Does hash ribbon capitulation mark the bottom?
When the 30-day average hash rate falls below the 60-day, miners are capitulating and a bottom is near.
Where we are now. Today the 30-day average hash rate is 1.0 and the 60-day is 0.9 (billions of the source's units), so the 30-day is above — no capitulation. Shaded bands are the 15 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2011-09, 2012-04, 2012-12, 2014-12, 2015-04, 2016-07, 2018-10, 2019-11, 2020-10, 2021-04, 2022-06, 2022-11, 2023-07, 2024-05, 2025-01.
This rule has fired 15 times. A doubling followed within a year on 9 of the 15. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 53.3% of the time.
| Times it fired | 15 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| Still open | 1 | fired since 2025-11-25; the 365-day window has not closed, so these are excluded from the figures above rather than counted as a success or a failure |
| What followed | 60.0% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 39% to 78% | the range the true rate could take, on this many occasions, before you invoke anything but chance; a binomial interval that treats the episodes as independent trials |
| Happened anyway | 53.3% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +6.7 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Charles Edwards, 2019. The reasoning is economic rather than technical: miners switching off means the marginal producer is unprofitable, which has historically coincided with low prices.
How we tested it
Trigger: 30-day average hash rate below the 60-day. Scored as a bottom rule: doubling within 365 days.
Only days the rule could have fired are counted. Consecutive triggers within 90 days are one occasion. The baseline excludes each trigger and the 90 days after it, because the aftermath of a signal is not a fair comparison. No verdict is given below 20 occasions.
What the numbers say
Fifteen occasions. 60.0% followed by a doubling within a year, against 53.3% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 6.7-point gap, positive, on 15 observations. The largest sample of any cycle-scale rule here, and a small positive gap whose interval contains the baseline.
What this does not mean
A 6.7-point gap is small enough that it could easily be noise even at twenty episodes. Do not read the absence of a verdict as a hint that one is coming.
And it does not mean the threshold itself was chosen fairly. Every rule in this registry was specified by someone who had already seen bitcoin’s history, so the cut-off is fitted to the record it is being judged against. The interval above measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not the choice of threshold, not that cycle turns are few and related, and not that thirty-six rules were tested in total. Only the forward record, which fixes a rule before its answer is known, avoids this.
What would change the answer
Five more capitulation episodes would make it scoreable, which at the historical rate is perhaps another five years.
If you cannot time it, the question changes
Most of the claims in this registry cannot be shown to beat a coin flip, and several are worse than one. That is not an argument against holding bitcoin. It is an argument that the decision worth spending effort on is how much to hold, not when to buy.
That is what How much bitcoin? is for: what fixed weights actually did in a conventional portfolio, and how much the answer depended on the year you started. For the valuation state today, and what has historically followed readings like it, see Where Things Stand.
Recomputed from the daily public snapshot by fetch/scorecard.py and published as scorecard.json. Method on the methods page; every claim in the scorecard.