I talk about Bitcoin's power law support line a lot, so...
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I finally ran a test everyone (probably) wonders about:
How much does “buying the power law support” actually beat random timing in Bitcoin?

It’s not even close. Comparing the two strategies from Jan 2015 → Nov 2025 (current ~$87k BTC)... (keep reading)

🧵1/5👇 2/5

...Support strategy: (Buy $100 every single time BTC dips below the long-term power law floor):

→ 236 buys
→ Total cash invested: $23,600
→ BTC accumulated: 34.56 BTC
→ Final portfolio value today: $3,001,941

Yes, 3 mill from 23 G's.

I just watched Luke Mikic's "takedown" of the Power Law on Simply Bitcoin (last ~15 mins of the linked video here) so you don't have to.

Here is, in chronological order, the list of errors, inaccuracies, fallacies, unfounded assumptions, contradictions, and false statements in the video (20 total)
🧵👇

https://x.com/LukeMikic21/status/1988320890501923221?s=20

1. Opens the segment by saying you should never trust charts - then immediately shares a chart supporting his belief in an impending supply shortage.

2. Claims today's global wealth is $900T (it's actually around one-third of that).

3. Bizarrely compares the Power Law's projected 2040 market cap to his incorrect $900T global wealth figure, concluding that 9% "feels low."

4. Refers to Michael Saylor's "really good chart" on projected global wealth - despite having just said, "never trust charts."

5. Claims the Power Law projects Bitcoin at $5 million per coin in 2045 (the actual projection is about $11.25 million per coin).

Luke Mikic doesn't like my Bitcoin Retirement Guide.

I think where Luke goes wrong is, he doesn't acknowledge the observed diminishing returns and sees that as a dirty word.

I don't.

Diminishing returns is indicative of a maturing, established asset that is STILL outperforming everything even with the diminishing returns.

Quick 🧵👇

x.com/sminston_with/… Rather than track the data, Luke suggests you should believe this trend will reverse course - rather than trending from mid-40%CAGR to mid-20% CAGR over the next 10-20 years, he tells you it will go toward 60%, 90%, or higher. Sound like good "planning?" Would you plan your loved one's retirement that way?

For good planning, I suggest start with accepting reality. Thinking something 'isn't bullish enough' isn't good enough.

🟠 How much Bitcoin does the average person need to retire?

Here, its calculated and presented in radial charts 🍥
for 96 countries, ages 5 - 75, retiring in 2025 - 2055.
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Based on each country’s average income level, adjusted for inflation (7% M2 expansion), and of course utilizing the highly reliable power law support line (5th percentile) as the BTC price model - check out the numbers based on your current age.

Assumes: spending the actual Bitcoin for annual living expenses, and expecting to live to age 100.

Highlights:
🍥MOST people in MOST countries still need less than 1 BTC for 2035 and out.
🍥If retiring this year, most countries need between 1-10 BTC.
🍥To retire in 2045 in BITCOIN-FRIENDLY countries:
• El Salvador: 0.023 - 0.13 BTC
• Switzerland: 0.26 - 1.5 BTC
• Portugal: 0.07 - 0.39 BTC

🧵 2025 → 2055 Retirement visual thread 👇 2025 Retirement:

Many have asked, and so here it is: FULL re-post of Smitty's Bitcoin Retirement Guide 📙
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Paginated, 600 DPI, $50k - $1M USD annual expense scenarios, assumed future 7% average annual inflation, and does not account for taxes.
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BOOKMARK this so you can always refer back to it!

Download, save, print-out, share 🧵👇 P.1 $50k / year

Been feeling like we're on the longest Bitcoin crab crawl ever?

Not only would you be right - but there is something else unique about the current "crab market" as I call it.

It is the first of all the crab markets to have a steeper slope than the previous one.

Keep reading 👇 I fitted each crab market using an exponential function, which gives us the growth rate of each (the is the "Crab Crawl Slope" in the inset plot.

When you plot each of the slopes, they actually behave as a power law on their own (R2 > 99.5). This means that the slope of the CURRENT CRAB WALK we are in should have a slope LESS STEEP than the one from 2019-2020...

