Bitcoin vs US M2

Bitcoin against the US money supply, both indexed to 100 — no lag offset, no second axis.

Data to 2026-09-22. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Bitcoin against the US money supply, both rebased to 100 on one log axis. Since 2014 M2 has roughly doubled while Bitcoin has risen by more than two orders of magnitude. The comparison is the clearest statement of the hard-money argument: one supply is a policy decision, the other is a fixed rule.

How it's calculated

Both series divided by their first value and multiplied by 100. No lag offset is applied. Widely circulated versions of this chart shift M2 forward by somewhere between ten and fifteen weeks — no two publishers agree on the number — until the lines appear to align. That is curve fitting, and it is not done here.

What it did in past cycles

Both start at 100 on 2014-09-17. M2 has moved almost in a straight line: 120.5 (2017-12-16), 185.2 (2021-11-08), 193.1 (2025-10-06). Bitcoin over the same anchors: 4,263, then 14,770, then 27,280.

Put plainly, at the October 2025 peak Bitcoin was 273 times its September 2014 level while US M2 was 1.93 times its own — and by the June 2026 low Bitcoin had fallen back to 128 times while M2 kept rising to 201.

The 2020–21 jump in M2 is the segment most often cited, and it is genuinely large: from roughly 140 to 185 in about eighteen months. It is also the segment where the correlation argument is weakest, because almost every asset rose over that window.

What it doesn't tell you

This is US M2, not global liquidity. It shows relative growth, not causation: money-supply expansion and Bitcoin's price have both trended up over the period, and this chart cannot distinguish a causal relationship from two series that happen to rise together.

M2 is also a slow, smooth, monthly series and Bitcoin is a daily market price. Two lines at wildly different frequencies on one axis will always look related; the eye reads the smooth line as a trend the volatile one is following. Very little of that impression survives being stated numerically.

Reading it with other metrics

Bitcoin vs US public debt makes the same argument against a different fiscal series, and US debt priced in Bitcoin inverts it into a single line.

Bitcoin priced in gold is the version with no fiat on either side, which is the stronger test — if the hard-money case only shows up against a depreciating unit, it is an argument about the unit. How inflation taxes savers works through what this means for someone holding currency.