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Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

Returns & Performance

Every rolling four-year return

Four years is the length most often quoted as the horizon over which Bitcoin has always paid. This page measures every overlapping four-year window in the record, so the claim can be checked against the distribution rather than a single example.

2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Windows are measured between year-end closing prices and overlap by construction.

Windows measured

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Overlapping four-year periods

Strongest window

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Weakest window

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The distribution of four-year outcomes

Each row is a four-year window beginning at a different year end. The windows overlap heavily — consecutive rows share three of their four years — so the table is not a set of independent observations. It is a sliding view of the same record, and its value is that it shows how sensitive the answer is to the choice of start date. A reader who quotes a single four-year figure is quoting one row of this table.

Every rolling four-year Bitcoin return, with start and end years, start and end prices, total return and annualised return.
WindowStart priceEnd priceTotal returnAnnualised
No records are available for this dataset.

2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014

Overlapping windows. These windows are not independent samples. A four-year window starting in 2015 and one starting in 2016 share three years of price history, so a single strong year can lift several consecutive rows at once. That is why the table should be read as a distribution of outcomes for a holder who might have started in any year, not as evidence about how often a four-year holding period succeeds.

What the distribution shows

The range is wide. The strongest window in the table multiplied the price many times over; the weakest produced a fraction of that, and no window in this table finished below its starting price. The spread between the best and worst outcome is the honest answer to the question of what a four-year holding period has produced. It is not a single number, and any claim that reduces it to one is selecting a row.

The pattern within the table is also worth noting. The windows that begin near a peak tend to be the weakest, and the windows that begin near a trough tend to be the strongest. That is not a surprising result, but it is a useful corrective to the idea that the holding period alone determines the outcome. Four years is long enough to capture a full cycle in most cases, and where a window begins within that cycle matters enormously.

The most defensible reading is that a four-year horizon has historically been long enough to produce a positive result from most starting points, and that the size of that result has varied by a factor of many. A reader planning around a four-year horizon should plan for the weak end of the distribution rather than the strong end, because the weak end is what a poorly timed start produces. The holding-period returns page shows the same idea for fixed windows of every length, and the twelve-month extremes page shows the shortest horizon.

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