Bitcoin Runs on a Clock: Why Every Price Indicator Dies and the Halving Clock Doesn't

Battle Count: 65

Directly relevant to crypto trading strategy design. Demonstrates that all major price-anchored technical indicators (Pi Cycle Top, MVRV, Mayer Multiple, Puell Multiple, 200-week MA) have structurally failed due to amplitude compression, while a pure time-anchored signal (halving phase) remains stable. Provides a causal power-law timing rule with monotonically improving Sharpe edge over buy-and-hold across four cycles, crossing positive in the current cycle. The halving-anchored cash rule compounded ~50x vs buy-and-hold over full history. Pre-registered falsifiable windows enable forward validation. The paper also disqualifies the entire genre of per-epoch indicator significance testing for persistent crypto signals, which has broad implications for strategy research methodology.

Core methodology (causal expanding-window OLS, IC computation, block bootstrap nulls, permutation tests) is implementable with standard Python scientific libraries (numpy, scipy, statsmodels). The full pipeline involves 15+ scripts covering data pulling, signal construction, inference, economic evaluation, replication, and null testing. The mechanical turn-dating rule is simple. The rotation null and block-bootstrap constructions require careful implementation to preserve autocorrelation structure. The block-height coordinate analysis adds a date-to-height mapping step. No ML model training required; primarily statistical and econometric computation.

All data sourced from public APIs (Bitstamp, Coin Metrics, FRED). Full analysis pipeline provided as documented Python scripts (15+ scripts). RESULTS_LOCK.md indexes each numerical claim to its script and output file. An end-to-end re-run audit directory is included. A public repository link will accompany submission. Block height series validated against four protocol halving heights and eleven mempool.space point-lookups.