SatsAtlas Purchasing Power Report · 2026 · pilot edition
What does Bitcoin actually buy?
The pilot edition measures purchasing power with the one product priced identically worldwide for 25 years: the Big Mac. Every figure below is observed — The Economist's price survey divided by Bitcoin's close on the observation date. No models, no projections.
Executive summary
- · A US Big Mac cost 20.98M sats in 2011. As of 2026-01-01: 7.0k sats.
- · One bitcoin bought 5 burgers in 2011 — 14,301 today.
- · Across 52 countries, the median burger's sats price changed -32.6% over the last five years.
01 · The long arc
observed · US series · log scale
The whole thesis in one line: the same burger, priced in sats, since Bitcoin had a market price. Spikes are BTC drawdowns; the drift is one-directional.
02 · Five years, country by country
52 countries with observations at both ends
The burger's sats price five years ago versus the latest observation. Negative = fewer sats buy the same burger. The biggest falls first; the table's bottom shows the exceptions.
Top 10 falls and bottom 5 shown; the full per-country data is on the worldwide chart.
03 · Method & how to cite
Source data: The Economist Big Mac index (CC BY 4.0; observed twice yearly since 2000) and SatsAtlas's own BTC daily closes. For each observation we divide the USD price by that date's BTC close. The five-year table requires an observation within ±9 months of both endpoints — countries without both are excluded rather than modelled.
The pilot edition is deliberately narrow: one observed product beats a modelled basket for verifiability. The 2027 edition will add our FX snapshot history (accruing daily since mid-2026) and the full price catalog.
SatsAtlas (2026). Purchasing Power Report, 2026 · pilot edition. Retrieved 2026-10-12 from https://satsatlas.com/reports/purchasing-power-2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
Related: the interactive chart · the Fiat League · the Readiness Index