I made 11x on Bitcoin and still feel like an idiot

Between 2013 and 2020, I bought and sold 19 BTC. I made around $80K off a $7K investment which helped with the down payment on our first house. Should feel great, right? Not exactly. Every time BTC pumps I tell my wife about what could have been. In her words, “Bitcoin is the worst thing that’s happened to our relationship.” So I dug into this feeling and here's where I landed: Bitcoin regret isn’t just common, it’s inevitable. Bitcoin is a currency so its usefulness depends on circulation. Unlike stocks, its value requires people to sell. If no one had bought that pizza with it, or sold when it hit $1K, or cashed out in 2017... BTC wouldn’t be what it is today. But that also means regret is baked into its DNA. I even made a new metric for it: the Bitcoin Regret Index. Basically I went back to 2014 (earliest available data) and calculated all the missed profits from sales. As of about a month ago, that index is at 172. That means for every $1 of Bitcoin wealth that exists today, there’s $172 of "what if" gains from people who sold too early. Total theoretical regret? $272 trillion. The TL;DR: Bitcoin is a regret machine. People have to sell for it to have any value. The price is powered by stories like mine. And maybe yours too. Full post here if you want to see more on my methodology: https://thomasdudley.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-a-regret-machine submitted by /u/mooopy [link] [comments]

Apr 21, 2025 - 19:17

I made 11x on Bitcoin and still feel like an idiot

Between 2013 and 2020, I bought and sold 19 BTC. I made around $80K off a $7K investment which helped with the down payment on our first house. Should feel great, right? Not exactly. Every time BTC pumps I tell my wife about what could have been. In her words, “Bitcoin is the worst thing that’s happened to our relationship.”

So I dug into this feeling and here's where I landed: Bitcoin regret isn’t just common, it’s inevitable. Bitcoin is a currency so its usefulness depends on circulation. Unlike stocks, its value requires people to sell. If no one had bought that pizza with it, or sold when it hit $1K, or cashed out in 2017... BTC wouldn’t be what it is today. But that also means regret is baked into its DNA.

I even made a new metric for it: the Bitcoin Regret Index. Basically I went back to 2014 (earliest available data) and calculated all the missed profits from sales. As of about a month ago, that index is at 172. That means for every $1 of Bitcoin wealth that exists today, there’s $172 of "what if" gains from people who sold too early. Total theoretical regret? $272 trillion.

The TL;DR: Bitcoin is a regret machine. People have to sell for it to have any value. The price is powered by stories like mine. And maybe yours too.

Full post here if you want to see more on my methodology: https://thomasdudley.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-a-regret-machine

submitted by /u/mooopy
[link] [comments]