200-week MA heatmap

The grey line is bitcoin's price and the violet line its 200-week moving average, both on a logarithmic axis. The dots sit on the price once every 30 days of the average, and each is coloured by how much the average grew over the 30 days before it: purple for little or no growth, then blue, cyan and green, up to yellow, orange and red for 16% a month or more. The scale on the right reads the colour.

So the chart says two things at once. Where the price stands against the violet line says how far it is above or below its roughly four-year average. The colour of the dots says how fast that average is itself rising, and an average of four years rises fast only once the price has spent months far above it: the colours trail the price rather than run ahead of it.

The readout gives today's price and today's average. Dashed verticals mark the halvings, and each series can be switched off in the legend. There are no range chips on this chart; on a computer, drag across the plot to zoom and double-click to reset.

The 200-week average here is the mean of the last 1,400 daily closes, 200 weeks of seven days. The dots are read every 30 days along the average, and a dot's colour is the average's growth over those 30 days, in per cent. Perly computes both from its own daily record. The chart's idea — the average's monthly rate of increase, as colour — is PlanB's, from January 2019, and he is credited under the chart; LookIntoBitcoin draws a version of it too. The figures here are Perly's own, so they agree with other versions in shape rather than to the dollar.

Two hundred weeks is close to four years, the length of a halving cycle, so the average folds a whole cycle's boom and bust into one slow line. Across the record the average has kept rising: at each cycle low in the table it stands higher than at the one before. At the lows of 2015 and 2022 the price closed below it; at the 2018 low it held just above.

The hot colours come when the price has spent months far above the average and drags it up. Dots at the top of the scale, 16% a month or more, came either side of the December 2017 top — the two hottest in the weeks after it, with the price already falling; in 2021 the average's growth reached orange, not red.

An average is made of prices already paid; it cannot say where the next ones will be. That most of the record lies above the 200-week average is a fact about the record so far, not a floor anyone guarantees.