Plain explanations of the cycle metrics behind the Hodlometer Index — written for people who plan to hold through the next one.
I have used Bybit for over five years — spot buying, the card I pay with day to day, a grid bot and a DCA bot, and the week in February 2025 when the exchange lost $1.46 billion and kept paying withdrawals. This is what it actually costs, where the caps and tiers bite, and the eight things about it I do not like.
I have used Wise for a bit over three years — the card abroad, currency conversion inside the app, SWIFT and SEPA transfers, and a Georgian sole proprietorship on Wise Business. This is what it actually costs, what it does well, and the seven things about it I do not like.
Buying bitcoin all at once beat spreading the purchases on most start dates since 2011 — the DCA calculator has said so for a while. This article measures the other side of that trade: how deep the committed money fell in its first twelve months under each approach, for bitcoin and for ether.
Eleven years of daily Wikipedia readership tested against bitcoin's price at every lag from −60 to +60 days. Attention peaks one day after the move, not before — and today's reading is the lowest of the whole record, inside a quiet spell that has run 452 days and has not ended.
Our own statistical model was replayed over thirteen months and marked against what bitcoin actually did — 766 forecasts, one by one. It lost to the laziest benchmark there is: assuming next month's price is today's.
Uptober, the September effect and sell in May, checked against our own 178 monthly bitcoin returns. The pattern is in the data — and 15 observations a month cannot tell it apart from luck.
A dollar in bitcoin became $5,864 since August 2011, against $8.43 in the S&P 500 and $2.19 in gold. We check the three claims that usually follow — digital gold, inflation hedge, uncorrelated asset — against the returns, the risk and the days it mattered most.
A 70/30 bitcoin-and-ether portfolio reset once a year finished ×361.9 against ×159.5 left alone — but split the decade into three non-overlapping stretches and the whole advantage sits in one of them. What rebalancing did to returns, to drawdowns and to the size of the trades, measured on every window our data allows.
Bitcoin’s 90-day realized volatility reads 34.6% a year against a 62.1% median since 2011. Fifteen years of the trend: where the fall stalled, why dropping the first three years halves it, and why a calmer average is not a safer asset.
Ten years of rolling correlation between bitcoin and ether: today’s 0.876 against a 0.831 median, five decoupling episodes that were really the ETH/BTC ratio moving fast, and why a 70/30 mix ran more volatile than bitcoin alone over the last year.
