The Ratio
Enter your own bitcoin price and gold price per troy ounce. Read ounces and grams per bitcoin, and watch the beam settle to the answer.
Open the ratioA quiet comparison of two scarce assets
Weigh two kinds of scarcity
One is dug from the earth and refined by heat. The other is counted by software and capped by agreement. This room holds a balance, a scorecard and an essay, so you can set the two side by side, slowly, with your own numbers.
Three fixed points
- 21,000,000the most bitcoin units that the rules will ever allow
- 31.1034768grams in one troy ounce, the figure every calculation here uses
- 210,000blocks between each halving of the bitcoin issuance reward
XAU side · Scarcity by geology
The metal that cannot be announced into being
Gold is scarce in the oldest way. The earth holds a limited amount of it, and getting more costs effort, energy and time. A refiner can purify, a mint can stamp, a vault can store, but none of them can add to the world’s gold by decree. What they can do is dig, and digging has always been slow, expensive and uncertain.
That physical resistance is much of the point. A bar has to be weighed, tested and carried by someone, and the friction is part of its character. It does not tarnish in ordinary air, it melts and reforms without losing itself, and a coin from a distant century is chemically the same stuff as a bar poured last year.
BTC side · Scarcity by rule
The ledger that cannot be inflated by hand
Bitcoin is scarce in the newest way: by rule. The protocol caps the supply at 21 million units, and everyone who runs the software checks each block against that cap. New units appear only as rewards for blocks, aimed at one about every ten minutes, and the reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. The scarcity is not in a material. It is in an agreement.
That agreement has costs of its own. It rests on proof of work using SHA-256, on many independent computers keeping the same record, and on people continuing to want that record to stay as it is. The arithmetic is exact. The social layer is not, and an honest comparison keeps both in view.
Three instruments
Put the two on the scale
The Scorecard
Rate each asset from one to ten on five properties, decide how much each property matters to you, and read the result as a radar.
Open the scorecardThe Essay
Seven short parts on what it means to be hard to make more of, and why the two kinds of difficulty are not interchangeable.
Read the essayXAU side · How to read this room
A way of looking, not a verdict
There are no live prices here. Every figure in the calculator is a number you typed, and every score in the scorecard is an opinion you can change. The defaults are labelled as starting opinions for exactly that reason: they are a place to begin disagreeing from.
Nothing on these pages is a forecast, a recommendation or an offer. The beam is a device for seeing how a comparison leans under the assumptions you give it. Change the assumptions and it leans somewhere else, which is the whole lesson.
BTC side · Independent and offline
Unhurried, unaffiliated, unconnected
BTC / XAU is an independent reading room. It is not affiliated with any exchange, mint, refiner, vault, fund or index provider, and it does not sell, hold, quote or route anything. It exists to make one comparison easier to think about.
The pages are plain files. Nothing is fetched, nothing is tracked and nothing you type leaves your browser. Your inputs may be remembered on this device so the tools are where you left them, and you can clear them with a button on each tool.