A Story About Pricing That Somehow Became a Story About “Measuring Sticks”
How much should we charge for one Big Mac in Bitcoin? This simple pricing question unexpectedly led us down a fascinating rabbit hole about the nature of value measurement.
What started as a simple pricing question
At first, it was just a matter of setting prices. If we’re putting BTC price tags on items, who decides those numbers and how? When I started thinking about this, I had a simple hypothesis—it probably depends on the “stage of adoption.” But when I dug deeper, that hypothesis was half right and half wrong. And the half I got wrong turned out to be much more interesting.
Reality is stuck in the “middle stage”
Shops that accept BTC for Big Macs almost universally operate through fiat currency pegging. Customers convert yen to BTC and send it to the store, which immediately converts it back to yen upon receipt. BTC merely passes through as a payment rail, while the price meaning remains in yen from start to finish. Even when it looks like a BTC price tag, behind the scenes it’s just referencing yen or dollar rates second by second to update the numbers.
The “upper stage” pathway doesn’t exist
I assumed that increased adoption would gradually lead to BTC becoming the measuring stick itself—a smooth upward progression. But in reality, there’s no such slope. There’s a gap in between, caused by extreme price volatility.
To price a Big Mac at a fixed “4,000 satoshis,” the store would need to think about everything—raw materials, rent, wages—in BTC terms. As long as procurement is yen-based, BTC price tags would need constant updates with market movements. It’s more rational to price in yen from the start and convert only at payment time. The upper stage can’t be reached by individual stores. It requires a “phase transition” where entire economic zones operate in BTC.
My hypothesis missed the “reverse” scenario
I only considered forward progress. But there are real examples of regression. El Salvador, which became the world’s first country to make BTC legal tender in 2021, revoked that status in early 2025 in exchange for IMF loan conditions. Demand didn’t follow. Even when pushed from above through institutional force, without practical reasons for people to use it, things slide back. “Degree of adoption” alone isn’t enough—we need a perpendicular axis of “institutional mandate vs. organic demand.”
The question flips: “What if BTC were on the deciding side?”
The center of value is no longer in “things”
The prices of physical goods are falling and staying low. Meanwhile, something else keeps expanding: emotions, experiences, attention, data—intangible value. Here’s where it gets tricky. When you measure something that keeps expanding with money that also keeps expanding, the measuring stick stretches too and can’t measure anything. It’s like trying to measure height with a rubber ruler. Yen and dollars can be printed infinitely, so they can’t serve as the “fixed reference point” needed to counter expanding value.
Why BTC “will become” the measuring stick
What matters is that this isn’t about what “should” happen. Regardless of who wants what, the structure of value itself is sliding in that direction. There are four currents:
01. The denominator disappears. Markets naturally start seeking non-inflating denominators.
02. Value resides in “records.” Intangible value is determined only by “who, when, first.” Only the “original record” can’t be copied. The system that can inscribe this immutably becomes the measuring stick.
03. Fixed landmarks are needed. Like sailors seeking fixed stars on a rolling sea, expanding systems require immutable reference points.
04. What gets chosen is not “scarcity” but “certainty.” Rare earth elements are scarce, but new deposits or technology could change their limits—they’re uncertain. BTC’s 21 million isn’t something to be discovered; it’s the definition itself. Having a high ceiling and having a certain ceiling are different things entirely.
BTC will become a measuring stick for value not because it’s a superior currency or because someone designed it to be, but because when the center of value shifts toward things that “expand, reside in records, and can be copied,” that world structurally demands a non-inflating denominator, a platform for inscribing records, and an immutable reference point. BTC happens to meet these conditions, so it’s not chosen but rather gets sucked into the vacant seat.
In a world pricing Big Macs, BTC’s “absolutely non-inflating” property was just excessive functionality. That’s why we’ve been stuck in the middle stage. But the moment value’s center of gravity shifts to the intangible side, that excessive functionality becomes exactly the functionality we need.
One final point
Being able to measure something and whether we should measure it are different things. Making emotions and experiences measurable with finite denominators might itself be the act of putting price tags on things that shouldn’t have them. Like time spent on ships or connections that can only be born at sea—there’s value that breaks the moment you price it. While “measurable” might work, “therefore we should measure” remains a separate question. I think this tension is probably the most interesting place we’ll want to explore going forward.
We’ve come quite far from the simple question of how to price one Big Mac. But by coming this far, I feel like I can see how deep that initial question really went.