The Bitcoin Power Law in Hindsight: Forecasts vs. Reality

How good were the Power Law forecasts of the past twelve years? Good on ranges, poor on dates. In 2019 Harold Burger wrote that Bitcoin would reach $100’000 no earlier than 2021 and no later than 2028; it got there in December 2024. Those who named an exact top down to the month missed: $210’000 was announced for January 2026, and the real top came in October 2025 at $124’673. As of November 2026 the boldest claims, such as "never below $100’000 after 2028", are still open.

Why looking back is worth it

The Bitcoin Power Law is usually discussed looking forward: where will Bitcoin be in 2030, when does the million come? Yet there are now enough old forecasts to measure the model against what actually happened next. That is the most honest test there is: whoever wrote back then did not know the future and could not refit the curve afterwards.

We collected the Power Law forecasts that can be read with a date and a number in the original source or in a named, quoted report. They are compared with the site's daily closing prices up to 7 November 2026 (CSV file). Forecasts whose wording we could not check are left out, even when they are often quoted.

What is weak about the model itself is covered in Criticism of the Bitcoin Power Law. Here there is only one question: what was said when, and what happened?

The Power Law forecasts at a glance

Closing prices in US dollars, UTC day. "Hit" means the event happened within the stated period, not that the path there was predicted.

2014: Trolololo's curve and its four dates

The oldest curve of this kind came not from a physicist but from an anonymous forum user. On 22 October 2014 "Trolololo" posted a "logarithmic regression" of the Bitcoin price on Bitcointalk. Bitcoin cost about $380 at the time and had fallen by more than half since the 2013 high. Trolololo added right away that this was a model, not a crystal ball.

His curve flattens over time, just like the Power Law. Mathematically it even is one: a price that grows with the logarithm of the days is a power of the days (see the math card below). From it he read four dates on which the curve reaches a new power of ten:

• $1’000 on 24 April 2015. Bitcoin cost $231 that day. The curve was a midline, and the price sat far below it in the bear market.
• $10’000 on 22 November 2017. Bitcoin first closed above it on 1 December 2017, nine days later. Three years ahead, that is a remarkable hit.
• $100’000 on 16 July 2021. Bitcoin stood at $31’385 that day and needed another 1’241 days to reach the mark.
• $1’000’000 on 6 September 2026. That day it was $80’341, 8 % of the curve.

The curve was too steep. This is no accident but the most important lesson of all the old forecasts: whoever calculates early only has the steepest years in the data. How the 2014 curve later became the Rainbow Chart with coloured bands, and why it had to be redrawn several times, is in Bitcoin Rainbow Chart explained.

2018: Santostasi and the straight line on the log-log chart

The name "Power Law" goes back to the physicist Giovanni Santostasi. In 2018 he presented a chart on the r/Bitcoin forum with both axes logarithmic: time since the genesis block and price. On it the prices lie along a straight line. We could not check a concrete price forecast from that first post in the original source, so it is not in the table.

A later call can be checked. In March 2024, with Bitcoin at about $68’000 and the model becoming known through videos and TV appearances, Santostasi told Cointelegraph that his model expected a top around $210’000 in January 2026 followed by a low around $60’000.

What happened:

• The top came three months early and much lower: $124’673 on 6 October 2025, 59 % of the announced value. In January 2026 Bitcoin closed no higher than $96’946.
• The low was almost exact: $58’628 on 30 June 2026, 2 % below the call.

The pattern is typical. The low of a Power Law forecast hangs on the floor, the model's most stable line. The top hangs on the assumption that the next boom overshoots the trend about as far as earlier ones did. That very assumption broke: each cycle rose less far above the line than the one before. Why the tops shrink and how the site built its top band because of it is explained in our research paper on the Power Law.

2019: Burger's corridor and the $100’000 question

On 3 September 2019 the engineer Harold Christopher Burger published the article "Bitcoin's natural long-term power-law corridor of growth". Bitcoin cost about $10’600. Burger drew not a single line but a corridor: a support line at the bottom with the slope of his regression, and a line through the 2011, 2013 and 2017 tops at the top.

