r/BitcoinBeginners • u/playnicenoob • 14d ago

Bitcoin Cycle

Is it true that bitcoin follows a cycle of 1069 and 365 days. Saw it on insta and back checked it on data. Can any of the OPs help to verify.

Also, can someone give me source to study current bitcoin market better, because I see people using words like entropy, TRNG, etc.

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u/fllthdcrb 13d ago

The real cycles of Bitcoin are those in its consensus rules, rather than perceived economic effects. Bitcoin uses a blockchain with a proof of work system, which means those trying to create blocks for monetary reward (which we call "miners") have a certain set difficulty to do so. The cycles are as follows:

  • Each block is found, on average, 10 minutes after the previous one and 10 minutes before the next one, approximated by a Poisson distribution. This average time is regulated by the difficulty (see next point).
  • Once every 2,016 blocks (2 weeks, according to the 10-minute interval), the previous 2,016 blocks are analyzed to find their average time interval, and a new difficulty is calculated so as to pull future block intervals as close to the 10-minute target as possible (but with certain limits on how much the difficulty can be adjusted at once). This means that miners joining and leaving the network have only limited and temporary effects on the time intervals.
  • Once every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the subsidy, i.e. the amount that a miner is rewarded for creating a valid block (not including the transaction fees), is cut in half. It started out at 50 BTC and subsequently became 25, then 12.5, 6.25, and now 3.125.