Dacoinminster's Power Law (2013)
The first recorded sighting of Bitcoin's power law. In February 2013, with bitcoin near $25, a Bitcointalk user dropped the price history into a spreadsheet and asked Excel for a power trendline. This is the line it gave him, drawn against every day of price since - never refit, never adjusted.
Dacoinminster's Power Law (2013)
@sminston_with · updated 2026-09-02
Who drew it
On 2013-02-13, a user posting as dacoinminster opened a Bitcointalk thread arguing that bitcoin's price had been following a smooth curve in time rather than lurching at random. He was not proposing a theory of money. He had a spreadsheet, and Excel had offered him a trendline:
= 4.41877086088824E-17*(X^5.59806919936792)X is days since the genesis block. Bitcoin was near $24.64 that week, and his formula put it at $26.82. The original thread is still up.
Why it is worth looking at
Every model on this site is fit to the whole price history, including the part it is being judged on. This one is not. It was fixed 13.5 years ago on the price history that existed then - about two and a half years of it - and everything to the right of that red dot is data it never saw.
Since he posted it, bitcoin has gone up 3,141x. His line, extended over the same stretch, reads $93,644 today against an actual $77,408 - the price sits at 0.83x the curve. A trendline drawn when a bitcoin cost less than a restaurant meal is, after two full cycles, wrong by about 21%.
It has not always been that close. Out of sample the price has spent 70% of days within a factor of two of the line, with a median position of 1.41x - slightly above it. But at the widest, on 2013-11-29, price ran 15.7x above the curve. A power law describes the middle of Bitcoin's behaviour, not its manias.
The lower panel is that error, plotted. It is price divided by the model, so 1.0 means the 2013 formula was exactly right. On a log axis it is the vertical gap between the two lines above, read as a multiple - above 1 is bitcoin running ahead of the curve, below 1 is it lagging.
What it is not is a forecast. A power law fits a straight line through log price against log age, and a straight line is a very forgiving shape on a chart that spans six orders of magnitude - it can be badly wrong in dollars while still looking close. Nothing obliges the next decade to sit on it.