On Tuesday, November 5, the price of bitcoin hit just shy of $70,000. On Monday, November 11, mere days later, that price now sat under $90,000, the highest figure bitcoin has ever been at. Though you may attribute this to Donald Trump winning the 2024 United States election, and it certainly helps, there’s seemingly a much bigger picture.

First, it’s worth noting that Donald Trump is seemingly responsible for an initial surge, and surrounding factors made that surge much higher. Donald Trump said in October that he wants to make America the “crypto capital of the planet“, even taking crypto donations for his campaign trail.

He spoke positively at a bitcoin conference in June this year, which is in stark contrast to when he told Newsmax cryptocurrencies’ value was “highly volatile and based on thin air” just before urging that the United States should highly regulate it back in 2021. His newfound support for cryptocurrency, when paired with the very vocal backing of Elon Musk, who is himself a backer of cryptocurrency, choreographs that his cabinet will be favourable to it.

However, Jesse Myers, the founder of OnrampBitcoin, which offers bitcoin financial services, suggests that this recent growth is related to post-halving, the act of halving the amount of bitcoin generated daily. As this figure goes down, the incentive to mine goes down with it, effectively enforcing a level of scarcity for the coin.

This is intended to be a countermeasure to broader inflation trends and is part of the coin’s purpose to be used as an actual currency. There are only 21 million total bitcoins that can be mined, with just shy of 20 million of them already being found, so post-halving stops the world from getting to the collective number quicker.

Speculative trading on this coin specifically is partially responsible for the astronomical figures we tend to see the coin go for, as those who hoard the coin see its value go up and potential entrants to the market are put off doing so.

Importantly, this post-halving happens every four years, and bitcoin has seen a sudden spike a few months after post-halving every single time. Trump’s win seems to have led to a surge but that surge has only spiked as high as it has thanks to the ongoing scarcity of the coin.

Post-halving also happened in April 2020, when we saw the sharpest percentage spike in price since the start of the coin. So, regardless of who wins the presidential race in 2028, it is likely to do the same.