Why Your Coffee Costs Fewer Sats Than It Did in 2017

There's a cafe in Oslo where a flat white costs about 45 kr. In dollars, that number only ever creeps up. But ask a different question — how many satoshis does it take to buy that coffee? — and the line on the chart bends the other way.

That's the strange thing about pricing the world in bitcoin. The cup doesn't change. The money you measure it with does.

Why does the same coffee cost fewer sats over time?

It comes down to purchasing power. Fiat currencies are inflationary by design: central banks expand the money supply, and over time prices drift up. The krone, the dollar, the yen — all of them buy a little less each year. You can watch that erosion country by country on our inflation tracker.

Bitcoin runs on the opposite logic. The supply is capped at 21 million coins, and no central authority can print more. Over multi-year spans, its purchasing power has risen. So when you price a fixed-cost item in sats, the number tends to fall — not because the coffee got cheaper, but because each sat got stronger.

What does that look like in practice?

Say a coffee costs about 5,000 sats (~$4) at recent prices. Rewind to 2017, when bitcoin traded far lower, and that same ~$4 cup would have cost tens of thousands of sats. The dollar price barely budged. The sats price collapsed.

This is the idea behind everything on SatsAtlas. Our shows how a beer, a Big Mac, or a month of rent converts into satoshis across dozens of countries. The lets you watch that conversion move over time.