Bitcoin to cocaine: how much cocaine does 1 BTC buy?
Illustrative price. This commodity has no public spot market; the figure is a composite estimate sourced from public reports — see /methodology.
One bitcoin currently buys roughly 2.11 kg at the wholesale tier (~$30,000/kg, ≥80% pure, US-standard). Cocaine has no public spot market, so the price is an illustrative composite drawn from the UNODC World Drug Report 2024, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024, and EMCDDA's European market reports. The visualisation surfaces three tiers because the same kilogram of cocaine has a wildly different price depending on where in the supply chain you sample.
The three tiers and their illustrative prices: producer at the source (~$2,500/kg, range $1,500–$3,500, raw refined base, UNODC); wholesale at port-of-entry or interior distribution (~$30,000/kg, range $25,000–$35,000, ≥80% pure US standard, UNODC + DEA NDTA); retail purity-adjusted at street level normalised to 100% (~$120,000/kg, range $80,000–$250,000, DEA + EMCDDA). The wholesale tier is the headline figure because it is the most directly comparable to how the other commodities on this site are priced — standardised purity, kilogram-scale transactions.
See it at scale. Open the live visualisation — the panel renders cocaine at true relative scale next to a constant 9-kg Shiba Inu, with a slider scrubbing through BTC amounts from 1 sat to 21 M BTC.
About cocaine and bitcoin
Cocaine sits in the visualisation as the high-density consumer-substance counterpart to the metals: the per-gram price is small enough that a typical retail BTC position buys an absurd amount, while a microscopic BTC position buys a kitchen-table quantity. It is rendered as a still-life with a forensic readout (mass, density, US-dollar value at the chosen tier) rather than a stacked cube because the visual idiom of a brick of compressed white powder reads more accurately than an abstract cube would.
As with Pu-238, cocaine is an illustrative price and is not in the machine-readable /data archive. The tier definitions, source URLs, and as-of dates live in src/lib/illustrative-prices.json. The brand voice is dry-forensic — neither glamorising nor moralising — because the goal of the panel is to make BTC-denominated purchasing power legible, not to opine on the underlying market.
Frequently asked questions
- How much cocaine does 1 bitcoin buy today?
- About 2.11 kg at the illustrative wholesale tier of ~$30,000 per kilogram (≥80% pure, US standard). The visualisation also surfaces producer (~$2,500/kg) and retail purity-adjusted (~$120,000/kg) tiers.
- Where do these prices come from?
- Composite illustrative figures drawn from UNODC's World Drug Report 2024, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024, and EMCDDA's European market data. Full source list and uncertainty bands are at /methodology under "Illustrative pricing → Cocaine".
- Why three tiers and not one number?
- Because the same kilogram of cocaine sells for radically different prices depending on where in the supply chain you sample. Producer prices reflect the value to coca-growing communities; wholesale prices reflect bulk interdiction value; retail purity-adjusted prices reflect street-level consumer economics normalised to 100% purity for comparison.
- Which tier is the headline BTC equivalence?
- Wholesale (~$30,000/kg). It is the most directly comparable to how the other commodities on the site are priced: standardised purity, kilogram-scale transactions, and the tier most often cited in official market reports.
- Is this in the downloadable dataset?
- No — the /data archive holds only commodities with public spot markets (BTC, gold, silver, platinum, copper, Brent crude, wheat, coffee). Cocaine appears on the visualisation as an illustrative reference.