Five year holding stats that'll blow your mind

So I got curious about what happens if you just buy bitcoin and forget about it for exactly 5 years. Had an AI run the numbers on every possible 5 year window since bitcoin started trading

Results from 959 different 5-year periods between august 2010 and january 2026:

Key findings:

- average return was 18229% which is insane but misleading because early buyers skew it hard

- median return was 3108% so your typical 5 year holder made 32x their money

- 958 out of 959 periods made profit thats 99.9% success rate

Only ONE losing period ever: bought december 18 2017 right at the top around 18900 and sold december 16 2022 during that FTX mess at 16600. Lost 12%

Breaking it down by when you started buying:

- 2010-2013 buyers got stupid rich because they bought at literal pennies

- Even 2018 which was terrible timing still averaged 346% returns

- 2021 buyers only have partial data but already averaging 145%

The distribution is wild - almost half of all 5 year holds returned between 1000-10000% and three quarters made over 100%

basically if you can handle holding for 5 years you win unless you have the absolute worst timing in history. Even then you only lose 12% which beats a lot of other investments during crashes

median person turns 1 dollar into 32 dollars over 5 years. Not bad for doing literally nothing