Bitcoin · power law · sources

The work this stands on

This site didn't invent the power law. It builds on the people who found it, formalised it, and chart it. Here are the primary sources, and a brief note on what each one contributed.

01 / THE THEORY

The Bitcoin Power Law Theory

Giovanni Santostasi, physicist (PhD)

Santostasi turned the power-law observation into a full theory. He argues Bitcoin's price tracks a power law of time (price ∝ t⁶ in his derivation, ≈t⁵·⁷ empirically), driven not by scarcity but by self-reinforcing network-effect feedback loops: adoption grows as a power of time, price follows users² (Metcalfe's law), and hash-rate follows price², each feeding the next. He frames these relationships as mechanistically necessary rather than mere curve-fitting, and treats the model as falsifiable over roughly the coming decade. This site's floor uses his parameterization. (We stress-test the maths on the Disprove the Math page.)

02 / THE CHART

Porkopolis Economics: "The Chart"

Matthew Mezinski, Porkopolis Economics

Mezinski maintains the widely-cited "Chart": Bitcoin's price plotted against a power-law regression of days since the genesis block, wrapped in percentile bands (≈67% and ≈95% of historical observations) rather than standard-deviation bands, a living, continuously-updated view of where price sits inside the corridor, with an R² above 0.95. A memorable framing from his work: price doubles roughly every 13% increase in Bitcoin's age. Porkopolis Economics more broadly covers monetary economics, money-supply metrics and Bitcoin through charts, writing and podcasts.

03 / THE CORRIDOR

Bitcoin's natural long-term power-law corridor of growth

Harold Christopher Burger, September 2019

One of the earliest rigorous public treatments. Burger fit power laws in log–log space and introduced the idea of a corridor bounded by two power laws (a support floor and a resistance ceiling) separating "normal" from "bull-market" behaviour (using RANSAC to handle outliers, R² ≈ 0.93). His long-range projections were strikingly prescient: $100k between 2021 and 2028, then never below it, and $1M between 2028 and 2037. The "corridor" framing that this site's chart uses traces directly back to this post.