People always say the last two halvings caused rallies, but if you look at the timing, it's not true at all. In markets, we don't talk about "catalysts" triggering moves a year later.
In fact, shortly after the 2016 halving, price dropped by 32% over the course of a few weeks!
It would be more accurate to say Bitcoin is simply in a long term uptrend. In fact, since everyone expects upside when the halving occurs, I would expect either downside or sideways. If the crowd is heavily long, price will usually drop. Any successful trader knows the crowd is usually wrong.
Bitcoin mining is one thing but another is we need to take a look at what happened with the gpu miners. Look at all those graphic cards that were out of stock just couple months ago, now they are cheaper than the market price on places like ebay which means miners are selling their machines because they are not making as much money. In fact, shortly after the 2016 halving, price dropped by 32% over the course of a few weeks!
It would be more accurate to say Bitcoin is simply in a long term uptrend. In fact, since everyone expects upside when the halving occurs, I would expect either downside or sideways. If the crowd is heavily long, price will usually drop. Any successful trader knows the crowd is usually wrong.
Same could happen to bitcoin, miners of ethereum couldn't stop ethereum dropping under the price that miners would make profit, why do you believe people who mine bitcoin could stop the price from going below the cost of mining? I think it could happen because bitcoin miners are bigger corporations whereas gpu miners are individuals but its still a risk.