Returns & Performance
Bitcoin's yearly returns, 2010 to 2025
2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Annual extremes rounded to the nearest cent
The calendar-year record
Each row is one completed calendar year. Open and close are the first and last traded prices of the year; high and low are the extremes reached at any point in between. The change column is measured from open to close, which is the convention most quoted in market commentary and the one that makes the least sense for a volatile asset — a point taken up further down the page. The final column divides the year's high by its low, which is a crude but useful measure of how much ground the price covered within a single year.
| Year | Open | High | Low | Close | Change | High / low |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No records are available for this dataset. | ||||||
2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014
The distribution of up and down years
Plotted as a bar chart, the series stops looking like a price history and starts looking like a distribution. Of the 0 years shown, 0 finished higher than they opened and 0 finished lower. That is a favourable ratio, but the ratio is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the scale: the gains are enormous and the losses are merely large.
2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Change measured open to close, per cent
What the pattern actually shows
The first thing a reader notices is the asymmetry. Bitcoin's best years are not merely better than its worst years are bad; they are better by an order of magnitude. The strongest year in the series is 2013, which opened at $13.50 and closed at $754, a gain of roughly 5,485 per cent. The worst year is 2018, which opened at $14,120 and closed at $3,744, a loss of about 73 per cent. Put those two numbers side by side and the point becomes unavoidable: a single good year can erase several bad ones, and a single bad year cannot erase a good one.
This is not a claim that Bitcoin always recovers, and it is not a prediction. It is a description of the record as published. The asymmetry exists because the asset has spent most of its life in price discovery, with a fixed supply and a demand curve that has repeatedly repriced the whole market in the space of months. The same mechanism that produces a 5,485 per cent year produces a 73 per cent year. They are not opposites; they are the same property observed at different moments.
The second thing the table shows is how little a single year tells you. Consider 2021: the year closed up 59 per cent, which sounds like a good year, and it was. But the price also fell from a high of $68,790 to a low of $29,300 within those same twelve months — a decline of more than half from the peak. A reader who bought at the top and sold at the bottom lost most of their capital in a year that the annual figure records as a gain. The calendar-year number is a summary of two points, and the path between them is where the investor actually lives.
The third observation is about the early years. The 2010 to 2014 figures come from a market that was thinly traded, with no established exchange and no reliable settlement price. The 2010 row shows an open of five cents and a close of thirty cents, a sixfold gain, but the entire year's trading volume would not fill a single modern block. These rows are included because they are the widely cited annual extremes and because omitting them would flatter the later record by making the base smaller. They should be read as historical reference points, not as prices anyone could have transacted at size.
Finally, the table makes clear why the choice of start date matters more than almost any other decision in return analysis. A reader who starts in 2010 sees a 0-year record with 0 down years. A reader who starts in 2018 sees a shorter record that begins with a 73 per cent loss. Both are looking at the same underlying series. The difference is entirely in where the window opens, which is why the ROI and CAGR page treats holding period as a first-class variable rather than an afterthought.
Calendar years versus rolling periods
The calendar year is a convention of accounting, not a property of markets. Bitcoin does not know when December ends. A holding period that runs from March to the following February is exactly as real as one that runs from January to December, and it can produce a very different number. When the annual figures are read as a sequence of independent trials, the reader is implicitly assuming that each January resets the asset's behaviour, which is not true.
Rolling periods correct for this by measuring every possible window of a given length rather than the windows that happen to align with the calendar. A one-year rolling return starting in November 2021, for instance, captures the collapse from the all-time high and looks nothing like the calendar-year 2021 figure of plus 59 per cent. A three-year rolling return starting in 2019 captures the pandemic crash, the 2021 peak and the 2022 bear market in a single number. The calendar table is the right place to start because it is legible and comparable across assets; rolling periods are the right place to finish because they describe what a holder actually experienced.
The practical consequence is that any statement of the form "Bitcoin returned X per cent per year" is incomplete without the window it was measured over. The dollar-cost averaging page takes this seriously by measuring steady accumulation rather than a single entry point, and the drawdown record supplies the other half of the picture: how far the price fell, and how long the recovery took.