Current Bitcoin price with charts

Measured on 25 October 2026: 20,103,303 BTC in circulation, which is 95.7% of the 21 million limit. The remaining 4.3%, about 896,700 BTC, is spread by the halvings over more than a century; arithmetically the last fraction is issued around 2140.

That figure moves, slowly and only upwards, so a text that states it has to state when it was taken. Guides written a few years ago give a noticeably lower share and have not been remeasured since; the share above was read off the chain on the date given.

Most readers arriving from a gold page expect the comparison to go one way: gold, geologically constrained, grows slowly; bitcoin, young and newly mined, grows fast. Since the halving of April 2024 that is no longer what the numbers say. The two rates are simple to compute and both sides of the calculation are published.

Two further things about gold’s side of the table. Recycling added another 1,404.3 t in 2025, taking total supply to 5,002.3 t, the highest in the series since 1970 — but recycled gold is not new gold, it was already in the stock, which is why the growth rate above uses mine production. And the 222,600 t figure carries its own surprise for the "timeless metal" story: roughly two thirds of it has been mined since 1950.

Stock-to-flow is the existing stock divided by the annual addition to it. It answers one question: how many years of today’s production are already sitting in the stock? From the same figures as above:

Note what the first two rows show before any comparison is drawn: for gold alone the metric yields two different numbers, 61 or 45, depending on whether recycling counts as flow. It is a definitional choice, not a measurement. Anyone presenting a stock-to-flow figure as a constant of nature is overstating what it is.

Use the metric for what it can do: it describes how sluggishly a stock responds to new production, and in that single respect it makes gold and bitcoin comparable. It is not a forecasting instrument, and this page gives no price forecast of any kind.

• ◆ Gold is scarce because the crust keeps it scarce. When the price rises, poorer deposits become economic — and the rate still barely moves. A new mine typically takes a decade and more from discovery to production. Gold’s scarcity is a fact about geology and about time.
• ◆ Bitcoin is scarce because a rule says so. The limit is absolute, unlike gold, where undiscovered deposits exist. It is also socially carried: it holds as long as participants keep enforcing the same software rule. Through every dispute in the network’s history so far, they have.

The honest formulation: gold’s scarcity cannot be abolished but is not absolute. Bitcoin’s scarcity is absolute but is theoretically abolishable. Both properties are real and neither is the better one. Which of the two risks matters more to a particular holder is a judgement about institutions, not a calculation.

• ◆ At home. Physical possession, nobody in between. The risks — burglary, fire, loss — are local and physical. Cover normally runs through household contents insurance, usually with low sub-limits for valuables.
• ◆ A bank safe deposit box. The point most holders underestimate is the legal construction: the bank provides the space but does not take the contents into its possession, because it does not know what is in there. It follows that the contents are regularly not covered by deposit protection and not automatically insured by the bank, and that the bank’s liability is limited by contract. The extent and the limits differ from country to country, so we give no figure here; the sources we were able to verify describe United States law, not German, EU or Swiss law. Ask for the liability clause in writing before relying on it.
• ◆ A bonded or high-security vault. Storage with a specialist custodian, often allocated — individually identified bars, audited. We name it as an option and give no costs and no customs or tax effect, because those depend on national law and we have not verified them.

If bitcoin behaved like gold, their prices would move together to some stable degree. Published correlations do not show that. They show something more awkward: values ranging from clearly positive to clearly negative, depending on the window, the data source and the method.

The naive move would be to pick one of those numbers. Anything from +0.70 to −0.88 can be used to prove whatever an article set out to say, and that is roughly how the range came about. The defensible statement is a statement about the spread itself: there is no stable correlation between bitcoin and gold. The rolling twelve-month figure peaked at about +0.41 and has sat near zero since 2024, and our own measurement over 1,667 common trading days from 5 September 2019 gives +0.12 — low, and for one window only. That the number depends so heavily on the choice of window is the finding, not a defect of the measurement.

The time pattern, as far as the sources allow one to be assembled: a positive relationship ran through 2020 and 2021, which gave the "digital gold" story a tailwind; from November 2022 to November 2024 the two moved fairly closely; in 2025 the relationship broke apart, with gold responding to fears about systemic risk while bitcoin responded more to adoption news and monetary policy expectations.

