What if you bought Bitcoin in 2012?
Crypto · Coin. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play20000.0× · S&P 500 same money: $5,312
$1,000 in Bitcoin at the start of 2012 would be worth about $20,000,000 today — 20000.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Bitcoin was described in a 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in January 2009 as digital money without a central issuer, with supply capped at 21 million coins. In 2012 it was a niche curiosity for cypherpunks and online drug markets such as Silk Road. Its path since has alternated between manias and collapses: the Mt. Gox exchange failed in 2014 after losing hundreds of thousands of coins, the 2017 retail frenzy took the price near $20,000 before an 80-odd percent crash, and the 2021 boom, powered by stimulus money and corporate buyers such as MicroStrategy, ended in the 2022 crypto-lending and FTX collapses.
Each time, the price eventually recovered to new highs. El Salvador made it legal tender in 2021, US spot bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024 and drew enormous inflows, and a crypto-friendly US administration announced a strategic bitcoin reserve in 2025. The price passed $100,000 for the first time in December 2024. Few assets in history turned $1,000 into as much, and few made holders endure as many stomach-churning drawdowns along the way.
The lesson: Extraordinary returns came bundled with repeated drawdowns of 75 percent or more; the gains went mostly to holders who could survive each collapse without selling.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $5.00 | $20,000,000 | $5,312 | 20000.0× |
| 2015 | $315 | $317,460 | $3,301 | 317.5× |
| 2018 | $14,000 | $7,143 | $2,519 | 7.1× |
| 2020 | $7,200 | $13,889 | $2,092 | 13.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2012, turning $1,000 into $20,000,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,312.
On this day
- 3 January 2009: Bitcoin's genesis block is mined
- 7 February 2014: Mt. Gox halts bitcoin withdrawals
- 12 May 2021: Musk stops accepting Bitcoin for Teslas
- 19 May 2021: Bitcoin's May crash
- 22 May 2010: Two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Bitcoin is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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