Data tracker · Gold and bitcoin
One bitcoin bought 17.2 ounces of gold at the August 2026 monthly close, against a median of 7.9 across the 144 months since September 2014. Bitcoin compounded at 56.2% a year over that window and gold at 11.7%, at 4.4 times gold's volatility. Every comparison of gold vs bitcoin below uses only the months both assets traded.
Monthly closes, no live quote on this page yet 144 paired observations since Sep 2014
Ounces of gold per bitcoin
17.2At the August 2026 close, with bitcoin at $78,549 and gold at $4,562.75.
The date on that number
Our bitcoin series ends at the August 2026 close and this page was last written on 9 September 2026, so the figure above is last month's close rather than a live price. Bitcoin has moved more than 20% inside a single month 39 times in these 144 months and gold has never once done it. That gap matters here in a way it would not on a page about gold alone.
Where that sits on the 11-year record
Latest closes
Both prices at the same monthly close, the ratio they make, and the three risk figures that decide what the ratio is worth knowing. Each card says what the number is and which window it was measured over.
Bitcoin, monthly close
$78,549-27.4% since Aug 2025 close
The Aug 2026 close, which is the newest bitcoin observation in our series rather than a live quote.
Gold, monthly close
$4,562.75+33.1% since Aug 2025 close
The LBMA fix for the same month, so both sides of every comparison on this page come from the same date.
Ounces of gold per bitcoin
17.2-45.5% since Aug 2025 close
One bitcoin priced in gold rather than in dollars at the Aug 2026 close, which removes the currency both are usually quoted in.
Bitcoin volatility, trailing 12 months
44%annualised from monthly log returns
Across the whole common window bitcoin has run at 67% annualised.
Gold volatility, trailing 12 months
28%annualised from monthly log returns
Across the whole common window gold has run at 15% annualised.
Correlation, trailing 24 months
0.120.06 across all 143 months
Monthly log returns, gold against bitcoin. A reading near zero means the two carry no reliable relationship in either direction.
Sources: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz) and Yahoo Finance, BTC-USD monthly close. Volatility is annualised from monthly log returns, and correlation runs on the same returns. Data verified as of 2026-08-31
Read this before the charts
Bitcoin has 144 monthly closes behind it and gold has 701, so the two records are 46 years apart in length and any comparison that treats them as equivalent is comparing a sample to a lifetime. Every comparative figure on this page therefore starts at September 2014, covers only the months both assets traded, and carries that window with it wherever it appears.
Those 11.9 years contain one full interest-rate cycle and no serious inflation before 2021, so bitcoin has never been priced through a decade like 1973 to 1982. Our page on the inflation adjusted gold price measures that question against 58 years of real returns, and bitcoin has never been held through anything resembling gold's own worst stretch either. Gold fell 61.8% from its September 1980 peak and did not recover it until April 2007, which is 319 months, and every decline like it sits outside the window this page can measure and inside our gold price history instead.
A page that reads a winner out of this window is reading one cycle and calling it a law. We publish the numbers because nobody else publishes them with the sample sizes attached. We would rather you finish this page knowing what the data cannot tell you than leave with a verdict it cannot support.
Gold's record
701 monthsApril 1968 to August 2026
Bitcoin's record
144 monthsSeptember 2014 to August 2026
What this page compares
144 monthsThe overlap, and nothing outside it unless it says so
The headline series
Bitcoin priced in gold rather than in dollars, at every monthly close from September 2014 to August 2026. Removing the currency both are usually quoted in leaves a series that ran from 0.17 ounces to 36.4 and stood at 17.2 at the August 2026 close, against a median of 7.9.
Bitcoin price divided by gold price, monthly close
Aug 2026 close
17.2The axis is logarithmic because the series covers two and a half orders of magnitude, and on a linear axis the first four years would sit flat against the baseline. The dashed rule is the 7.9 median, which describes this distribution better than the 12.2 mean does, because one long stretch above 25 pulls an average a long way.
Sources come from LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz) and Yahoo Finance, BTC-USD monthly close. Data verified as of 2026-08-31
Download the gold and bitcoin dataset as CSVMonths above 30 ounces
12 of 144Drawn from 5 separate episodes rather than 12 independent readings, which is the distinction that decides how much weight the number can carry.
Months below one ounce
31 of 144For the first two and a half years of the record a whole bitcoin bought less than a single ounce of gold, and it has never gone back there since April 2017.
Range across the record
0.17 to 36.4The high is 211 times the low, and a ratio that travels two orders of magnitude in 11 years is describing one of its two assets rather than the relationship between them.
