Satoshi Institute · retirement
Stack what you have, keep buying, then live off it. The honest answer isn't one age — it's a range, set by how fast you assume Bitcoin grows. So this shows you both ends: the power-law trend, and a sober 10% a year.
Earliest you could retire — by assumption
Power-law trend
Conservative · 10% / yr
The spread between those two is the real answer. Everything here hinges on one guess — how fast Bitcoin grows. The power-law trend implies roughly 20% a year, decelerating; the conservative line assumes 10%. Real returns could be lower, or negative for years at a stretch. Plan toward the cautious end.
BTC ≈ $62,958 · refresh live
A projection, not a plan, and not financial or retirement advice. It assumes steady contributions, a smooth growth path, and selling Bitcoin to fund spending, none of which the real world delivers. It ignores taxes on those sales, which are real and can be large. The power-law fit uses 2013–present data and extrapolation grows less reliable the further out it runs. The further the date, the wider the true uncertainty.
FAQ
The tool doesn't answer that — you do. What it does is make the math honest.
The core problem with most retirement planning is that it uses historical equity returns (7–10% real CAGR) as a baseline, without acknowledging that those returns come from a specific 80-year period of American economic dominance that may not repeat. Bitcoin's historical returns are much higher and much more volatile. Both sets of numbers are backward-looking.
What the calculator actually models:
The future value of Bitcoin holdings under a user-specified annual appreciation rate, compared to a traditional portfolio. It also models withdrawal sustainability using a sequence-of-returns framework — which matters enormously for Bitcoin, because a 70%+ drawdown in year one of retirement is categorically different from the same drawdown in year fifteen.
The arguments for including Bitcoin in retirement planning:
The arguments against treating it as a primary retirement asset:
The responsible use of this tool is to model a range of appreciation scenarios including flat and negative, and to treat the Bitcoin allocation as a component of a diversified plan rather than the plan itself.
Methodology
Solves for the BTC stack required to fund annual expenses indefinitely at a chosen safe withdrawal rate, projected forward on the power-law trend.
Default w = 3.5% — below the equities-derived 4% rule because BTC volatility punishes higher rates in sequence-of-returns terms. The conservative (lower-band) case is the planning anchor; the bull number sizes upside, not plan.