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.
Bitcoin —, gold — an ounce.
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 three starting years, in both units, with today’s reading against each.
| 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 gold trend fitted to 2011–2026 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.
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 2011, 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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