Bitcoin’s all-time high, and the time spent below it

Distance from the record, from formula to reading

One division, and one rule

The distance from the record divides today’s price by the highest bitcoin ever reached before it, then subtracts one. The result is written as a percentage and can never be positive: on the day the price clears the old record, it is the record that rises, and the distance returns to zero.

The figure reads without conversion. At 0 %, bitcoin is setting a record. At −20 %, it has given up a fifth of its high. At −50 %, it is worth half of it. In markets this measure is called drawdown; this site names it for what it describes, the distance from the record.

The record is measured over the whole history, never over the period on screen

This is the rule that decides everything else. The record used for a given day is the highest reached since the first close in the series, not the highest within the window being viewed. Changing the period changes what you are shown, never what is measured: over thirty days as over sixteen years, today’s distance is still measured against the record of 7 October 2025.

The other choice exists, and it produces a different indicator: a distance measured from the start of the window would be zero on the first day displayed, and would no longer have anything to do with bitcoin’s record. The module on this page follows the first rule, as the 200-day average of the Mayer Multiple does, computing over the entire history and displaying over the period requested.

Three conventions, stated rather than assumed

The calculation is a single division, but it rests on three conventions, which explain why one day sometimes yields slightly different values from one site to another:

• daily closes, never an intraday price: a low touched during the day and recovered before midnight does not appear
• days counted in universal time, from one midnight to the next
• the record in force on that day, the one known at the date being read, not today’s record applied to the past

The third is the least obvious and the most important, because it lets the history be read as it was lived. On 15 January 2015, the distance was −84.9 %; the record it measured was $1,137, not $124,777.

An example, 1 July 2026

On 7 October 2025, bitcoin set its record at $124,777. On 1 July 2026, it traded at $58,534. The division gives 0.469, a distance of −53.1 %, the lowest point of the crossing under way as of this page. Between the two dates the record did not move by a dollar: it is the price that moved away from it.

Bitcoin’s deep troughs, one per cycle

Since 18 August 2010, bitcoin has set a record on 263 closes, and has returned to its high 87 times after leaving it. Most of those crossings are trivial: 69 out of 87 never went below −20 %, and half of them lasted less than five days. It is the others that make up bitcoin’s history.

Eight completed crossings below half the record

The four deepest each close a cycle, and all of them follow the same shape: a record, a fall lasting months, a low, then a climb back that takes longer than the fall.

The crossing that opened on 7 October 2025 is not in this table: it is not over, and a crossing under way has no duration, only an age. As of 10 September 2026 it had run 339 days and its low was −53.1 %, reached on 1 July 2026. Eight crossings have been deeper, four have been longer.

What the key dates say about these troughs

The events this site dates on the key dates of Bitcoin page fall inside these crossings, and rarely where you would expect them.

The MtGox bankruptcy, on 28 February 2014, lands in the middle of the longest one: the distance was already −48.7 % that day, and the low came only three hundred and twenty-one days later. The Covid crash, by contrast, fits in a single close: between 12 and 13 March 2020, the distance went from −58.8 % to −74.9 %.

The FTX bankruptcy, on 11 November 2022, did not open its cycle’s trough, it closed it: the distance was −74.0 % on the day it was announced, and the low came eleven days later, at −76.7 %. Fourteen months on, on 10 January 2024, the first American spot exchange-traded funds were approved while the distance still stood at −31.7 %; the record fell fifty-five days later.

Four bands, and the time spent in each

Distance markers, not market thresholds

The module splits the distance into four bands, and the bar under the chart gives the share of history spent in each. The boundaries read without arithmetic, at a tenth, a fifth and half of the record.

The darkest band is the most common

This is the counter-intuitive result of the page, and it is worth stating plainly: bitcoin has spent 46.9 % of its history more than 50 % below its record. Close to one day in two.

The corollary is harsher still. Out of 5,869 closes, only 263 are records, that is 4.5 % of the time, and nine calendar years out of seventeen contain none at all: 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2026 so far.

That is why the colour of the bands says depth and not rarity. Giving the shade of the exception to the band where bitcoin lives the most would make the picture say the opposite of what the data measures.

Time spent below a threshold

Read it from top to bottom. Bitcoin has spent more than eight days in ten at least 10 % below its record, and only fifty-eight days, one per cent of its history, more than 90 % below. All fifty-eight fell between 19 October and 19 December 2011.

