Just over 10 years old, Bitcoin might already be the best-performing investment of all time. It might also be the most volatile, and volatility has a way of luring people into ill-timed and costly investing choices. So with all the headlines about Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, it seems reasonable to ask how its investors are doing.
There’s no denying Bitcoin’s astonishing success. Its price has grown a stupefying 796,933 times since 2010. For perspective, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has grown 869 times since its inception in 1896. That means Bitcoin’s price appreciation has been 917 times that of the Dow in less than a tenth of the time.
With a surge like that, it doesn’t take a big investment to make a pile of money. A measly $100 bet on Bitcoin on day one, or close to it, would have blossomed into close to $80 million. And investors didn’t have to be there from the beginning to rack up big gains. They just had to hop on somewhere along the line and hang on to their coins.