Bitcoin · Updated daily · Figures to 27 Aug 2026
Is Bitcoin expensive at $80,210?
Whether you hold it or you've stayed out, the question is the same: is $80,210 expensive? One model has tracked the price since the beginning - the power law - and right now it puts fair value at $121,197. The chart and the model's working are below.
Maybe you own some and can't decide whether to feel clever or nervous; maybe you've stayed out and wonder if you're already too late. Either way the question underneath is the same one - is this thing expensive? - and it deserves better than the shouting on either side. So here's the price, all of it, from the same source every week, next to the one yardstick that has held up long enough to be worth showing.
So, what are we looking at, exactly?
The weekly closing price of one bitcoin in US dollars, from Coinbase, since 2014 - the longest clean record a regulated exchange provides. The shape is the famous one: long quiet stretches, then vertical years. Slide the window forward and each "crash" that filled the news at the time flattens into a step on a larger climb - which is exactly the observation the model below tries to formalise.
The latest price against the power-law model's fair value
0.66×
The power law, in plain words
Physicist Giovanni Santostasi noticed that bitcoin's price, over its whole life, has grown along a straight line - if you plot both the price and time on logarithmic scales. That's a power law (the same mathematical shape as how earthquake sizes or city populations are distributed), and his fitted version has three levels: a floor the price has never stayed under, a fair-value line through the middle, and a top band the manias touch. Today those levels put fair value at $121,197 and the floor at $59,360. These are modelled figures - a description of the past projected forward, not a promise.
The model's fair value today is $121,197; the market price is $80,210. History note, not advice: the price has swung far to both sides of this line and stayed there for years at a time.
Price from the chart · fair value from the Santostasi power-law modelFive years ago the price was $49,328. Whatever you think of the asset, that multiple is the reason the chart keeps its audience.
Calculated from the chart aboveWhat this chart can't tell you
Whether to buy any. We chart; we don't call. The power law is a description of thirteen years that may simply stop being true - no other asset has followed one forever, and bitcoin's own past includes drawdowns of 80%. The headline price is one exchange's latest daily close, and the chart plots weekly closes - so the chart's right edge can trail the number at the top by a few days, other venues trade at slightly different prices, and this asset can still move 10% overnight.
Further reading
All of our numbers come from live, free sources - here, Coinbase's bitcoin price via FRED, updated daily (we chart the weekly closes). The power-law levels are calculated from Giovanni Santostasi's published model parameters; our earlier open-source study of the model, with its code, lives at Mandala.
If you want to dig deeper, FRED carries the full daily history free - and the copy button under our chart takes the chart with its source attached.