Bitcoin is famous for its booms and busts, which has given rise, especially in the mainstream media, to the theory that buying Bitcoin is equivalent to using your money as firelighters. This frightens people from entering the market, or even learning about Bitcoin itself, worried that they will become one of innumerable investors left gnashing their teeth as Bitcoin plummets. One look at Bitcoin’s ‘Underwater Window’ however shows that nothing could be further from the truth.
What is the Bitcoin Underwater Window
Given the frequency with which the media bashes Bitcoin’s perceived ability to make the homed homeless, you would think that the odds are firmly stacked against investors when it comes to making money from it.
To test this we created the ‘Bitcoin Underwater Window’, which we define as being the various periods during Bitcoin’s trading history in which you could have bought it and never had the opportunity to at least break even. These periods are:
- December 16-19, 2017 (4 days)
- January 5-9, 2018 (5 days)
- June 26, 2019 (1 day)
- August 6-14, 2019 (9 days)
Total: 19 days
So in Bitcoin’s entire eleven-year history, that’s a total of 19 days in which you could have bought and not yet had the chance to recoup your losses. Bitcoin’s total trading time stands at approximately 4,072 days since the genesis block was mined by Craig Wright (joke), giving us an Underwater Window of 0.466%.
To put that in perspective, Bitcoin has been a potentially profitable investment (or at worst a break even investment) for 99.53% of its total trading time, throwing the media’s claims of guaranteed financial ruin into an ice bath. Fancy an even clearer representation?
Stop the Press (Forever, Ideally)
These figures show that the doom mongers and the ‘told you so’ brigade are so wrong it’s laughable, unless you happen to be someone who bought the top in 2017 and sold at a loss because the papers told you it was going to zero. Sorry. Not much we can do about that.
Mainstream media outlets have gone to great lengths to push investors away from Bitcoin, calling it everything from a fraud to a Ponzi scheme and trying to inform anyone who has fallen for the trap that their money was gone forever. This is clearly not the case however, as our findings demonstrate.
And for all those who did buy the top in 2017, here’s a word of advice – ignore the press and HODL. It will be worth it.
