Price Boundary

Both levels are built from an idea called coin days. A coin earns one coin day for every day it sits untouched, and spending it destroys everything it has accumulated. A coin that sits for three years and then moves destroys far more than one that moved last week. Weighting activity this way puts the emphasis on what long-term holders do and filters out the constant churn of coins moving back and forth.

Running that across all of Bitcoin's history produces Transferred Price, roughly a lifetime average of what spending has cost. Both levels on the chart come from it, in opposite directions.

Terminal Price, the ceiling, is Transferred Price multiplied by 21, matching Bitcoin's 21 million coin cap. That rescaling puts historical behavior onto the terms of the full eventual supply, rather than letting recent activity dominate simply because more coins circulate now.

Balanced Price, the floor, is Realized Price minus Transferred Price: what owners paid, less what spending has already worked through. It has historically marked the point where a bear market has fully cleared out its sellers.

The chart shows price between Balanced Price and Terminal Price. The band is deliberately wide. It is the range price has spent essentially all of its time inside, not a precise target.

The two edges differ in character. Balanced Price looks backward, describing what owners paid net of what has been spent. Terminal Price is a rescaling of past behavior onto the full supply, and reads better as an upper bound than as a prediction.

In Bitcoin's earliest completed cycle, price came closest to Terminal Price within days of the final peak, though it did not cross it in this build's data. In the cycles since, price has come closest to Terminal Price much earlier and has closed the gap less each time. Balanced Price has come close to price in the months around major cycle lows, though how close has varied from cycle to cycle.

Our version is an approximation, which matters if you are comparing numbers against another source. Coin days destroyed is a paid data feed we do not currently consume, so both levels are estimated from Realized Price and calibrated to line up with the published figures. The shape of the band and its relationship to price hold up, but the exact dollar levels will not match a chart built from the full data, and in this build price has not yet crossed Terminal Price the way the published version has at past tops.

Terminal Price is also a young indicator with few cycles behind it, and its author has noted it can cross price well before the actual peak arrives.

Both levels assume old coins eventually move on-chain. Bitcoin that migrates into ETF or custodial structures and then sits still distorts the coin days signal they are built on.