What does a bitcoin weigh?
Bitcoin's purchasing power in physical commodities
How much gold, silver, cash or plutonium does 1 BTC buy? Live ratios, daily, since 2013.
Famous amounts, smallest to largest. Pick one to weigh it.
Dropped from its own height (9.88 in), it falls for 226 ms and hits the floor with 752 J. At rest it bears down at 992.4 psf. The blow lasts 0.7 ms and peaks at 209.9 tons of force.
Hashweight · live
What the machines securing Bitcoin weigh
Millions of mining machines run flat out to keep Bitcoin honest. Stack every one of them in a single pile and this is what you'd get, drawn to scale, from 2014 to today.
Where they run
Big industrial sites, flare gas, hydro, and a long tail at home
How it's weighed
- Hashrate from mempool.space, back to 2014. Hashrate alone doesn't give a weight: 1 EH/s took about 870,000 machines in 2015 and about 3,700 today.
- So each rise in hashrate is built from the newest Antminer on sale at the time, runs for five years, then is replaced by that day's newest. Machines switched off in a dip still count: they still weigh.
- Weights and sizes are from Bitmain's spec sheets, with the separate power supply the S5–S9 era needed. The pile packs every case edge to edge; ~10 tonnes of full nodes are left out.
- Other makers, mixed fleets and slow retirements all blur it: read every figure as ±30%.
The Weigh-In — the newsletter
What a bitcoin weighs, and what moved it. Same voice as the site.
Bitcoin in things you can hold
Bitcoin Weigh-In answers a question that's harder than it looks: what does one bitcoin actually buy, expressed as something you could pick up off a table? The site renders a single BTC's purchasing power as physical commodities — gold, silver, plutonium-238, cocaine — at true relative scale, next to a constant 9-kg Shiba Inu named Sat so the eye has somewhere to land. Move the slider and the cube grows or shrinks; scrub the date and you can watch a bitcoin's weight in gold drift across thirteen years of market history.
Under the hood is a public, daily-updated dataset of commodity prices in BTC going back to 2 January 2013, sourced from CoinGecko, GoldAPI.io and FRED with deterministic BTC supply computed from the protocol's halving schedule. The dataset is CC-BY-4.0 and ships as CSV, JSON, NDJSON and Parquet — useful if you're doing your own bitcoin-vs-commodities analysis. The methodology page documents every source, every forward-fill rule, and the cross-validation pipeline that flags provider disagreements above 0.5%.
Per-commodity deep-dives
Each launch commodity has its own page with the live ratio, market context, and FAQ:
- BTC → Gold How much gold does 1 BTC buy?
- BTC → Silver Troy ounces of silver per bitcoin.
- BTC → Plutonium-238 The radioisotope that powers spacecraft.
- BTC → Cocaine Wholesale, producer, retail tiers.
- BTC → Cash A literal stack of $1 bills, to true thickness.
Free, citable, machine-readable
The full daily archive (BTC, gold, silver, platinum, copper, Brent crude, wheat, coffee — 2013-present) is published under Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 at /data in CSV, JSON, NDJSON, and Parquet. Cite as Bitcoin Weigh-In Daily Commodity Price Dataset; attribution is the only restriction. The methodology page documents every source, every forward-fill rule, and the cross-validation pipeline. Browse historical purchasing power year-by-year at /snapshot.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Bitcoin Weigh-In?
- Bitcoin Weigh-In visualises one bitcoin's purchasing power as physical commodities you can actually hold — gold, silver, plutonium-238, cocaine — rendered at true relative scale next to a constant reference (a 9-kg Shiba Inu named Sat). It pairs a live, daily-updated price dataset with a side-by-side cube renderer so a glance tells you how heavy a bitcoin is, today, in things that exist.
- How much gold can 1 bitcoin buy today?
- The exact ratio updates every day at 02:00 UTC, pricing gold via Pax Gold (PAXG) on CoinGecko. Move the slider on the homepage or open /btc/gold to see the current troy-ounce equivalent, plus the historical curve back to 2013.
- How is the bitcoin-to-commodity price calculated?
- Each day's BTC-USD price (from CoinGecko) is divided by the commodity's USD-denominated price from the same day. Gold is priced via Pax Gold (PAXG) on CoinGecko, silver from GoldAPI.io, and Brent crude from FRED; historical platinum, copper, wheat, and coffee were sourced from Stooq. Bitcoin circulating supply is computed deterministically from the protocol's halving schedule. The full methodology is published at /methodology.
- Is the underlying dataset free to use?
- Yes — the full daily history of commodity-vs-BTC prices is published under Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 as CSV, JSON, NDJSON, and Parquet at /data. Cite it as Bitcoin Weigh-In; attribution is the only restriction.
- How often does the price data update?
- The dataset rebuilds every day at 02:00 UTC via a GitHub Actions cron that fetches the previous UTC day from each source, cross-validates against Massive, and commits the new artifacts to the public repository. Forward-fill carries the previous known value across weekends and holidays so every calendar date has a row.
- Which commodities are covered?
- The live dataset covers BTC, gold, silver, platinum, copper, Brent crude, wheat, and coffee. The visualisation currently renders four — gold, silver, plutonium-238, and cocaine — chosen for the spread of densities and price-per-gram they show. Plutonium-238 and cocaine are illustrative composite prices (no public spot market); their methodology is documented at /methodology.
- How tall would a bitcoin's worth of $1 bills actually stack?
- It depends on the amount and the date, but the site computes it exactly: stacked to the real 0.10922 mm note thickness (Bureau of Engraving and Printing), then compared to real-world landmarks from a doorway up to the edge of space. See the Cash tab on the homepage, or /btc/cash for the current figure.
- How does a Bitcoin miner actually find a block?
- It guesses. A mining chip hashes the 80-byte block header twice with SHA-256, changing a 32-bit number called the nonce each time, and checks whether the result falls below the network's target. Almost every guess fails and is thrown away instantly; at today's difficulty the whole network needs more than 10²³ guesses per block. /mining takes a chip apart in 3D and simulates one hash core working through real block headers, including a replay of the moment a real block was found.