Smitty's Bitcoin Retirement Guide: e-Book Edition 📙
*Only here on X*

The wait is finally over - you're going to want to bookmark this.
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🧵Thread👇

Without detailing the exact instructions on how to use the guide, this time around, I will explain the important changes - and from there, please engage, share, and enjoy!

1) Updated Model: This is a critical solution, and I'll explain why. Rather than using the median (50th quantile) power regression model, as was used in previous versions, Smitty's e-Book uses the 5th quantile. Why? Statistically, theoretically, this ensures that 95% of the time the desired annual withdrawal rate (living/spending costs) will not need to be down-adjusted due to volatility - because by definition, only 5% of the price falls below this 'support' line (see my other models). Therefore, you should only expect to need to down-adjust roughly once in 20 years. This makes this e-Book version more conservative, while maintaining realism and (clearly) attainability of stacking targets (see the various pages).

2) e-Book Format: I'm only posting these to X for now; but since in the past there has been so much positive engagement, I wanted to keep the overall 'brand' while enhancing the stylings so that it feels like an easy mini reader for folks comparing spending/stacking scenarios for retirement. It is also high DPI, now with nice borders, headers/footers and even page numbers. Feel free to print out and make a physical copy, or choose your favorite scenario, laminate and post on the wall.

3) Table addition: I've been meaning to include this change for a while. Not all of us are graphic/visually inclined, and indeed many of us are table/spreadsheet inclined. Therefore, below the graphs, I added easy-to-read look-up tables which exactly map to the Retirement Years and Current Age from the graphs, along with exact color-matching according to Current Age. No more needing to follow lines and line intersections; should also help for the visually impaired.

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As always, the key assumptions in the guide to remember:

1*Assumed 7% annual inflation rate going forward (not easy to predict but historical expansion has been pretty close to this).
2*Taxes not accounted for - tax policy is too variable and too liable to change in any given year - please do your own homework for your own situation.
3*You're living to 100 (or at least planning your conservative BTC spend-down plan out to that age).
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So, as always, flip through the replies in this thread, and enjoy the new tool!

"Helping you develop a better Bitcoin stacking target for life planning." - Sminston With

#notfinancialadvice P.1 - $50k/year

Sminston's Bitcoin Retirement Guide (Part Deux):
Retirement Year

Again helping to answer the question of "How much Bitcoin should I get?"

A thread 🧵👇
. . .

Instructions to use this version:

1) Find the chart in the replies (below) that corresponds to your expected annual living cost (in 2025 dollars) (e.g. $50k/year, $150k/year, etc.).

2) Find the year you expect to retire on the x-axis.

3) Find the colored, curved line (legend for reference) that corresponds to your *Current Age* (if it doesn't have your exact age, find the two closest to your current age and imagine a curved line drawn between them).

3) Trace up the vertical line from your retirement year to a colored line (if the colors don't help, just count the lines - there are only 8 of them).

4) Find where the vertical line of your retirement year meets your Current Age line - then trace this to the y-axis value they meet at. This y-axis value is your "Bitcoin Needed (BTC)" to retire that year. Whether you obtain that Bitcoin today, or in the future, by that date you need that amount of Bitcoin.

. . .

Assumptions are the same as the last Bitcoin Retirement Guide post:

1) Future BTC price is projected by 50th percentile regression power law model.

2) Everyone dies at age 100.

3) Money supply (USD) grows at constant rate of 7%CAGR - meaning, whichever colored line you choose accounts for this 7% inflation from today to your retirement year, and beyond (ex: if you choose $100,000/year, in 2035 that would be about $196,715 - the model accounts for this).

4) The Bitcoin Needed Today amounts represent the minimum amount to prevent your BTC stack from hitting zero by age 100 - this is meant to be a minimum target, and therefore the individual should determine how much additional buffer BTC they should target.

5) Assumes a 'constant withdrawal rate in real 2025 USD terms', meaning the only increase year-year is to offset assumed 7% inflation.

6) Assumes no taxes will exist on withdrawals.

