The Printer
Use the left and right arrow keys to step through calendar years; the down arrow moves to the subsidy eras and the up arrow back.
Who estimates what
People work today and set some of that effort aside for tomorrow; money is the record that carries it forward. Bitcoin keeps that record with proof of work. Miners spend computation and electricity to propose blocks; every node checks each block against the consensus rules and rejects what breaks them, however much work it carries. Rewriting a confirmed transaction means building a valid competing chain with more accumulated work than the one everyone already holds, so settled history gets more expensive to change the older it is. That security is probabilistic, not absolute.
The rules fix how many coins a block may create and the height at which that halves; they say nothing about what a coin is worth. A coin does not contain the energy that mined it, mining cost does not set the price, and a halving guarantees no return. Supply is protocol; purchasing power is demand. Bitcoin white paper, sections 4–6.
Three different things called inflation
Monetary inflation is growth in the quantity of money. For bitcoin that is new coins; for a currency it is a broad aggregate (M2, M3, M4 — each central bank's own definition, not comparable with each other).
Price inflation is a price index moving. The CPI is a basket, re-weighted and quality-adjusted; the number is written every month, after the fact.
A time price is a price divided by an hour's pay. It is the unit this page uses for "we buy less with our work", because it cancels the currency.
The two kinds of inflation never share a unit here. The money chart plots growth rates of money aggregates and bitcoin's issuance on one percentage axis and carries the CPI line dotted, labelled "prices, not money", for contrast; the table beside it lists cumulative multiples side by side, never summed.
Which worker, which series
"Average worker" is FRED AHETPI, average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private, from 1964. Before 1964 the cans use manufacturing production workers (NBER A0850AUSA052NNBR 1890–1926, M08142USM055NNBR 1920–48, BLS CES3000000008 from 1939); the 1898 → 2026 line in the hero therefore splices manufacturing onto all-private, and the manufacturing wage sits above the economy-wide median. "Minimum wage" is the federal floor (FEDMINNFRWG, from October 1938); many states exceed it. Annual figures are annual averages of the months each series published; the latest year is year to date.
Which bitcoin price
2010–2013 is blockchain.info's daily cross-exchange average (from 2010-08-18; Mt. Gox-era thin-market prints). 2014 onward is Bitstamp's daily close; year-end figures use the 31 December close. The live spot is the same CoinGecko reading the Odds page uses, refreshed every five minutes, and the provenance strip says whether it is live, stale or a seed.
Three supply numbers
Schedule supply is the sum of every subsidy the consensus rules allowed through the tip block, assuming all of it was claimed. Circulating is the ledger, which is about 266 BTC lower because some miners under-claimed their subsidy (one block claimed nothing at all) and the genesis coins cannot be spent. Effective subtracts coins presumed lost — every figure for that is a dormancy heuristic, none a count, which is why the slider is labelled an assumption. Lost coins make the rate slightly higher (the base shrinks) and the level lower. The page does not say bitcoin is deflationary, because no public measurement of the annual loss rate exists.
The soup can's own caveats
Every historical price is an advertised sale price; list prices run 25–60 % higher (10 ¢ on holiday sale vs 15.5 ¢ regular in November 1961; $1.59 list at Target vs a $1.21 rolling-twelve-month sale average in 2026). 1905–61 is one New Jersey town's newspaper ads plus two ad scans. 2011–19 are interpolated inside a 75–85 ¢ band. The 1962 can, the year Warhol painted it, cost 10–16 ¢; the 29 ¢ story is museum lore. The can is 10.75 oz today and 10.5 oz in 1960s–70s ads: it got slightly bigger, not smaller, but the size history has no primary source, so every can is drawn at one height and the ounces are printed in the caption. "Same can" is true of size and branding, not recipe. Pre-1913 cells have no CPI.
Projections and reconstructions
Bitcoin's issuance after today is projected at 600 seconds per block from the tip; every halving so far came early. Country rows marked "IMF" for 2026–27 are World Economic Outlook projections. Argentina 2009–17 is reconstructed (INDEC/IMF 2009–13, Buenos Aires City 2014–16, IMF 2017) because the official index was discredited; the line is dashed. Venezuela's multiple is an order of magnitude. The 100-unit race uses annual-average inflation rates, so a "now" tile and a point-to-point multiple will not agree to the decimal.
In Satoshi's words
Sources
Every number on the page carries a freely readable source; nothing is taken from paywalled press or subscriber reports. The page is served from committed seeds plus a nightly snapshot; only the tip height and the spot price are fetched at request time. Informational and educational only. Not investment advice.