Current Bitcoin price with charts

The upper limit of 21 million bitcoin is not written into a contract; it is part of the consensus rules participants run. The 2008 paper draws the gold comparison itself, which matters only because it shows the analogy is not retrofitted marketing.

The reward of 3.125 BTC is measured: over the 144 blocks ending at height 973,062, read on 25 October 2026, the subsidy came to exactly 450 BTC, and fees made up only 0.41% of what miners received. There is no date for the next halving: it happens at block height 1,050,000, then 76,938 blocks away. Any text that gives you a day and a month for 2028 is converting blocks into days and presenting the result as the schedule.

Stock-to-flow gives gold about 61 years on mine production alone and bitcoin about 122, but the price model built on the metric has failed: its forecasts for the end of 2021 did not occur, and the model contains no demand term.

The honest formulation: gold’s scarcity cannot be abolished but is not absolute; bitcoin’s is absolute but theoretically abolishable, because it holds as long as participants keep enforcing the same rule. Which risk matters more is a judgement about institutions, not a calculation.

One bitcoin divides into 100,000,000 satoshi, because the protocol holds amounts as whole numbers with eight decimal places. For a metals investor this is where one familiar cost disappears: the price per satoshi is the same whether ten or ten million are bought, while with metal the premium per gram rises as the piece gets smaller, because minting, assay and handling are costs per item. We give no percentage for that effect: it is dealer-specific and day-specific.

The counter-cost is the network fee, which depends not on the amount but on the space the transaction occupies in a block. That inverts the comparison: with gold the burden scales with the smallness of the piece, with bitcoin with the size of the transaction data. The fee is an auction, so treat any reading as a snapshot — on 25 October 2026 it was at the floor of 1 satoshi per virtual byte, and a guide that tells you a transfer "costs a few pence" will be wrong during the next congestion.

Three Ways to Hold It, and One Risk With No Metal Equivalent

Self-custody means access depends on a private key, and the risk is that it is final: no body can reset a forgotten key, and a confirmed transaction is irreversible. Custody with a provider moves that risk to a company’s solvency instead — the largest losses in bitcoin’s history arose not in the protocol but in the businesses around it. On the scale of lost coins, with the date attached: the widely quoted figure of roughly 3.7 million BTC dates from 2017 and has been requoted ever since, built on indicators rather than measurements.

What it comes down to: a gold bar in a vault can be stolen, but it cannot be forgotten; a private key cannot be taken without someone reaching it, but it can be forgotten, and then it is gone. Two different risks, not two strengths of one. One British point is worth adding, because holders routinely assume the opposite: dealing in bullion is not an FCA-regulated activity in the United Kingdom, with no Financial Services Compensation Scheme cover and no Financial Ombudsman Service. Whether that perimeter reaches a cryptoasset firm our sources do not establish, so this page does not say.

Correlation: the Spread of Published Values Is Itself the Finding

If bitcoin behaved like gold, their prices would move together to some stable degree. Published correlations show values from clearly positive to clearly negative depending on the window, the source and the method — a rolling twelve-month figure peaking at about +0.41 and near zero since 2024, a 30-day figure of +0.70 in early 2025, a one-year figure of −0.17 in 2026. Anything in that range can prove whatever an article set out to say, so the defensible statement is about the spread itself: there is no stable correlation between bitcoin and gold.

Two readings follow. Silver in 1980 was a bitcoin-class event: around −90% in two and a half years sits in the same bracket as bitcoin’s worst cycles, around −93% in 2011 and −77% in 2021 — the difference is not that precious metals can fall like that but how often. And gold’s worst setback was not its deepest but its longest: around −70%, stretched over nineteen and a half years. The two can occupy the same role in a portfolio while behaving completely differently inside it, which is a statement about diversification, not a recommendation.

The list below names mechanisms, not directions. Every item is a channel through which something can arrive at the price; none says what the price will do, and nothing on this page is a forecast.

• ◆ Supply is fixed in advance and steps down. Unlike a mine, issuance cannot respond to the price: 450 BTC a day, halving at block 1,050,000, currently 0.82% of the circulating supply a year.
• ◆ Demand has no industrial floor — and neither does gold to any great extent, at 6.5% technology demand. For both, demand is monetary, and monetary demand can change its mind faster than a factory can.
• ◆ Liquidity and the clock. The same order size moves the price further in a thin book, and with the weekend share of volume down to roughly 13% and spreads more than doubling, time of week is a driver of amplitude.
• ◆ No reliable macro anchor. Because the correlation with gold is unstable rather than merely low, a holder cannot assume bitcoin will respond to a crisis the way gold has: in 2025 the two moved apart precisely when systemic fear rose.

Costs are described here by type, not by figure: fees are the subject of a running price war, and any number printed in a guide is out of date before the guide is. An exchange means buying in an order book and receiving bitcoin itself — a trading fee per order, the bid-ask spread (the invisible part, more than twice as wide at the weekend), the network fee when moving coins to self-custody, and counterparty risk while the balance stays there. A broker usually has no explicit order fee, so the cost sits in the spread, and frequently there is no option to withdraw the coins at all.

Which of those routes a United Kingdom investor may actually use, and on what terms, is a question of British financial regulation that our sources do not settle — so this page names the gap instead of guessing. What can be said is the comparison of cost shapes: for physical metal the dominant one-off costs are the dealer premium and, outside investment gold, 20% VAT; for bitcoin they are the spread and, on a securitised route, an ongoing charge that accrues whether or not anything happens.

The framework a British investor meets on the metal pages is the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992, and it has no holding period: a gain after two weeks is treated like one after twenty years. The rate is 18% within the basic rate band of £37,700 and 24% above it, after an Annual Exempt Amount of £3,000 (s. 1K). Self Assessment is required where the gain exceeds the allowance or the proceeds exceed £50,000.

Two reliefs that matter for metal cannot reach a cryptoasset, and both failures follow from the wording. The relief that keeps sovereigns struck from 1837 and the gold Britannia outside Capital Gains Tax works because those coins are sterling legal tender (Coinage Act 1971 s. 2(1)) and sterling is not a chargeable asset (s. 21(1)(b), HMRC CG78305) — bitcoin is neither. The chattels rule in s. 262 is written for tangible movable property, and a ledger entry is not tangible. That is a reading of the statutory scope, not an HMRC position.

On value added tax, the exemption in Group 15 of Schedule 9 to the Value Added Tax Act 1994 is written for investment gold — bars from 995 fineness and coins of at least 900 fineness minted after 1800 that are or have been legal tender. The statute says gold, which is why silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium and iridium all carry 20%. What it means for an exchange of cryptoassets against currency we do not state, because no British authority for it is in our sources — nor for whether an ISA may hold one (for physical metal it may not), nor for the money-laundering rules reaching such a firm: the £10,000 threshold of SI 2026/621 reg. 9 is a duty on dealers in goods, and we do not stretch it to a different trade.