Methodology

Our own data and external sources

The data from our own Bitcoin full node (all network metrics) and our own node crawler (the world map) are genuinely ours, as are the curated database and every computation on top.

What comes from outside are mainly the prices (Coinbase live, CoinGecko and CoinMetrics for the history), the euro conversion (ECB daily rates), market cap/volume (CoinGecko), the Fear & Greed index (alternative.me), and inflation (FRED) and gold (Yahoo Finance). We fetch, store and process all of that ourselves.

So "own data" here means: our own node, our own crawler, our own fully stored history and our own computation. It does not mean that we produce the price ourselves (no one does; it forms on exchanges). We are not a live passthrough of someone else's API.

Price data

The basis is our own, fully stored price database: over 1.5 million records at 5-minute resolution, reaching back continuously to 1 January 2012, plus daily data from 18 July 2010 (the start of trading on Mt. Gox). The historical prices come from CoinGecko and a CoinMetrics backfill; the current live price is added every 30 seconds from Coinbase.

Why only daily before that? In 2010/2011 Bitcoin traded on one or two small exchanges with very little volume. Clean 5-minute candles could not be filled. A daily reference price is the most credible thing reconstructable for that era.

US-dollar prices are real historical data. Euro values are converted from the USD price at each day's ECB reference rate, day-accurate across the whole history. Which currency is shown is chosen top right; it is independent of the language.

Network data & our own node

Blocks, block height, difficulty, hashrate, mempool size and fees come primarily from our own self-hosted Bitcoin full node (REST for the metrics, WebSocket for the live mempool). If it fails, a freshness check automatically switches to mempool.space as failover.

Market metrics such as market capitalisation and trading volume come from CoinGecko, the Fear & Greed index from alternative.me. Sources and update cadence are documented openly under "About the data".

Reference data: inflation & gold

For sats purchasing power we need comparison series our price database does not contain: the consumer price indices (US, Euro area, Germany) from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) and the gold price (XAU/USD) from Yahoo Finance. We fetch both daily and store them on our side; they are clearly marked as external reference data.

DCA calculator

For each buy date in the chosen interval we take the nearest real price from the database and compute how much Bitcoin the fixed amount would have bought at that price. The amounts are summed over the period.

Today's value = accumulated BTC × current price. Return = (today's value - total contributions) ÷ total contributions. No fees or spreads enter the calculation; it is an idealised simulation.

What-if

A one-off investment: the entered amount buys a BTC quantity at the real price on the chosen date; its value today follows from the current price. Same data basis as the DCA calculator.

Converter

Converts BTC, satoshis, euros and US dollars against each other live. 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshi is fixed; the fiat conversion uses the current live price (updated every 30 seconds).

Fee calculator

Transaction fee = transaction size (in virtual bytes, vB) × fee rate (sat/vB). The current fee rates (fastest, ~30 min, ~1 h) come live from the mempool. SegWit transactions are smaller (fewer vB) and therefore cheaper.

Yearly returns

Yearly return = last price of the year versus the first recorded price, in percent. High and low are the maximum and minimum of all prices in the year. 2010 starts in July (market start), the current year is marked with *.

All-time high & drawdown

The all-time high is the highest price ever recorded. The current distance (drawdown) = (current price - ATH) ÷ ATH, plus the number of days since the ATH. All of it comes straight from the price series.

Price milestones

For each milestone (e.g. first $1, $1,000, $10,000) we find the first date the price crossed it: the earliest data point above the threshold in our price series.

Volatility clock

For each hour we compute the relative range (high - low) ÷ low and average it across all history per weekday-and-hour combination (all times in UTC). That reveals when Bitcoin moves the most on average, and that pattern needs the intraday resolution from 2012 on.

Whale tracker

We record on-chain transfers of 100 BTC or more and join each with the price at the time of the transfer (EUR and USD). The statistics are purely descriptive.

Important: we make no causal claims ("whales move the price"). Many large transfers are moves between an exchange's own wallets or into cold storage and have no impact on the market.

Is Bitcoin a bubble?

The bubble check is computed purely from daily closes: every drop of more than 50% from the prior high, the 4-year rule (the worst return over every rolling 4-year window), volatility per year (annualised standard deviation of daily log returns) and the long-term trend as a linear regression of log(price) over log(days since the genesis block in 2009).