Drivers
Real rates reach both assets, and almost nothing else does. Central bank buying, jewellery demand and the halving schedule each reach exactly one of them, which is the structural reason the correlation between their monthly returns sits at 0.06 rather than at either end of the scale.
| Driver | Gold | Bitcoin | Reaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real interest rates | Gold pays no coupon, so a higher real yield raises the cost of holding it and a falling real yield removes that cost. | Bitcoin also pays no coupon, and since 2020 it has traded closer to a long-duration risk asset than to a currency. | Reaches both, which is part of why the correlation between them is near zero rather than negative. |
| Central bank buying | Official sector purchases have run above 1,000 tonnes a year since 2022, according to the World Gold Council. | No central bank holds bitcoin as a reserve asset, and the US strategic reserve holds forfeited coins rather than purchased ones. | Gold only. This is the largest structural buyer that has no equivalent on the other side. |
| The halving schedule | Mine supply grows roughly 1% to 2% a year and has never changed on a schedule anyone could read in advance. | Issuance halves every 210,000 blocks, with the last halving in April 2024 and the next due around April 2028. | Bitcoin only, and it is the one supply event in either asset with a date attached to it. |
| Exchange traded fund flows | Gold ETFs have existed since 2003 and hold a well-documented share of above-ground metal. | US spot bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, so the flow channel is two years old in this data. | Reaches both now, but only 32 of the 144 months in this window had a spot bitcoin ETF in them. |
| A liquidity squeeze | Gold fell 0.1% in March 2020, and its longer record contains months where it was sold hard to meet margin calls. | Bitcoin fell 25.1% in the same month, and it trades every hour of every day, which makes it the first thing sold. | Compresses the ratio quickly, because the asset that falls further is the one in the numerator. |
| Jewellery and industrial demand | Jewellery accounts for close to half of annual gold demand according to the World Gold Council, which puts a bid under the price that is unrelated to investment flows. | There is no equivalent, and every bitcoin bid is an investment bid or a payment bid. | Gold only, and it is part of why gold ran at 15% annualised volatility over this window while bitcoin ran at 67%. |
Sources: World Gold Council demand trends, the bitcoin protocol issuance schedule, and our own monthly series. Price series verified September 2026
The common window
A dollar put into each at the September 2014 close finished at 3.75 in gold and 203 in bitcoin by August 2026, which is 11.7% a year against 56.2% a year. Both figures are price only, with no dealer spread, storage cost, exchange fee or tax taken out.
Growth of 100, indexed at the first month both traded
Both lines start at 100 in September 2014 and share one axis, so the vertical distance between them is the whole story. The axis is logarithmic because bitcoin finishes the window at 20,300 against gold's 375, and a linear axis would render gold's entire path as a horizontal line along the bottom.
Calendar year price change, close to close
In 10 of the 11 complete calendar years in this record the two finished more than 60 percentage points apart, and in 4 of the 11 one asset rose while the other fell outright. An investor holding both would have spent most of the last decade watching one position do something the other was not doing at all.
2026 runs to the August 2026 close rather than to a December one, and it is marked with an asterisk for that reason.
What we found in the data
Both times the ratio has reached its widest, the twelve months that followed closed it, and both times gold did the work rather than bitcoin. After March 2021 gold rose 14.8% while bitcoin fell 22.7%, and after January 2025 gold rose 77.2% while bitcoin fell 23.2%. That is a real pattern and it is two observations.
| Month | Ratio | 12m later | Gold 12m | Bitcoin 12m | What was happening |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 2015 | 0.17 | 0.33 | -11.8% | +69.6% | Bitcoin bottomed at $217 after a 32% month. The lowest ratio in the record |
| December 2017 | 11.0 | 2.9 | -0.9% | -73.6% | The first mania peak, and the largest twelve-month gain in this data |
| December 2018 | 2.9 | 4.7 | +18.4% | +92.2% | Bitcoin ended the year down 73.6% while gold moved 0.9% lower |
| March 2021 | 34.8 | 23.4 | +14.8% | -22.7% | The ratio first reached 34.8, a record that stood until November 2024 |
| December 2022 | 9.1 | 20.3 | +14.6% | +155.4% | The FTX collapse. Bitcoin finished 2022 down 64.3% and gold finished it up 0.4% |
| January 2025 | 36.4 | 15.8 | +77.2% | -23.2% | The widest reading in the record, unwound by gold rising rather than bitcoin falling further |
Sources are the LBMA monthly fixes and the Yahoo Finance monthly close, and past performance does not predict future results
Median twelve-month price change, grouped by the ratio the month started at
We sorted every month with a full year of data after it by the ratio it started at, then measured what each asset did over the following twelve months. Starting above 25 ounces, gold's median gain was +38.4% against bitcoin's -20.6%, and bitcoin finished ahead in only 5 of 25 months. Starting below one ounce the order reverses completely, with bitcoin ahead in 29 of 31.
