Bitcoin's purchasing power in physical commodities

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 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 stooq 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.

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). 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 from stooq XAUUSD spot prices. 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 close (from stooq) is divided by the commodity's USD-denominated close from the same trading day. Spot prices come from stooq (gold, silver, platinum, copper, coffee) and FRED (Brent crude). 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.