Bitcoin cycle

Each cycle is aligned to "days since halving" and indexed to its price at the halving (index = price ÷ price-at-halving, log axis). This makes cycles at very different price levels comparable. The phase bands are a fixed naming convention, not a detector. The forward cone projects the 3 complete cycles forward from today (min/median/max). It is a historical analogy and not a forecast (n=3).

Plus a price-based market phase via the 365-day return: capitulation (≤ -35%), sideways, euphoria (≥ +100%). The thresholds are fixed and age with the cycles; we point that out in the text.

RSI bottom signal

Weekly closes, Wilder RSI(14). A signal is the week the RSI falls from ≥35 to <35 (one per episode, reset only at RSI 50), detected from 2011. Per signal we measure the return over +1/3/6/12 months and how close the actual cycle bottom was. The sample is very small; this is illustrative and not financial advice.

Seasonality

Monthly closes; monthly return = close ÷ previous close - 1. We use complete calendar years from 2013 only (before that the extreme early years distort the average). Per month we show mean and median (more robust) plus the hit rate. There are few values per month, so this is a rough orientation only.

Power-law corridor

Linear regression ln(price) = a + b·ln(days since the genesis block). The corridor is the quantiles of the deviations (residuals) from the trend: green = historically cheap, red = expensive. The fit runs over the whole history including today and shifts every day. That gives a reading relative to its own history and is not a forecast.

Sats purchasing power

Sat value = Bitcoin monthly close ÷ 100,000,000. Four views: nominal; real = nominal × CPI(today) ÷ CPI(month) (inflation-adjusted); in gold = nominal USD value ÷ gold price per gram; and €/$ against Bitcoin = how many sats 1 €/$ bought. The Bitcoin price is ours, inflation (CPI) from FRED, gold from Yahoo Finance. The analysis is purely descriptive and not a forecast.

Halving simulator

From the completed cycles we compute each cycle's peak multiple (top ÷ price at halving); these shrink from cycle to cycle (diminishing returns). The next multiple = last × decline factor (conservative/moderate/aggressive from the historical factors). An absolute peak price only appears once you assume a halving price yourself; that is your assumption and not a forecast.

Network metrics

Block height, hashrate, difficulty and mempool come live from our node. Derived from them: circulating supply (from block height and the halving schedule), stock-to-flow (supply ÷ coins newly created per year), hash price (miner revenue per TH/day = block reward × blocks/day × price ÷ hashrate) and a rough estimate of network security cost.

Mempool visualizer

Shows the unconfirmed transactions of the next projected block, live via WebSocket from our own node, grouped by fee class. You see in real time what's competing to get into the next block.

Fear & Greed index

We source the Fear & Greed index (0 = extreme fear, 100 = extreme greed) from alternative.me; we display it but do not compute it ourselves. It combines volatility, market momentum, social media, surveys, Bitcoin dominance and Google Trends into a single number.

Network crawler

We talk to the Bitcoin P2P network directly: connect to known nodes, request their peer lists (getaddr) and try to connect to every address found. Reachable nodes are grouped by country (via GeoIP), client version and network on a live world map; that is currently around 16,400 reachable nodes.

We count machines, not endpoints: one address counts once, even if it answers on several ports. Otherwise a single server could expose many ports and inflate the figure at will. Bitnodes counts the same way.

Tor nodes

Tor nodes (.onion) are only reachable over the Tor network. We run several Tor instances in parallel (each building its own set of circuits) to probe thousands of onion addresses at once. That finds ~8,400 reachable Tor nodes instead of only a few dozen with a single connection.

Validate address

Validates the address format purely by calculation: the Base58Check checksum for legacy and P2SH addresses and the bech32/bech32m checksum for SegWit and Taproot addresses. No network request is needed: an address is either mathematically valid or not.

Verify message

Recovers the public key from a signed message (ECDSA recovery) and compares the address derived from it with the one given. If they match, the holder of the key belonging to that address signed the message.

Check balance

We query an address's balance and activity server-side from mempool.space so your IP never reaches the provider. The searched address is not stored permanently.

Indicators & tension map

We compute all indicators deterministically from daily closes, with no AI model and no LLM: RSI over 14 periods, MACD (12/26/9), moving averages over 7/30/100 days, support/resistance from local extrema.

The tension map places the market in a field of RSI (momentum) and price deviation from the 30-day average (trend strength). Indicators are descriptive and not a forecast.