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In Bitcoin, I watch three core metrics:

While all three give us a health check on the network, price is the ultimate leading indicator. It’s the simplest metric to look at and immediately understand, at a glance, what’s happening in Bitcoin.

When price is booming, all else follows.

Price is Bitcoin’s built-in marketing engine. It forces attention from outsiders, traditional finance, legacy media, fence-sitters, and yes, even the critics.

When Number Goes Up, critics call it a speculative bubble.
When Number Goes Down, those same critics declare Bitcoin dead.

What the critics consistently miss is that price follows cycles. Just like traditional markets, debt structures, and legacy industries experience short- and long-term expansion and contraction, Bitcoin is no different.

In traditional manufacturing, seasonal trends and production realities filter down into spot prices and market behavior. Bitcoin operates on its own version of this reality: the four-year halving cycle.

The halving framework has historically provided a reliable roadmap for how and when Bitcoin behaves the way it does.

We are currently roughly a year and a half out from the April 2028 halving, putting us squarely in what has traditionally been the bear market/consolidation phase.

Price is sitting down roughly 50% off the peak of the last bull run. To seasoned Bitcoiners, a 50% drawdown is routine. In early market cycles, we watched Bitcoin draw down upwards of 80% to 90%.

That extreme volatility had two effects:

It spooked traditional investors, who saw the massive swings as a fundamental flaw.
It attracted risk-tolerant traders, who understood that volatility is a feature, not a bug.

Price movement proves that Bitcoin is a healthy, liquid, and robust market. It will experience booms and busts just like any other emerging monetary asset undergoing global price discovery.

Unlike price, which moves wildly in both directions, hashrate has traditionally only gone up. Barring temporary disruptions where miners turned off machines en masse to relocate (like the famous China mining ban), rising hashrate has been the ultimate signal of network security and operational conviction.

Lately, however, hashrate has experienced noticeable dips. This reflects the harsh economic realities miners face during a prolonged price slump. Like individual investors, mining companies manage short- and long-term capital commitments and have stakeholders to answer to.

In this current market, capital has been chasing “shiny objects”—capital flows have migrated toward AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and space tech.

To survive and maintain profitability after the last halving, many mining companies have actively pivot-hedged their business models, shifting infrastructure away from pure-play Bitcoin mining and into hosting AI data centers. Miners are economic actors: they go where the yield is highest.

This shift in capital flows highlights why I’ve kept a close eye on broader digital asset equities. Over two and a half years ago, I wrote about my favorite Bitcoin equity play: the Fidelity Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF (FDIG).

My position in FDIG is up roughly 50% since then, serving as a solid vehicle to dampen downward Bitcoin volatility while keeping broad exposure inside a traditional brokerage account.

Because an index like FDIG captures the full ecosystem, exchanges like Coinbase, payment processors, and miners like IREN that have expanded instead into AI and data centers, it tends to buffer portfolio drawdowns better than holding pure Bitcoin or pure-play miners during a crypto bear market.

Bitcoin price is cyclical. With strong support holding firm in the low-to-mid $60Ks, we are likely nearing the tail end of this bear phase.

My strategy during these range-bound and muted periods remains unchanged: I maintain or dial up my long-term Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) strategy.

When the bull market inevitably resumes and “Number Go Up” drives us back into price discovery, I dial the DCA back and let the marketing engine do its work.

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