[sassypants]

I've been meaning to build a chart to evaluate this. The question would be: What are the longest periods of time one could have held Bitcoin and lost money? And secondarily, how frequent were the opportunities to have lost money?

My ballpark guess would be that the longest you might have held Bitcoin at a loss were if you purchased during a few day span during the peak of 2011. You would have had to have held for almost two years to have turned a profit. But on 95-99% of days in which you could have purchased bitcoin, you would have profited within 1 year.

I'll try and put that together. Should be interesting.

[bottled_poe]

If I understand you correctly, your estimate is way off. Have a look at the bitstamp exchange rate for the last 8 months. Looks like around 40% of days closed at a price above the current price.

[sassypants]

In my example I was using a 1 year horizon. So none of those closing prices would be charted until they had a year to mature.

I think I would need to make a slider so that you could explore the concept at various time horizons -- 8 months might bring a 50% occurrence of profit.

But my expectation is that at 1 year 95% of investments are sound, while at 2 years it would be 100%.