Daily closes since 2011, with the moving averages most often used to judge trend and cycle position. Log scale by default — tap the ℹ to see why that matters.
On a linear scale every equal vertical distance is an equal number of dollars: the gap from $10k to $20k looks the same as $70k to $80k. On a logarithmic scale every equal vertical distance is an equal percentage move, so a doubling looks the same whether it happens at $100 or $100,000.
That distinction matters more for Bitcoin than for almost any other asset, because the price has moved across five orders of magnitude. On a linear chart of the full history, everything before 2017 is a flat line pressed against the bottom — the entire 2013 cycle, a move of more than 100×, becomes invisible. Log scale makes cycles comparable to each other, which is the whole point of looking at fifteen years at once.
Use linear when you care about absolute dollars — sizing a position, reading a drawdown in money rather than percent, or zooming into a few weeks where the percentage range is small anyway. Switch with the Scale control above.
A moving average is the mean of the last N daily closes, recalculated each day. It strips out
daily noise so the underlying trend is visible. All three here are simple averages
(SMA), equally weighting every day in the window.
When the 50-day crosses above the 200-day it is called a golden cross, and below it a death cross. Both are widely watched and both are lagging by construction — they confirm a move that has already happened rather than predicting one.
The honest caveat: moving averages describe the past. They are smoothing, not forecasting. They are most useful for answering "what regime are we in?" and least useful for "what happens next week?"
Market cap divided by realized cap. Shaded zones mark historically meaningful extremes.