Bitcoin · Retirement Guide · Power Law
How much BTC to retire?
A daily-updated power-law fit to Bitcoin's entire price history, used to estimate how much BTC you need to be holding in your target retirement year to fund the rest of your life. The model assumes you simply hold, with no further buying, so it is also the amount you'd need to own today and never touch.
- Set your own annual spend (default $100k)
- 7% inflation, life expectancy 100
- Eight current-age cohorts (5 / 15 / 25 / 35 / 45 / 55 / 65 / 75)
- Refit nightly
- Set your own inflation, life expectancy, retirement age
- Add your existing BTC stack and weekly DCA
- Pick the model quantile (q=0.01 through q=0.50)
- See the earliest age you could actually retire
Standard guide · free
Set your spend
You're changing annual spend - the chart and table below update live. Inflation, life expectancy, the model quantile, and the personal on-track calculator are part of membership.
Bitcoin Needed to Retire: $100k/year
@sminston_with · updated 2026-08-24
| Current Age | 2026 | 2031 | 2036 | 2041 | 2046 | 2051 | 2056 | 2061 | 2066 | 2071 | 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Age 5 | 8.34 | 4.05 | 2.51 | 1.80 | 1.40 | 1.15 | 0.975 | 0.845 | 0.741 | 0.654 | 0.578 |
| Age 15 | 8.20 | 3.91 | 2.38 | 1.66 | 1.26 | 1.01 | 0.837 | 0.707 | 0.603 | 0.516 | 0.439 |
| Age 25 | 8.08 | 3.79 | 2.25 | 1.54 | 1.14 | 0.887 | 0.713 | 0.582 | 0.478 | 0.391 | 0.315 |
| Age 35 | 7.96 | 3.67 | 2.13 | 1.42 | 1.02 | 0.767 | 0.592 | 0.461 | 0.357 | 0.270 | 0.194 |
| Age 45 | 7.83 | 3.54 | 2.01 | 1.29 | 0.892 | 0.641 | 0.467 | 0.336 | 0.232 | 0.145 | 0.069 |
| Age 55 | 7.69 | 3.40 | 1.86 | 1.14 | 0.747 | 0.496 | 0.322 | 0.191 | 0.087 | 0.000 | - |
| Age 65 | 7.49 | 3.21 | 1.67 | 0.954 | 0.556 | 0.305 | 0.131 | 0.000 | - | - | - |
| Age 75 | 7.19 | 2.90 | 1.36 | 0.649 | 0.251 | 0.000 | - | - | - | - | - |
Every model here is the same power law, ln(price) = ln(k) + a · ln(days since 2009-01-03), fit at a different quantile. The quantile decides which part of Bitcoin's price distribution the line tracks. At q=0.05 it draws a floor that only about 5% of days have ever closed below. At q=0.50 it draws the median. OLS fits the mean instead of a quantile.
A lower quantile is a more conservative plan. The line sits under the bulk of history, so it assumes you retire into weakness rather than strength. That demands more BTC up front, and it is exactly what protects you from volatility. If price spends a cycle below trend, a plan built on the median quietly breaks, while a plan built near the floor still funds itself.
There is also a structural reason to sit low. My own characterization work finds that the cleanest, most genuinely power-law behaviour lives in the 5th to 10th percentile band. Higher quantiles are increasingly shaped by cycle blow-off tops, which are the least repeatable part of the record. Fitting near the floor tracks the part of the distribution that has actually held its shape, making it both the conservative choice and the stable one.
Free viewers get q=0.05. Members can switch between OLS and q=0.01 through q=0.50.
- Annual spendfree
- Your cost of living in today's dollars. It scales the whole table linearly, so doubling it doubles every BTC figure.
- Inflation ratemember
- Compounds your spend from today through each retirement year. Default 7%. It bites twice, inflating both the first year of retirement and every year after it.
- Life expectancymember
- How long the money has to last. Default 100, deliberately long, because running out is the failure that matters.
- Modelmember
- Which quantile, or OLS, prices your future withdrawals. See Models on the left.
- Model cutoff datemember
- Trains the fit only on data up to a chosen day, then projects forward blind. Set it to a past date to ask what this guide would have told you then. That is the honest test of whether the model holds up out of sample.
- Current + retirement agemember
- Your row in the table, and the year you stop earning.
- Stack + weekly DCAmember
- Feeds the on-track score: what you hold now, plus what you keep buying, projected against what you will need.
The numbers in the table are BTC held today. They already account for the price path, so you are not expected to keep buying unless you say so.
Unlock the full guide with custom assumptions as a member
- Set your own annual spend
- Chart + table update as you type
- 7% inflation, life 100, q=0.05 fixed
- Every standard indicator chart
- Inflation, life expectancy, model & cutoff date
- Your age and target retirement age
- Existing stack + weekly DCA → on-track score
- Earliest age you can actually retire
- Downloadable PDF report
- The newsletter - long-form deep dives
- All Smitty Original charts
- All stacking tools, fully customizable
