Bitcoin is experiencing one of the most challenging periods in its twelve-year history, but let’s leave the panic aside and imagine what the largest crypto would look like if it were physical.
How Much Space Would Bitcoin Get?
Most regulators and government officials prefer to refer to Bitcoin as virtual currency, and for very good reasons – the cryptocurrency supply resides on servers rather than our pockets and suitcases. Thanks to the magic of blockchain, we can transfer crypto at any distance without middlemen.
But what if Bitcoins were physical and we could put all of them in a pile? In order to visualize it, we used the metallic Bitcoin souvenir sold on online stores like AliExpress. This is what it looks like:
Most of these coins have a thickness of 3 mm and a diameter of 40 mm. Considering that Bitcoin’s circulating supply is just over 18 million, here is how much space you’d need if you planned to hold all the physical coins in a vault:
That’s pretty compact, right? In this image created by our graphic designer, each bloc has 500 coins in height. For each of the three complete blocs, there are 100 coins in length and another 100 in width. Thus, a complete bloc has a total of 5 million coins.
Here is the same visualization from another angle:
If Bitcoin looked like a penny, then all of its market cap would be about a fifth of this:
This is the “Penny Harvest Field,” an exhibition at Rockefeller Center, featuring an estimated 100 million pennies worth $1 million. You can watch it from different angles here.
How Would BTC Compare to Gold and USD?
Bitcoin is often referred to as digital gold for its capability to store value. But how much space would you need for all the gold mined in history?
Last year, the World Gold Council estimated that all the gold ever mined weighed 190,040 tons, though other estimates may vary by up to 20%.
Here is an older image of all of the world’s mined gold when it was estimated to be at 166,500 tons. The cube with the dimensions of 20.5 meters would take much more space than the Bitcoins from our visualization:
Nevertheless, if it were all melted, it would fit within an Olympic Swimming Pool. Here are other interesting gold visualizations.
As for the US dollars, if you were to keep all them in cash, you’d need even more room. Here is the visualization of one trillion USD:
It’s worth mentioning that those pallets are double-stacked and are made of $100 bills.
To understand how much space you would need, you should know that the M0 money supply indicator, which includes all the physical dollars, is currently just below $3.5 trillion.
What do you think about our Bitcoin visualization? Share your thoughts in the comments section!
Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoinist: Caplevatchi Igor, AliExpress, Travelvista.net, Demonocracy.info, Pagetutor.com
