Why the Floor Never Reaches Zero

The Power Law floor is a formula of time: a fixed positive factor times the number of days since the genesis block, to the power of 5.688. The number of days grows every day, so the line rises every day and can never fall to zero. That holds for the line, not for the price. Bitcoin has closed below the floor, so far at most about half of it, and bitcoin itself could in principle fail.

A line that can only go up

The floor is not a measured price. It is a calculation: take the days since 3 January 2009, raise them to the power of 5.688, multiply by a very small but positive number, and take 42 % of that. Nothing else goes in. No price, no volume, no news.

Everything else follows from this. A positive number raised to a positive power stays positive. And because the number of days grows by one every day, the result grows too. So the floor can neither fall nor become zero, whatever happens in the market. How the floor is derived and where it stands today is explained in The Power Law floor: how low can bitcoin fall?. This article is about what that property means.

How fast the floor rises

The floor always rises, but not always at the same speed. In dollars each step gets bigger, in percent it gets smaller. That is typical of a power law: early on, one year is a large share of all the time so far; later it is a small one.

Calculated with the site's formula. The values from 2027 on are not a forecast; they only show where the line lies if the pattern continues.

The growth falls, but it never reaches zero. Even in 100 years the floor would still rise, only very slowly. A floor that stands still or falls does not exist in this model.

What this means and what it does not

"Always rises, never zero" sounds reassuring. But it is a property of the formula, not of the bitcoin price. Three misunderstandings are easy to make.

Misunderstanding 1: "The price cannot fall below the floor"

It can, and it has. The floor is the line where the big crashes since 2011 have ended so far. It is not a wall. From July 2010 to November 2026 bitcoin closed below it on 218 of 5’957 days, most of them in 2010, 2012 and 2015.

Misunderstanding 2: "Because the floor rises, my bitcoin rises"

No. The floor also rises when the price falls or stands still. That is exactly how the price gets below the floor without anything dramatic happening: it only has to tread water long enough. Bitcoin closed at 75’868 US dollars on 7 November 2026, 14 % above the floor. If the price stays there, the formula's floor overtakes it at the beginning of April 2027.

Misunderstanding 3: "A model that never becomes zero proves that bitcoin survives"

The model assumes that bitcoin continues to exist and to be used. It describes how the price has grown with time so far. Whether that continues it cannot prove, because a formula from the past knows no future events. The model's other weaknesses are covered in Criticism of the Bitcoin Power Law.

On a logarithmic chart, the kind the Power Law uses, zero does not even exist. Every halving is a step of the same size down, and reaching zero would take infinitely many. A price of zero would therefore not be "very far below the floor" but the end of the model: it would have nothing left to describe.

How far below the floor the price went

How far has the price strayed from the rising line so far? The table shows, for each cycle from one all-time high to the next, the lowest daily close measured against that day's floor.

Daily closes: Coin Metrics up to 10 Jan 2018, OKX after that, data as of 7 Nov 2026. The cycles are bounded by the all-time highs of 8 Jun 2011, 4 Dec 2013, 16 Dec 2017, 8 Nov 2021 and 6 Oct 2025.

Three things stand out:

• The distance is shrinking. In its first year with prices bitcoin fell to half the floor. In 2015 it was 12 % below, since then at most 1.5 %. Keep 2010 in perspective: there was barely a market, few traders, prices under 10 cents.
• The lowest point against the floor is not always the lowest price. In 2012 and 2015 the price low came earlier. The distance to the floor was largest later, when the price moved sideways and the floor caught up with it.
• One cycle stayed above it entirely. Even the Covid crash on 12 March 2020, with a daily close of 4’797 US dollars, ended 2 % above the floor.

Five cycles are not many. The figures describe what happened, not what has to come. How each bear market unfolded is shown in All bitcoin bear markets compared.

With your own purchase price and holdings, check here where the floor stands today and in the coming years:

What would have to happen for bitcoin to go to zero

A bitcoin is worth what other people give for it. It only goes to zero when nobody wants a bitcoin any more, and for good. A deep bear market is not enough, because there many people just don't want bitcoin at that price right now. Soberly, there are three ways it could happen.

1. The network fails

Bitcoin is software. A serious bug that destroys trust in the fixed supply of 21 million or in ownership, and is not repaired, would be the end.

There have been such bugs. On 15 August 2010 an overflow bug in one transaction created about 184 billion bitcoin. The developers released a corrected version within a few hours, and the chain with the faulty transaction was abandoned. In September 2018 a bug was found in Bitcoin Core (CVE-2018-17144) that could have been used to create extra bitcoin. It was fixed before anyone exploited it.

Both cases show both things: bugs happen, and so far the network has repaired them. The larger and older the network, the more people review the code. A residual risk remains.

2. Bitcoin is banned

A state can ban trading, exchanges, banks or mining within its borders. That lowers demand there and can push the price down. But a single state cannot switch off the network as long as nodes run and miners find blocks somewhere in the world. When China banned mining in 2021, the network's computing power dropped sharply and recovered within months, because the miners moved to other countries.

It would only become dangerous if the large economies acted together and permanently. The legal situation in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and worldwide is explained in Can bitcoin be banned?.

3. An attack breaks its security

Two attacks are often named:

• A 51 % attack. Whoever controls more than half of the computing power can reverse their own payments and block transactions. They cannot spend other people's bitcoin without their keys. The attack costs hardware and electricity on an enormous scale, and it would damage the value of what the attacker wants to gain.
• A quantum computer. A large enough quantum computer could break today's signatures and compute private keys from public keys. As of November 2026 no such machine exists, and bitcoin can switch to other signature schemes. How big the danger is, is described in Quantum computers and bitcoin.

There is also a quiet way without a bang: people lose interest because something else does bitcoin's job better. That too would be a way to zero, only slower.

What follows for you

None of these paths is likely, none is impossible. The floor cannot capture them, because it knows only time. That is why two rules belong together: use the floor to put normal bear markets into perspective. And hold only as much bitcoin as you could lose entirely without being ruined, however unlikely that is.

The floor and a total loss in one table

If you keep the two apart, you read the floor correctly: as a yardstick for history, not as insurance for the future. How the floor fits into the whole model together with the trend and the top band is explained in The Bitcoin Power Law explained.