Why the sample size on that chart is smaller than it looks
The 21 months above 25 ounces come from only 4 separate episodes, because a ratio that goes wide stays wide for months at a time and each of those months gets counted again. Treating them as 25 independent observations would turn four events into a statistical law. The episode count therefore sits next to the month count on every bar, and we read this chart as four data points rather than twenty-one.
What we found in the data
Bitcoin compounded at 4.8 times gold's annual rate over this window and carried 4.4 times the volatility to do it, which is close enough to proportional that the return figure on its own tells you very little. The figures worth carrying are the depth of the falls and what each asset did while the other one was falling.
Annualised volatility of monthly log returns
Over the common window gold ran at 15.3% and bitcoin at 66.7%, a multiple of 4.37. The third bar is gold measured over its own 58-year record at 19.0%, which is a different sample and is on the chart to show that the shared window flatters gold as well as flattering bitcoin. Neither figure says anything about how either asset behaves against equities, which is the subject of our gold vs the S&P 500 page.
Peak to trough on monthly closes, common window
Bitcoin has fallen more than 30% from a monthly-close peak 5 times in 11.9 years, with the deepest running 75.6% from December 2017 to January 2019 and taking 35 months to regain the peak. Gold's deepest fall over the same months was 22.9%, from February 2026 to June 2026, and it has not been recovered yet, which still leaves it short of the 30% line bitcoin has crossed 5 times.
Bitcoin's worst twelve months
-73.6%Dec 2017 to Dec 2018
Gold's worst twelve months
-12.1%Dec 2014 to Dec 2015
Bitcoin's best twelve months
+1368.9%Dec 2016 to Dec 2017
Gold's best twelve months
+84.2%Feb 2025 to Feb 2026
The finding that matters
The correlation of monthly returns across all 143 months is 0.06, and splitting the record at January 2020 gives 0.00 across the 63 months before it and 0.11 across the 80 months after it. The story that bitcoin started trading like gold once institutions arrived, and the opposite story that it decoupled into a pure risk asset, are both being told about a relationship that has never registered in either direction.
A correlation near zero says the two do not move together on average, and it says nothing about the months that actually hurt, so we looked at those separately. Across bitcoin's 14 worst months the median bitcoin return was -22.8% and gold's median over the same months was +0.3%, with gold rising in 9 of them. Bitcoin did the same in reverse, rising in 9 of gold's 14 worst months for a median of +4.1%.
Holding both has therefore been genuinely diversifying over this window, which is a narrower claim than the one usually made for either asset. Not falling together is not the same property as rising when everything else falls, and the only month in the common window that tested the second property was March 2020, when bitcoin fell 25.1% and gold finished 0.1% lower. One month is one month, and that is the honest limit of what these 144 observations can support.
Correlation, all 143 months
0.06Gold up during bitcoin's worst months
9 of 14Months both fell together
28 of 143What the risk numbers cannot see
Every drawdown here is measured on monthly closes, so a fall of 40% inside a month that recovered before the close does not appear in this data at all, and bitcoin has done exactly that more than once. Gold's own figures over this window are flattered in a different way, because its worst stretch on record ran from September 1980 to August 1999 and finished 15 years before this page's bitcoin series starts. Neither asset's real risk fits inside 11 years of month-end prices.
Timeline
Every entry carries both prices at that monthly close, the ounces of gold a bitcoin bought, and where the ratio stood twelve months later, so the story and the number cannot drift apart.
September 2014
The comparison becomes possible
Our bitcoin series starts here because this is the first month with a clean exchange close behind it, and one bitcoin bought about a third of an ounce of gold. Gold's own record was already 46 years old at that point, which is the asymmetry every figure on this page has to be read through.
January 2015
Bitcoin bottoms at $217
After a 32% fall inside a single month, one bitcoin bought 0.17 of an ounce of gold, which is the lowest reading in the record. Anyone measuring the two assets against each other on that date would have concluded that bitcoin was a failed experiment, and the twelve months that followed took the ratio to 0.33.
December 2017
The first mania peak
Bitcoin closed December at $14,156.40 after rising 1,369% over twelve months, the largest one-year gain anywhere in this data, and one bitcoin bought almost 11 ounces of gold for the first time. Gold finished the same year up 12.7%, which nobody was writing about.
December 2018
Bitcoin ends the year down 74%
The 2018 calendar year took bitcoin from $14,156.40 to $3,742.70 while gold moved 0.9% lower, so the ratio fell from almost 11 ounces back to under 3. This is the single clearest month in the record for the claim that the two assets are not doing the same job.
March 2020
The Covid liquidity event
In the one month of the common window when every asset was being sold at once to raise dollars, bitcoin fell 25.1% and gold finished 0.1% lower. That is the closest thing to a controlled test of the hedge claim that these 11 years contain, and it is a sample of one.