Bitcoin’s four large setbacks are usually quoted to settle the argument. They deserve to be quoted next to the metals’ own worst episodes, with years attached, and with an explicit note on how precise the figures can honestly be.

The sequence is itself a statement. Around −93%, −86%, −84%, −77%: bitcoin’s setbacks have become shallower from cycle to cycle, not deeper. That can be read as a market maturing — more capitalisation, more participants, more liquidity. What it does not permit is extrapolation. That the next decline will be smaller does not follow from four observations, and this page makes no claim about what comes next.

Bitcoin is an entry in a distributed ledger. There is no piece, no mass, no fineness, no mintage. What falls away in bitcoin’s favour: authenticity testing, storage space, transport insurance, alloy and fineness, discounts for damaged pieces, per-item premiums on small units. What falls away to bitcoin’s cost: everything that needs no infrastructure. A gold bar works without electricity, without a network, without software running somewhere and without anyone continuing to compute. Bitcoin needs a running network. That the network has run since 2009 without a systemic failure is the strongest answer to that worry — but seventeen years are seventeen years, and gold has been used as a store of value for far longer than any price series exists.

Like gold, bitcoin pays no interest and no dividend. The entire return is price change. That is the truest thing the two have in common, and the reason both react to the same variable: the yield available on safe alternatives. The original paper is explicit that the supply of new coins is designed to end up "completely inflation free" — that is, with no running inflow at all.

One asymmetry belongs here because it concerns the buyer, not the asset: a confirmed bitcoin transaction is irreversible and there is no mechanism by which a buyer can force a refund. Buying metal from a dealer sits on a contract with statutory warranty behind it.

This is the best documented point in the whole section, and it is routinely retold wrongly. On 10 January 2024 the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved rule changes permitting the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on national exchanges — formally Securities Exchange Act Release No. 34-99306, covering the rulebooks of NYSE Arca, Nasdaq and Cboe BZX. Trading began on 11 January 2024 with 11 products and a first-day turnover of roughly 4.6 billion USD. The approval came more than ten years after the first application for a spot bitcoin product, and the immediate trigger was a federal appeals court ruling that had set aside an earlier refusal.

"While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin."

Gary Gensler, Chair of the SEC, statement on the approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products, 10 January 2024.

In the same statement the Chair described bitcoin as "primarily a speculative, volatile asset that’s also used for illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion, and terrorist financing", and said the decision was "cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin". The approval is widely narrated as a seal of approval. The authority itself contradicted that reading on the day it was granted. A precious metals site can quote that without taking sides, because it is the primary source.

We give no figures for the assets held in these products. Those numbers change daily, they come from secondary compilations, and in a guide published in 27 languages they are guaranteed to be stale. The honest description is of an order of magnitude: these are now large, regulated vehicles, and their flows are watched as a demand channel.

A classic bitcoin ETF is not possible in the European Union, because the UCITS framework does not permit a fund on a single asset. What is available instead are physically backed ETPs or ETNs — legally debt securities collateralised with bitcoin, traded on an exchange and held in an ordinary brokerage account.

That legal form is the part worth understanding, because it is not what the label suggests. The cost and risk types are: an ongoing charge taken from the unit value daily; the exchange spread when buying the unit, which is additional to the ongoing charge and often overlooked; the custody and order fees of the investor’s own bank; and issuer risk, since the instrument is a debt security — reduced where it is physically backed with a redemption claim, but not reduced to zero.

One comparison with the metal side is worth drawing explicitly: with a physical metal purchase the dominant one-off cost is usually the dealer premium and, outside investment gold, value-added tax. With bitcoin the dominant costs are the spread and, for a securitised route, an ongoing charge that accrues whether or not anything happens. Different cost shapes, and the one that bites depends entirely on the holding period.

Crypto assets are not investment capital in the German sense and are not subject to the flat-rate withholding tax. They are "other assets" within the private disposal rules. The Federal Fiscal Court decided the point: in its judgment of 14 February 2023 (IX R 3/22) it held that "virtual currencies in the form of currency tokens" are among the other assets that can be the subject of a private disposal transaction under Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 EStG.

