Practical questions for people who plan to hold through a full cycle.
Buying bitcoin all at once beat spreading the purchases on most start dates since 2011 — the DCA calculator has said so for a while. This article measures the other side of that trade: how deep the committed money fell in its first twelve months under each approach, for bitcoin and for ether.
A 70/30 bitcoin-and-ether portfolio reset once a year finished ×361.9 against ×159.5 left alone — but split the decade into three non-overlapping stretches and the whole advantage sits in one of them. What rebalancing did to returns, to drawdowns and to the size of the trades, measured on every window our data allows.
Every daily entry since 2011 held for one, two and four years: how many ended in loss, what the median produced, and where the four-year rule already bends.
Seven declines of 50% or more in fifteen years of daily closes: how deep each went, how long recovery took, and why the median day sat 46% below the peak.
What $100 a week into BTC and ETH actually produced from four different start dates, including the losses — plus how little the schedule matters.
