Set the plan
The three variables below define how confidently you can retire — maintaining your lifestyle while minimising the risk of running out. The question isn’t only whether your scenario reaches escape velocity: play with the variables. What happens if you retire a year later — or earlier? Can you afford a higher income than you planned?
Your bitcoin stack will decrease over time as you draw on it; the open question is what its purchasing power does. Depending on your three variables, it may rise — and may reach escape velocity. Nothing here is a recommendation; the defaults are a starting position, not a target.
Click a number to type it directly. Hold an arrow to repeat. Arrow keys work once a stepper has focus. Reset to defaults
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Nominal figures include inflation — part of any nominal “escape” is the dollar shrinking, not the stack growing. The real-dollar view is the harder, more honest test.
Under: reverts to trend.
In today’s dollars.
Retiring later means starting with a larger stack, but bitcoin’s implied CAGR under the Power Law decays with time — a later window runs at a lower growth rate. This marker measures pace (how fast the stack outruns spending), not size, so it can sit closer to the threshold even as your projected dollars rise.
Trend growth is a multi-year average, not an annual delivery schedule. The Power Law says nothing about the order in which returns arrive, and the order is what breaks retirement plans — see the Retirement Stress Test.
The Threshold
The intent here is to find where the threshold sits between depletion and escape velocity — because even small changes in one variable can shift the whole picture. A strong plan (retiring later, a large stack, a modest income) may have no threshold left to cross; a more tentative plan can be probed to see if and where it breaks.
Move one of the three numbers and watch the other two thresholds move with it — each shows how much that constraint has to expand or compress to reach the same result. Try setting all three at your intended plan, then move just one to see the stress or relief it puts on the other two.
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One step in any direction — what a single click of each stepper does from here.
Growing versus spending
One bar per retirement year: how much the stack gained or lost that year after the withdrawal. Green is a year the stack outgrew its spending; the negative colour is a year it did not.
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Inflation and growth model are saved on this device only and shared with every other calculator on the site. Everything else on this card is page-local. Defaults are starting positions, never recommendations.
Reproduce any row: Starting BTC − BTC sold = BTC left; price × BTC left = stack value; income ÷ price = BTC sold. Portfolio dollars follow the dollar basis on the assumptions card; BTC price is always nominal. Same projection that draws everything above.
| Year | Phase | BTC price | Starting BTC | Stack value | Income drawn | BTC sold | BTC left |
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Open this scenario in the full retirement calculator → — that page is the audit surface, with the price chart, the accumulation phase, and the comparison columns this one leaves out.
Escape velocity is a property of the model’s growth assumption, not of bitcoin. Everything above assumes returns arrive in trend order — smoothly, on schedule, every year. They do not. A crash early in retirement forces the sale of far more bitcoin to cover the same bill than the trend-relative arithmetic here implies, and that stack does not come back when price does. The Retirement Stress Test is where this plan gets hurt on purpose; run it before you believe a green bar.
The same caution runs the other way. If bitcoin trades below its long-term trend today, a plan built on the gap-persists basis is planning for a discount that has historically closed. Neither basis is the safe one in every regime, which is why the page reports both.