If You Invested $1,000 In Bitcoin 10 Years Ago, Here's How Much Money You'd Have Today

If you've tuned into any financial news lately, then it's relatively likely you've heard about the newfound price highs that Bitcoin has reached. The infamous father of all cryptocurrencies recently made history by surpassing the $100,000 mark in December 2024, a fundamental psychological price barrier widely talked about by speculative financiers and crypto enthusiasts alike for many years.

This marks a new era for the cryptocurrency which has experienced a wild ride of price volatility over the years. Bitcoin has seen as high as 99% price drops during cold bear market winters, and euphoric surges of up to 6,600% during roaring bull markets since it was largely made available to trade in 2010. So regardless as to whether you're bullish or bearish on the asset, it's impossible to deny that if you were an early adopter of it, you've certainly proved any naysayers very wrong up to this point. That being said, if you were indeed amongst those who bought something like $1,000 worth of Bitcoin 10 years ago, how much money would your investment be worth today? Let's take a look at the price history of Bitcoin to find out.

It's without a doubt that Bitcoin has been one of the absolute best performing assets of the last 10-plus years. For example, in October of 2010, the price of Bitcoin was around $0.10. As of around 6:00 AM on December 12th, 2024, the price was sitting at around $100,000. This means that in the last 14 years, BTC's price has surged a whopping 99,999,900%, an absolutely astronomical increase in value.

Now granted, even though the upside volatility of Bitcoin has been quite substantial, the downside has been remarkably brutal as well. Still, in the 10 years between 2011 and 2021 alone, Bitcoin outperformed all 17 of the top performing assets in the world substantially despite this. For example, during this same time frame the NASDAQ 100 only experienced cumulative gains of 541% compared to BTC's 20,000,000%. This notes a remarkable difference in ROI (return on investment) between the two. However, even if you missed the mark on buying Bitcoin in the early days of 2010, you still could potentially make a lot of money if you were to buy and hold it for another 10 years into the future. For reference, let's take a look at how much money you could've made by investing just $1,000 into Bitcoin in 2014.

2014 was a rocky year for Bitcoin. While it started off the year somewhere in the $800 range, due to unfortunate events that transpired in the following months, its price began declining. This was initially due to the infamous Mt. Gox incident, where a popular crypto exchange got hacked and ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars of investors' money. This incident sparked a BTC decline that lasted throughout 2014, leaving its price somewhere in the $300 range by the year's end. However, still, on average if you bought $1,000 worth of BTC at some point in 2014, your investment would be worth somewhere in the range of $270,000 as of December 2024.

Anyways, all this goes to show is that patience triumphs over all. This is because if you bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin at the beginning of 2014, your investment would be down significantly by the end of the year. However, if you rarely paid attention to your investment over the course of the following decade, it would be up so significantly today that any downward volatility that occurred since you first bought would be nothing in comparison to the gains made. That being said, investing in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin does come with a great degree of risk due to the volatile nature of the asset class, so it's important to do extensive research before purchasing and never invest more than you can afford to lose.