March 2021
The ratio reaches 34.8 for the first time
Bitcoin closed March at $58,918.83 against gold at $1,691.05, and one bitcoin bought 34.8 ounces, a record that stood until November 2024. Over the twelve months that followed gold rose 14.8% and bitcoin fell 22.7%, which is the same shape the January 2025 record produced four years later.
December 2022
After the FTX collapse
Bitcoin ended 2022 down 64.3% for the year with the ratio back at 9.1, while gold finished the same year 0.4% higher, so an investor holding both would have watched one position halve twice over and the other do nothing at all. The ratio more than doubled again over the following twelve months.
January 2025
The record high of 36.4 ounces
Bitcoin closed January above $102,000 with gold at $2,812.05, and one bitcoin bought 36.4 ounces, the widest reading in the record. Over the twelve months that followed gold rose 77.2% and bitcoin fell 23.2%, taking the ratio down to 15.8.
February 2026
Gold's record close, and bitcoin 42% below its own
Gold closed February at $5,222.30, the highest monthly close in its 58-year record, while bitcoin sat 42.1% below the peak it made in July 2025. At 12.8 ounces the ratio was back to where it last sat in February 2023, and only 6 of the 35 months in between had closed below 15.
Our view
Every entry below carries the day it was written. A tracker with one undated opinion sitting under live data is the failure mode this page was built to avoid, so an old note here stays visible as an old note rather than passing for current thinking.
· latest
The bitcoin close at the top of this page is the 31 August 2026 monthly close rather than a live price, and this page was written on 9 September 2026. Bitcoin has moved more than 20% inside a single month 39 times in these 144 months and gold has never once done it. That close can sit a long way from where bitcoin trades this afternoon, and we would rather say so than round the gap away.
The January 2025 reading of 36.4 ounces has now fully unwound, and it did so with gold doing the work rather than bitcoin. Gold rose 77.2% over those twelve months while bitcoin fell 23.2%, which is not the direction most people assumed a wide ratio would close from.
We rechecked the correlation between the two after several readers asked whether bitcoin had started trading like gold, and the answer in this data is that nothing changed. Monthly returns correlated at effectively zero before 2020 and at effectively zero after it, so the decoupling story and the convergence story are both being told about a relationship that has never existed.
Written by the Gold IRA Digest Editorial Team. Opinion, labelled as opinion, and never a recommendation to buy or sell either asset.
What is scheduled
Windows are months rather than exact dates, because the later release dates are not published yet and inventing one would be the same mistake as inventing a verification date.
What this means if you hold metal in an IRA
A self-directed IRA can hold both, and it holds them under different rules with different costs attached. Section 408(m) sets the purity standard and the depository requirement for your bullion. The IRS treats virtual currency as property under Notice 2014-21 instead, so the storage arrangement that governs your gold does not reach your bitcoin at all. The practical difference shows up on the fee schedule, because a custodian charging a flat annual fee on metal will often charge a percentage of assets on the crypto. On a $100,000 position a 1% asset-based fee is $1,000 a year, against a storage fee that usually runs $100 to $300. Our page on gold IRA fees carries what each custodian we called charges, with the date we checked it.
The number that decides your outcome is not on this page. It is the premium over spot on the day you buy and the annual fee you agreed to, both of which we would rather you had in writing before the ratio above enters the decision at all.
Common questions
How this page is built
The ratio is the bitcoin price divided by the gold price, both in US dollars, joined on month-end dates so that neither side of a comparison is dated differently from the other. Gold uses the LBMA London fixes and bitcoin uses the Yahoo Finance monthly close, giving 144 paired observations from September 2014. There is no live bitcoin feed behind this page, so both sides are month-end closes, and the live metal numbers sit on our gold price today and silver price today pages. Volatility is annualised from monthly log returns, drawdowns are measured peak to trough on monthly closes, and correlation runs on the same monthly log returns rather than on prices.
Both series are joined on their month-end date rather than by position, so a repeated or missing month in either file collapses before any arithmetic reaches it, which is the guard that keeps a month that never happened out of the returns. Forward returns are simple price changes with no dealer spread, storage cost, exchange fee or tax applied, so a real outcome in either asset is worse than these figures by whatever the round trip costs. Every chart is rendered on the server and works with JavaScript disabled, which is also why the assistants that quote this page can read it.
Sources
The full dataset is available as a gold and bitcoin monthly CSV, and corrections go to the editorial team and are logged publicly.
Gold IRA Digest is an independent publisher. This page is information rather than investment advice, and nothing on it recommends buying or selling either asset. Past performance does not predict future results. Some links on this site earn us a commission, which never changes what we publish about a company or an asset.