'The price of Bitcoin' isn't really one number

For stocks, the closing price on a single listing exchange usually serves as the official price. Crypto has no such central close. Bitcoin trades around the clock across hundreds of exchanges worldwide, each with its own independent order book. So even at the same instant, the 'BTC price' differs from exchange to exchange — slightly, and sometimes substantially. The single number that aggregators like CoinGecko show on screen is really a representative value — a volume-weighted average across many exchanges — not the actual execution price at any one venue.

The figures in this game's data are exactly that kind of representative value. Bitcoin is recorded at $19,800 in December 2017, yet in that very period coins on Korean exchanges traded higher than abroad even after currency conversion. That gap is the famous 'Kimchi Premium.' With capital-movement controls and overheated domestic demand stacking up, a single Bitcoin was worth a different amount in Seoul than in New York. Filling in the per-moment prices, I saw that behind the one-line memory of 'about $20K back then' lay a price band scattered across exchanges.

When an exchange collapses, the price splinters too

An exchange is the window through which we observe a price — and when it breaks, that very window distorts the price. Right after Bitcoin first hit $31 in 2011, the Mt. Gox hack shook confidence and the price soon crashed to $2. Because the overwhelming majority of trading sat on a single exchange back then, one venue's incident effectively became 'the whole market's price.'

The 2022 FTX bankruptcy is even starker. Bitcoin was pushed down to $16,500 by the shock, and Solana — a major FTX-backed coin — crashed to $8 over the same span, roughly 97% off its high. One exchange's insolvency dragged down a specific coin's price wholesale. The same Solana was $260 in November 2021 and $8 in December 2022 — a price gap, carved out by timing alone, on the order of magnitudes within a single year.

Shift the moment by just days and the order of magnitude changes

It isn't only the exchange — the 'when' splits the price too. Luna (Terra) collapsed from $120 to nearly $0 in just three days in May 2022. The data holds the post-collapse figure of $0.0001, meaning the same coin in the same month differs by over a millionfold across a few days. Dogecoin is the same story: below $0.002 in the March 2020 COVID crash, then $0.74 by May 2021 — about 370x over a year-ish gap in timing. The question 'how much is Dogecoin?' has no valid answer at all unless you pin down the moment.

✍️ Operator's note — Nowhere was my memory lazier than with coin prices — I had them filed away as 'a single number.' Lined up by moment, though, the same Solana swung between $260 and $8, and Luna lost entire orders of magnitude in days. I took that as a signal that crypto is fundamentally a price-scattered asset. So when someone says 'I hear coin X is at such-and-such,' the question fires automatically in my head: 'which exchange, as of what date?'

What this game trains

This game does not recommend buying or selling any coin. It is not investment advice, and the score shown is not user statistics — it is simply the result of comparing your guess against historical record data. There is exactly one thing it trains: the habit of looking at timing and venue together whenever you look at a price. As you run rounds, juggling huge numbers ($69,000) and tiny decimals ($0.003), your order-of-magnitude sense gets a workout, and when a wrong round reveals the real per-moment price, you see how far your 'single point of memory' strayed from the actual distribution. Some coins you can roughly nail just by getting the moment right; others throw you off by whole orders of magnitude if you don't know the exchange crisis behind them — experiencing that difference firsthand is the point.