That is exactly the provision under which physical gold, silver, platinum, palladium and the other platinum group metals are taxed in Germany. The consequences line up:

• ◆ One-year holding period. The statute covers disposals "where the period between acquisition and disposal is not more than one year". Sold after that, the gain is not taxable, whatever its size. Sold inside it, the gain is taxed at the personal income tax rate.
• ◆ How the deadline is computed. It runs by the calendar under Section 108 (1) of the Fiscal Code together with Sections 187 (1) and 188 (2) of the Civil Code: the period ends on the anniversary of acquisition, and the first tax-free day is the day after it. Counting 365 days is wrong, and across a leap year it is wrong by two days.
• ◆ No separate rate. The gain increases taxable income and is charged at the personal tariff, a band of 14% to 45%, plus the solidarity surcharge of 5.5% on the income tax and, where applicable, church tax.
• ◆ Loss relief is narrow but symmetrical. Losses may be set off only against gains from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year, with a carry-back to the immediately preceding year and a carry-forward to later years. They do not reduce salary and they do not reduce investment income — but they do offset a gain on gold or silver, because that gain arises under the same provision.

One further sentence in the same provision deserves a flag rather than an answer. Where an asset has been used as a source of income in at least one calendar year, the period extends to ten years. Whether staking or lending triggers that extension for crypto is a question the tax administration addresses in its own guidance, which we could not retrieve to verify on 25 October 2026. We therefore state the rule and not its application: anyone who has staked or lent coins should settle this with an adviser rather than assume either answer. Physical metal in a vault produces no income and stays at one year.

This is where most German crypto tax cases go wrong, and it has no parallel on the metal side. In the same 2023 judgment the Federal Fiscal Court held that currency tokens are acquired when obtained in exchange for euro, for a foreign currency or for other virtual currencies, and are disposed of when exchanged back into euro or a foreign currency or converted into other currency tokens.

Every swap is therefore a disposal and an acquisition at the same time — it realises a gain or loss on what was given up, and it starts a fresh one-year period for what was received. Someone who moves between crypto assets several times inside a year can owe tax on gains without ever having seen a euro. Selling gold to buy silver has the same structure in German law, incidentally; the difference is that nobody does it a dozen times a month.

The court added a point in the opposite direction, against the argument that crypto cannot be taxed because it cannot be enforced: it found no normative enforcement deficit for the taxation of currency token disposals in 2017, and no indications of a structural one.

Private disposal gains and other income go into the Anlage SO schedule of the income tax return. For taxpayers without professional representation the return is due, under Section 149 (2) of the Fiscal Code, "at the latest seven months after the end of the calendar year" — that is, 31 July of the following year. With a tax adviser, Section 149 (3) extends that to 31 July of the second year following the assessment period.

The larger change is DAC8: Council Directive (EU) 2023/2226 of 17 October 2023, which amends the directive on administrative cooperation and obliges crypto-asset service providers to report their users to tax authorities, with a transposition deadline of 31 December 2025.

• ◆ Germany transposed it with the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act (Kryptowerte-Steuertransparenzgesetz, KStTG), enacted as Article 1 of the implementing act of 22 December 2025 and in force from 24 December 2025 — inside the deadline.
• ◆ Under Section 21 KStTG the obligations apply for the first time to the 2026 calendar year, and the reporting period is the calendar year.
• ◆ Section 9 (1) KStTG requires providers to report the prescribed information on reportable users annually by 31 July for the preceding reporting period, to the Federal Central Tax Office. Taken together, that makes the first report due by 31 July 2027 — a date that follows from the two provisions rather than appearing in the act.

For a holder, the practical consequence is about record-keeping, not about a new tax. The one-year period and the EUR 1,000 threshold are unchanged by DAC8; what changes is that the tax office can be told about the transactions independently. That is also where crypto differs from metal in daily practice: a metal buyer has a dealer invoice with weight and date, while the acquisition trail for crypto hangs on exchange exports. Keeping them is the holder’s job.

It is not the subject of this page, so one paragraph. Rewards from staking, lending and mining in a private capacity are generally other income under Section 22 no. 3 EStG, which carries its own threshold: such income is not subject to income tax if it amounts to less than EUR 256 in the calendar year. That EUR 256 is not the EUR 1,000 of Section 23 — they are two different thresholds in two different categories of income. Whether staking also extends the holding period to ten years, and where larger mining becomes a trade, are matters of administrative guidance that we could not verify, and we therefore make no claim either way. This page is general information and not tax advice.