How it's calculated

Every number divides a price in dollars by the bitcoin price in dollars.

Live and historical prices

The boards use the live bitcoin price from Coinbase, refreshed every minute while the page is open, against the latest available price of each item. History comes from Yahoo Finance (bitcoin, gold futures, S&P 500) sampled at each quarter end, and from FRED for homes and everyday prices. The data refreshes every weekday after the U.S. market close.

Everyday prices

Hours of work use average hourly earnings of U.S. private employees. Gasoline is the weekly U.S. regular retail price. Eggs, coffee, and electricity are BLS average prices (per dozen, per pound, and per kWh). Each observation is paired with the bitcoin close on its own date. The Big Mac row uses the U.S. price from The Economist's Big Mac index, published every January and July. The inflation-adjusted chart restates past prices with the consumer price index (CPIAUCSL).

Homes

Median sales prices of houses sold, for the U.S. (MSPUS) and the four census regions (MSPNE, MSPMW, MSPS, MSPW). FRED publishes them quarterly with a lag of a few months.

Changes and charts

Changes compare what one bitcoin buys now against the observation on or before the same date one and five years ago. Index charts set each series to 100 at its first observation. The S&P 500 uses the index level as a benchmark, not a fund you can buy. Dotted lines mark the 2016, 2020, and 2024 halvings, when new bitcoin issuance was cut in half; the next is expected around 2028.

Savings calculator

Each purchase buys bitcoin at the weekly (Sunday) close: every week, or the first weekly close of each month. The stack is valued at the live price. "Kept in dollars" divides the same total by today's average hourly wage, so it shows what the cash buys now, after inflation. No fees, spreads, or taxes are included.

Retirement check

Everything is in today's dollars. Selling is taxed at one flat rate on the whole amount sold, which overstates tax for anyone with a cost basis. The proceeds buy a ladder of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS): one bond maturing each year, so each year's income is set by today's rates and rises with consumer prices. The rates are the daily constant-maturity real yields at 5, 7, 10, 20, and 30 years that FRED publishes from the Federal Reserve (DFII5, DFII7, DFII10, DFII20, DFII30), joined by straight lines, with the 5-year yield used for anything shorter. The yearly income is the level payment, made at the end of each year, that uses up the whole amount by the final year. Thirty years is the longest ladder that can be bought, and after the last bond the money is gone.

In a taxable account, the interest on TIPS and each year's inflation adjustment to their principal are both taxed federally as they accrue, and neither is taxed by states. The check lowers each bond's yield by your income tax rate times the sum of that real yield and expected inflation, taken from the 10-year breakeven inflation rate (T10YIE). That is one flat rate with no brackets or deductions, so treat it as an average. Each published yield is used as the rate for a single payment at that maturity, a small simplification. Trading costs are not included, and neither are gaps in the maturities on sale, which a real ladder fills with neighboring bonds.

Choosing forever spends only the interest: the 30-year real yield, less the same tax, on bonds whose principal is never spent. That rate is fixed only until those bonds mature. What replaces them depends on yields at the time, which nobody can know now, so forever is an estimate and not a guarantee. It sits close to what research on long retirements finds for stock and bond portfolios: a worst historical starting rate of about 3.3% for 50 years and 3.1% for 60 (Early Retirement Now, U.S. data since 1871), and Morningstar's forward-looking 3.3% for 40 years (2025). Bitcoin kept at a price that only matches inflation adds nothing to a forever income, because any spending from it would eventually use it up.

Any share you keep in bitcoin stays out of the ladder, so the ladder line is the income that remains even if bitcoin goes to zero. The "keeps pace with inflation" line adds the kept bitcoin sold in equal slices over the same years, at a price that never changes in today's dollars and with the same flat tax on each sale. It is a floor and a cautious middle case, not a forecast; no growth beyond inflation is assumed anywhere. The hurdle under the slider is the steady yearly growth above inflation at which the kept bitcoin, sold down over the same years, would pay as much as the ladder. The same sale tax applies either way, so the hurdle is simply the ladder's own after-tax return above inflation, and an uneven path needs more than that on average.

The backtest starts at each past quarter with today's value converted to that quarter's dollars (CPI), buys bitcoin, and sells at the first weekly close of every month to cover inflation-adjusted spending after tax. "Keeps pace with inflation" divides the after-tax value by yearly spending.

Cycle gauge

The 200-week average is the mean of the last 200 weekly closes. The gauge places today's price divided by that average among every week since the average first existed (mid 2018); below the 20th percentile reads as historically low and above the 80th as historically high. The drawdown compares the live price with the highest weekly close, placed the same way among past drawdowns. The halving countdown uses the live block height from mempool.space, the next halving at block 1,050,000, and ten minutes per block. Three cycles are a tiny sample; none of this predicts anything.

Not advice

This is a historical comparison tool. Nothing here is investment, tax, or financial advice.