The Power Law is usually drawn in dollars. Measure bitcoin in ounces of gold instead and the same kind of trend appears, a little looser. This page shows where bitcoin sits against it today, and why that differs from the dollar picture.
Pricing bitcoin’s power law in gold is not new. Matthew Mezinskis (Porkopolis Economics) has charted bitcoin against gold alongside his dollar work, Stephen Perrenod published a fit in ounces in 2024 (exponent 5.47 on quarterly prices), and b1m.io tracks one live. The fit, the range and the comparisons below are this site’s own, computed from the World Bank’s monthly gold series and the site’s bitcoin price record.
The start year changes the trend, the usual range and every reading on the page. 2011 is the longest record; later starts give the recent years more weight, and the gold trend moves with the choice more than the dollar trend does. (Whether an early fit would have predicted today is a separate test: Did an early fit predict today?)
Bitcoin —, gold — an ounce.
The implied gold trend is a by-product of the two fits (the dollar trend divided by the ounce trend), not a model of gold’s own price.
This page describes where bitcoin sits against a fitted line; it does not say where it goes next. A trend fitted to sixteen years of prices is a description of the past, and the reading below is a location, not a forecast.
Each line below measures bitcoin against its own trend: once in dollars, once in gold, both fitted the same way to the same months. For most of the record they move together, because gold’s price changes slowly next to bitcoin’s. Since 2024 they have come apart.
The deepest point of each bear market since 2015, against each trend.
| Bear market | Low in gold | Low in dollars |
|---|
Mostly, gold moved. Its monthly average went from — an ounce in January 2024 to — in —, — in a little over two years, and stood at — in —. Over the same stretch bitcoin made a new high in October 2025, when it bought about — ounces, and then fell. Today it buys about —, — fewer ounces than at that high, against a — fall in dollars.
A trend is only as good as its stability. Fit it from a later start and see whether it holds. Here are the four starting years, in both units, with today’s reading against each; the highlighted row is the one the page is using.
| Fit | In gold | In dollars | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exponent | R² | Today | Exponent | R² | Today | |
Two readings fit the chart, and the page does not choose between them. One is that bitcoin, measured in gold, has fallen unusually far below a trend it has always returned to. The other is that gold’s run reflects something new, such as the heavy buying by central banks since 2022 (more than 1,000 tonnes a year in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, by the World Gold Council’s count), and the fitted gold trend understates where gold now sits. A trend that has been tested over sixteen years of bitcoin’s record has not yet been tested against a gold market like this one.
The buttons at the top of the page move where the fit starts. This section asks a different question, the one The Power Law page uses to test the dollar trend: if the line had been fitted only to the data up to a cutoff, would it have pointed to where today’s trend is? Here every fit starts at the first sample (—), as on The Power Law, ends at the cutoff you choose, and is carried forward to today. Everything after the cutoff is a test the line never saw.
Why the two units part: a dollar is the unit bitcoin’s price is quoted in, while an ounce of gold is itself a price that moves. For the cutoff you chose, gold went from — an ounce at the end of — to — today, and a line fitted to ounces up to the cutoff could not know that. The dollar trend is the one that has held out of sample; the gold trend is, in effect, that trend divided by whatever gold does next. The “Bitcoin cheap, or gold expensive?” card above is the same fact, read today.
This page measures one against the other. Why they are compared at all, and how they differ as money, is the subject of The Bitcoin Migration’s section on gold: why gold’s scarcity carried it for thousands of years, and why its need for custodians became its undoing. The Half-Life compares their supply: gold’s grows about 1.7% a year; bitcoin’s is fixed at 21 million.
Gold: the World Bank’s monthly gold price (Commodity Price Data, the “Pink Sheet”), the average of daily rates in each month, July 2010 to —. A monthly average smooths gold’s moves within the month, so a single month’s reading can differ from one taken on a given day.
Bitcoin: the site’s price record (the same samples behind The Power Law), each divided by gold’s average for its month. Today: the live bitcoin price over the live gold price (Coinbase’s gold spot quote, else PAX Gold, a token redeemable for one ounce); if either is unavailable, its latest monthly figure, and the line under the readout says which.
The trend: a least-squares fit of the logarithm of ounces on the logarithm of days since the genesis block (3 January 2009), from January of the start year you choose (2011 by default; 2013, 2016 or 2020), refitted from the data each time the page loads. It is this page’s fit, not the site’s dollar reference model, so the dollar multiple here (fitted the same way, for a like-for-like comparison) differs a little from the one on The Power Law. The usual range is the 5th to 95th percentile of the monthly multiples.
Sources: World Bank Commodity Markets; Porkopolis Economics; Stephen Perrenod, “Bitcoin power law vs. gold” (2024); b1m.io, Bitcoin vs Gold.
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