From it he derived ranges instead of dates, which made his forecasts sturdier:

• $100’000 no earlier than 2021, no later than 2028. Bitcoin first closed above it on 8 December 2024. His own regression line reached the mark on 30 December 2024, three weeks later.
• The 2017 top only secured for good by the end of 2023. Whoever bought at $19’641 in December 2017 last saw a close below that on 12 January 2023. That was almost a year before Burger's date, so roughly right in the sense of his claim.
• A possible path with $150’000 at the start of 2022. Burger explicitly called this a scenario the model allows, not a forecast. On 1 January 2022 Bitcoin stood at $47’731. The scenario did not happen, but it did not break any of his bounds either.

His two hardest statements are still open: after 2028 the price will never drop below $100’000, and $1 million will be reached no earlier than 2028 and no later than 2037. On 7 November 2026 Bitcoin stood at $75’868. For the first claim to hold, it has to rise by almost a third by early 2029 and stay there.

2024 and 2025: cycle targets from Power Law variants

With the ETF boom of 2024 came many variants of the model that named not only a midline but a concrete cycle top. Two of them are documented with number and date in a Cointelegraph report of 27 April 2025. Bitcoin cost just under $94’000 at the time.

• Sina, co-founder of 21st Capital, works with a quantile model: he draws bands below which a given share of all past prices lay. From it he named $130’000 and $163’000 before the end of 2025.
• The anonymous analyst apsk32 draws contour lines into the Power Law curve and wrote: "Expecting $200,000+ Bitcoin in Q4."

The top came on 6 October 2025 at $124’673, in the fourth quarter, but below both targets. Bitcoin then fell by more than half in 2026. Both calls therefore hit the time window and missed the height, just like Santostasi's.

The reason is the same: all three assumed the boom would again reach about as far above the trend as in 2017 or 2021. At the top, Bitcoin closed at 10.9 times this site's Power Law line in 2013, 6.3 times in 2017, 2.8 times in 2021 and 1.1 times in 2025. How things went after the 2024 halving in detail is described in The Power Law after the last halving.

The pattern: ranges hit, dates didn't

Put all the forecasts side by side and three rules emerge.

Windows beat dates. Burger's "no earlier than 2021, no later than 2028" hit, Trolololo's "16 July 2021" did not. A seven-year window sounds vague but is honest: the Power Law describes a corridor in which the price sits high for years and low for years.

Lows are more predictable than tops. The floor has proven the most stable line across all cycles; bear markets ended between 0.41 and 0.56 times the line. The tops, by contrast, shrank from cycle to cycle. Those who predicted a low were often close; those who predicted a top were almost always too high.

Every curve got flatter. Trolololo's 2014 curve had an exponent of 6.7, Burger's of 2019 5.85, today's common formula 5.69, and a regression with all data up to November 2026 comes to 5.64. Each time, the next generation saw that growth slowed faster than the previous one had assumed. How sensitive the forecast is to such changes is shown in How stable are the Power Law parameters?.

For comparison: Stock-to-Flow was further off

The other well-known model, PlanB's Stock-to-Flow, was even more optimistic over the same period because it expected price jumps after every halving. The Power Law forecasts were mostly too high; Stock-to-Flow was far higher still. The direct comparison with all the numbers is in Power Law vs. Stock-to-Flow.

Still open: the claims for 2028 to 2045

The next hard test concerns all Power Law forecasts at once. This site's floor rises every day and in Dec 2028 reaches the October 2025 high. If Bitcoin has not closed above it by then, it is below the floor, and the model in this form is refuted. Burger's $100’000 bound from 2028 and this test almost coincide. What the model expects today for 2030 to 2040, with floor, trend and top band, is in the Bitcoin price prediction by the Power Law.

How to read a Power Law forecast

From the look back come four questions you can ask any new forecast:

1. Does it give a range or a day? An exact date for a top is more than the model can deliver.
2. Does it rest on the floor or on a top? Statements about the lower bound have held up better so far.
3. What data was it fitted on? A curve that only knows the steep early years overestimates the future. Check how far the data goes and which exponent came out.
4. Can it be refuted? Good forecasts name a date from which they would be wrong. Burger's "never below $100’000 after 2028" is such a statement.

If you want to check yourself whether a curve fits the data, you can rebuild the regression in a spreadsheet, step by step in How to recalculate the Power Law yourself. The site's formulas are in the Methodology, today's lines on the Power Law page.