Bitcoin is up quite a bit, but it's total returns are negative as every dollar out is a dollar someone else up in and mining + transfer fees is a huge expense.
It's possible to win big at negative sum games, but by definition not everyone can.
Some people got very lucky. Some people lost their life savings.
In the stock market with diversified investments, even if the market crashes, historically you would have always recovered and then some within not very many years so long as you didn't do the stupid thing and panic and sell during the crash in an attempt to time the market.
«In the stock market with diversified investments, even if the market crashes, historically you would have always recovered and then some within not very many years so long as you didn't do the stupid thing and panic and sell during the crash in an attempt to time the market.»
Same with Bitcoin. There is no difference between the all-time SP500 chart and the all-time BTC price chart. In both cases, historically anyone who holds long enough ("within not very many years") eventually makes money:
I'm not saying people should dump their savings into BTC, just that your argument isn't a good argument to defend the SP500. An SP500 index fund is great for other reasons, namely: it has a great track record and you can't really go wrong with investing in ~500 of the biggest American companies.
...which is why I said it had a great track record :) The problem I had with your post is that you implied long-term BTC holders were not recovering their investment, which is plain wrong.
That wasn't my intended implication, I was suggesting just that in the long term there's a far greater track record of positive growth in the traditional stock market compared to Bitcoin.
That would depend on if you had a basket of stocks representative of the whole market and rebalanced your portfolio throughout a downturn (not common at all). Companies can and do go bankrupt. Historically, the same has been true of Bitcoin, where it always recovers to a new base.
It's possible to win big at negative sum games, but by definition not everyone can.