Bitcoin has been around for less than two decades, but its performance has already made it a formidable force to be reckoned with. Over the years, the digital asset has been able to repeatedly outperform established asset classes, especially the bullish part of its cycles. In hindsight, bitcoin’s annual performance also turned out to point to the bottom of the market. In this report, we look at the last decade of bitcoin’s performance.
10 years of performance for Bitcoin
Raoul Pal, former Goldman Sachs executive and founder of Real Vision, shared a visual on Twitter which showed the performance of bitcoin against other asset classes in the financial market such as the S&P and the Bloomberg Dollar Index, and it showed how well the digital asset performed in the over the past decade alone.
The visual that starts from 2013 and will continue to 2022 shows that bitcoin was able to outperform all other assets for seven years, emerging at the top for each of those years. On the other hand, in years where bitcoin did not outperform these asset classes, it turned out to be the worst performing asset of that year.
Examples of these are in 2014, 2018 and now in 2022 when the digital asset had underperformed by more than 50% each time. Each time, years of underperformance follow years of incredible performance, and then the next year sees the same outperformance again.
Bitcoin was down -57.51% in 2014, but the previous year was up over 5,400%. Then the following year in 2015, the cryptocurrency was up 36%, topping the list once again. Then for the next three years would continue to outperform the market.
BTC performance over the last decade | Source: Twitter
Those three years of plenty and then a year of drought repeat themselves again until 2017, after which BTC would be the worst performer in 2018, down more than 74%. Over the next three years, from 2019 to 2021, bitcoin would see consistently high returns. 2022 then follows the same trend, with performance below that of the broader market after three years of outperformance.
BTC holds gains from Tuesday | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Does that mean the bottom is in?
Bitcoin has already lost over 70% of its all-time high value, which points to the bottom and is at least close for the digital asset. Then, given bitcoin’s performance over the years and the trend that seems already established, this indicates that the bottom is already registered.
If the trend continues, the years 2023 to 2025 could see BTC once again outperform the broader market. Additionally, this would place the peak of the next bull market somewhere between 2024 and 2025 with at least double-digit growth expected for the digital asset during those years.