Returns for the average 5-year HODLer

I asked Claude to crunch some numbers on the return people got if they held bitcoin for 5 years averaged over all the 5 year periods in its history.

Here are the results across 959 overlapping 5-year windows from August 2010 through January 2026:

The headline numbers:

- Average return: 18,229% (183x your money)

- Median return: 3,108% (32x your money) — median is more representative since early periods skew the average massively

- 958 out of 959 periods were profitable (99.9%)

The one exception: If you bought on Dec 18, 2017 (near that cycle's peak at ~$18,900) and sold exactly 5 years later on Dec 16, 2022 (deep in the FTX crash bear market at ~$16,600), you lost

12%. That's the only 5-year window that lost money.

By entry year (average return):

- Early years (2010-2013) are astronomical — hundreds of thousands of percent — because you were buying at pennies/single digits

- Even the "worst" entry year with complete data (2018, buying into a bear market) still averaged 346% (4.5x)

- 2021 entries only have partial 5-year data so far (only 11 windows that have completed), but those are averaging 145% (2.4x) already

The distribution is heavily right-skewed: 46% of all 5-year holds returned between 1,000-10,000%, and 74% returned over 100%. Only one single period out of 959 lost money.

So your claim holds up almost perfectly — with the caveat of one narrow window around the 2017 peak to 2022 trough. The median 5-year holder turned $1 into $32.