How long a crossing lasts

The fall is shorter than the climb back

The four great crossings share one shape, and it is the only thing about which they truly resemble each other. The fall to the low took between five and a half and thirteen and a half months; the climb back to the record took longer, from fifteen months to more than twenty-five.

In 2013-2017, four hundred and six days down and seven hundred and seventy-one back up. In 2017-2020, three hundred and sixty-four then seven hundred and sixteen. In 2021-2024, three hundred and seventy-eight then four hundred and sixty-nine. And in 2011-2013, one hundred and sixty-four days to fall 93 %, four hundred and sixty-six to come back.

One thousand one hundred and seventy-seven days, the record for length

The longest completed crossing runs from 5 December 2013 to 24 February 2017: one thousand one hundred and seventy-seven days, three years and almost three months without a single record. It contains the MtGox bankruptcy, a low of −84.9 %, and three entire calendar years — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — in which bitcoin never once came near its high.

Short crossings are far more numerous. Of the 87 completed, half lasted less than five days: these are the breathing of a rising market, a record followed by a pullback of a few per cent and then another record. Among the eighteen that went below −20 %, the median rises to eighty-four days.

What duration does not promise

These durations are readings, not deadlines. Four deep troughs do not make a law, and nothing obliges the fifth to resemble the ones before it. The only thing the past establishes is that bitcoin has returned to its record every time so far; the sample of great crossings can be counted on one hand.

Troughs that grow shallower

Placed side by side, the four great lows trace a slope: −93.2 %, then −84.9 %, then −83.2 %, then −76.7 %. Each cycle has bottomed higher than the one before.

The same shape appears at the top of the cycle, on the Mayer Multiple, whose peaks fall from one cycle to the next. The two indicators tell the same story from their two ends: the amplitude narrows on the way up as on the way down.

A slope, not a law

Four points and three intervals is far too little for a trend, and the caution here is not a figure of speech. Between the first trough and the last, bitcoin went from a niche asset to one quoted on futures markets and held by index funds. What changed is not only the amplitude, it is the nature of what is being measured.

The explanation most often given, a market whose depth keeps increasing, is plausible and unverifiable on four observations. It is not read in this page: it is added to it.

The 2011 trough formed on a market where a single exchange handled most of the trading. Comparing its amplitude to that of 2022 means comparing two markets, not two moments of the same market.

What the indicator does not say

It predicts nothing

A deep distance has already been followed by a deeper one. On 10 September 2011, bitcoin fell below −80 %; it lost thirteen more points before reaching its low, two and a half months later. The indicator says where you stand relative to the past, never where you are going.

It depends on the currency

In euros the same closes give different figures, because the exchange rate moves between the day of the record and the day being read. The 2011 trough is −92.7 % there instead of −93.2 %. More to the point, the ranking changes: in euros the 2017 trough is a tenth of a point deeper than the one in 2013, while in dollars two points separate them the other way. The module recomputes everything in the currency selected.

It looks backwards by construction

The record can only rise. An indicator bounded by a past high is therefore, by construction, a measure of what has already happened, and it only updates on the day of the next record.

The past being read is a survivor’s

Bitcoin has returned to its record every time. Thousands of digital assets born in the same period never returned to theirs, and they appear in none of these series. Reading “it always comes back” into this table means reading a property of bitcoin out of a sample that contains only bitcoin.

What distance from the record is not

The Mayer Multiple compares to a moving reference

The Mayer Multiple divides the price by its average over the last two hundred days. Its reference moves up with the price; the reference of the distance from the record never comes back down. The two can therefore say opposite things on the same day: on 7 October 2025, the distance from the record was 0 %, a record by definition, while the multiple stood at 1.18, that is, a price exceeding its own average by only eighteen per cent.

The drawdown of markets, under another name

The measure is what finance calls drawdown, and more precisely current drawdown: the distance from the highest point reached so far. Its neighbour, maximum drawdown, keeps only the worst of the period and reduces to a single number; this one reads day by day, which is the whole point of a series.

Neither a signal nor a valuation

The distance from the record says nothing about bitcoin’s value. It knows neither supply, nor the network, nor demand: it knows two prices, today’s and the highest before it. That is what makes it readable at a glance, and what makes it insufficient on its own. The bitcoin price dashboard carries the others.

Frequently asked questions