Disclaimers:

*this is NOT financial advice
**this is NOT a suggestion that you should sell your Bitcoin

. . .
$50,000/ year: $100,000/ year:

Both online and IRL, the question I continue to hear the most is "How much Bitcoin should I get?"

I've spent some time putting a visual guide together that has helped some people close to me set stacking targets based on when they expect to retire. I hope this can also be helpful to you or the people you care about.
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How it works:
1) Decide the age at which you would hypothetically retire—the point at which you could live off it for the rest of your life if necessary (not that you'd actually want to sell it). There are groups of lines that represent retirement ages 35, 45, 55, 65 and 75 for simplicity.

2) Determine (in 2025 dollars) the annual expenses you expect to live on starting in your year of retirement (these are denoted by the different colors dark grey --> Bitcoin orange, $50,000/yr --> $300,000/yr)

3) Find your current age on the x-axis

4) Find where the line colored according to your expected annual living cost, within the Retire@ line group of your retirement age target, intersects with the line of your current age

The Bitcoin Needed Today (BTC) that corresponds with that point (see y-axis) is the minimum amount you should target.

If the several groups of lines are too difficult to navigate, look below in this thread's replies to see the isolated Retire@ cases by age (35, 45, 55, 65, 75).

Assumptions:
1) Future BTC price is projected by 50th percentile power law model.
2) Everyone dies at age 100.
3) Money supply (USD) grows at constant rate of 7%CAGR - meaning, whichever colored line you choose accounts for this 7% inflation from today to your retirement year, and beyond (ex: if you choose $100,000/year, in 2035 that would be about $196,715 - the model accounts for this).
4) The Bitcoin Needed Today amounts represent the minimum amount to prevent your BTC stack from hitting zero by age 100 - this is meant to be a minimum target, and therefore the individual should determine how much additional buffer BTC they should target.
5) Assumes a 'constant withdrawal rate in real 2025 USD terms', meaning the only increase year-year is to offset assumed 7% inflation.
6) Assumes no taxes will exist on withdrawals.

Disclaimers:
*this is NOT financial advice
**this is NOT a suggestion that you should sell your Bitcoin Retire at 35:

I bring you: The Bitcoin Decay Channel™

. . .

1/ There are a number of #Bitcoin price guides both inside and outside the X sphere; oscillators/indexes for short-term trading, and projections for longer-term planning. The Decay Channel is the latter but is the basis for an index that I will follow up with soon.

The problem is, it is very difficult to find projections that are tracking the true, observed bounds of the price channel so far (the cycle tops and the bottoms), and often the methods used, I think, lead to some amount of wishful thinking towards the top end. You may hear about the ‘exponential decay’ of the price bubbles, but there has not been a ‘roadmap’ in the form of a channel that clearly and explicitly shows this and projects it out. I believe this is the best way to set realistic expectations for the years and cycles to come.

The recipe for the Decay Channel is simple:

It uses a solid support line for the bottom of the channel, generated by fitting the #powerlaw we all know and love.

The channel upper bound is generated by fitting a simple exponential model to the top data residuals using regression; this creates the ‘decaying’ trend of the upper channel that you see, where it actually converges into and intersects with the power law support line.

[Note: in the plots, showing support line as derived with .01, .03, .05 quantile regression for comparison] 2/ Things you’ll notice from The Decay Channel:

a) The exponential decay of the cycle tops is hard to ignore, and it shows the upper bound intersecting the power law support in 2031 (assuming you use all historical data; some argue to leave out outliers from 2010, but this is a topic for another time).

This is a serious thing to consider - what happens in 2031? This would imply that the bubbles... completely disappear at that point. And, that we only have two significant bubbles left before the closing of the Decay Channel in 2031. This, of course, assumes the ~4-year period of the cycles continues until then.

It seems hard to imagine that hype cycles/bubbles/bitcoin bull runs will go away, but this is what the data points to. There is a world of opportunity to continue exploring why, but my early stab at the cause is: Bitcoin behaves both like a natural system based on a true network, but is also traded in the marketplace by populations of humans; the power law support is indicative of the true nature of the scale-invariant network, while bubbles represent the excitation seen in human markets during bullish phases following liquidity surges.

[Legend shown here, separately, to let the plots look cleaner]