My brother-in-law brings this up every single family dinner. Not aggressively — he’s not that guy — but there’s always a moment, usually around dessert, where someone mentions something expensive and he goes, “yeah well, I nearly bought Bitcoin in 2020.” And everyone just sort of nods. We all have a version of that story. The friend who did buy it and won’t shut up about it, or the version where you almost did and quietly wish you had.
So I actually sat down and worked out the numbers properly. Not the fantasy scenario where you bought at the bottom and sold at the top. The boring, realistic one: you had $1,000, you bought Bitcoin in March 2021, and you’re still holding it now, in March 2026. What’s it actually worth?
The answer is going to disappoint some people and surprise others.
Let’s Just Do the Maths
Bitcoin in early March 2021 was hovering around $47,000–$50,000. So $1,000 bought you roughly 0.02 BTC. A tiny fraction of a single coin, which still feels psychologically weird — you’re not buying a “thing” so much as a decimal point. But fractions count.
Today that 0.02 BTC is worth somewhere between $1,360 and $1,440, with Bitcoin currently trading around $68,000–$72,000. So you’ve made somewhere in the ballpark of $400 on your thousand bucks. That’s roughly a 40% return over five years.
Which is… fine? Like genuinely fine. A high street savings account over the same period would have given you maybe 1–2% annually, so call it $1,050–1,100 total. You beat that. You beat inflation, arguably. But you did not retire. You did not tell your boss where to go. You made four hundred dollars, and as we’ll get to in a second, you earned every single cent of it the hard way.
The Part the Headlines Always Leave Out
November 2021. Eight months after you bought in, Bitcoin hits $69,000. Your $1,000 is now worth about $1,380 and you feel like the smartest person you know. You’ve probably mentioned it to at least one person who didn’t ask. This is the part of the story crypto Twitter likes to tell.
Then 2022. I don’t want to be dramatic about it but 2022 was genuinely brutal for anyone holding crypto. Bitcoin fell from that $69k high all the way down to under $17,000 by December. Your $1,000 investment is now worth about $340. Not a “paper loss” you can philosophise your way out of — your money is just gone, more than half of it, and there’s no guarantee it’s coming back. Luna collapsed. Celsius collapsed. FTX — one of the biggest exchanges in the world — turned out to be a fraud and blew up spectacularly in November of that year. The whole ecosystem felt like it was unravelling.
The people who made money out of this five-year window are specifically the people who did not sell during that period. That sounds obvious. It was not obvious when you were watching your $1,000 become $340 while every financial journalist on the planet was writing Bitcoin’s obituary.
2023 was a slow grind back. 2024 picked up momentum. Spot Bitcoin ETFs got approved in the US in early 2024, which was genuinely a big deal — it meant BlackRock, Fidelity, and others could offer Bitcoin exposure to regular investors without them needing a crypto wallet or a Coinbase account. Institutional money started flowing in differently. Bitcoin crossed $100,000 for the first time in late 2024. And now here we are.
How Does It Actually Compare Though
This is where I think a lot of crypto content is intellectually dishonest. They’ll benchmark Bitcoin against a savings account and declare victory. Okay, yes, you beat a savings account. You also beat keeping cash under your mattress. That’s not the comparison that matters.
$1,000 into a boring S&P 500 index fund in March 2021 would be worth somewhere around $1,600–1,700 today. Better return than Bitcoin, considerably less drama, no 75% drawdown along the way. I’m not saying that to talk you out of crypto. I’m saying it because if someone had just told me that plainly five years ago I would have appreciated it.
Now — if you’d bought in March 2020 instead, when Bitcoin was sitting around $5,000? That $1,000 is worth over $13,000 today. Timing is everything and nobody gets it right consistently. Not the YouTube analysts, not the Twitter influencers, not the hedge funds. The people who did well mostly just bought early and held without checking the price every day.
Should You Buy Bitcoin Now
I’m not going to tell you yes or no because I genuinely don’t know and neither does anyone else, including the people who act like they do. What I will say is the market looks different now than it did in 2021. The ETF approvals changed the buyer profile. When BlackRock adds Bitcoin to a product, they’re not speculating on vibes — they’re making a structural allocation decision. That probably doesn’t eliminate the volatility but it’s a different kind of market participant than the 2021 retail frenzy.
The only rule that’s held up across every market cycle: don’t put in money you can’t afford to watch drop by 70% and still sleep at night. Not “affford” in theory. In practice. The 2am, portfolio down 70%, every headline saying it’s over practice. If you’d have panic sold in December 2022 — and plenty of very smart people did — you locked in a loss and missed the recovery entirely.
The Short Version
Your $1,000 from March 2021 is worth about $1,400 today. That’s not nothing. It’s also not the number people imagine when they picture Bitcoin returns. The five-year journey to get there involved watching it nearly triple, then collapse by 75%, then slowly claw its way back and then some. Most people did not hold through all of that. The ones who did came out ahead.
My brother-in-law, by the way, still hasn’t bought any. Maybe he’s right. Maybe in five years he’ll be at a family dinner saying he nearly bought Bitcoin in 2026. It’s a very human pattern.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments are highly volatile. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before investing.