishing from the record the moment it passes.

Latching is one-sided by design. It tracks whichever extreme the current leg is running toward, so an unlatched reading on the other side is not a measurement that the other side has not happened.

A leg is the unit the timing indicators actually measure, because a rising leg and a falling leg have different typical lengths and averaging them together would describe neither.

Every leg carries the rule that ended it and the date it was marked, both of which sit on the cycle record.

It states what the whole supply would be worth if every coin were valued at the latest trade. That is a convenient total rather than a sum anyone could realize, since the latest trade sets the price for a small fraction of the supply.

Comparing it against realized cap is what several of the valuation indicators are built on.

Two price rules and one reading rule can confirm a pivot. A fall of 33% from a running high confirms that high was a peak. A rise to 2.5 times a running low confirms that low was a bottom. Altitude holding in an extreme band for 14 days marks the turn without waiting for either price move.

A pivot is a statement about the record as it stands rather than a permanent one. If the leg extends and a new extreme prints before the rules fire, the pivot moves to the new extreme and takes its dates with it.

Where market cap prices every coin at the latest trade, realized cap prices each one at its own last trade and adds those up. Coins that have not moved in years are still carried at the price they last moved at, so the total reflects the cost base of the ownership base rather than today's quote.

The gap between the two totals is unrealized profit held on paper, which is the raw material for several valuation indicators.

Dividing a raw gap by the standard deviation converts it from its own units into a count of typical swings. That is what makes a figure comparable against its own history: it answers how unusual today is rather than how large today is.

Several indicators use it for exactly that reason, since a dollar gap means different things at different network sizes.

The subsidy steps down only at a halving and is constant in between, so each era has a single issuance rate. The current era pays 3.125 BTC per block.

Because issuance is flat within an era and drops sharply between them, the era boundary is the natural place to compare supply conditions across cycles.