How much R1,000 in Bitcoin bought in the past 10 years would be worth today

R1,000 in Bitcoin bought a decade ago would be worth around R352,880 in November 2024, making for a far better investment than the vast majority of listed companies in the world.

The cryptocurrency has surged to record highs this month in what some analysts have dubbed the “Trump-pump”.

As part of his re-election campaign, US President-elect Donald Trump promised to make his country the “crypto capital of the planet” and to build up a national Bitcoin stockpile.

Trump also said he would fire US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, who has spearheaded a successful crypto crackdown with significant high-profile court wins.

The SEC has been accused of unilaterally wrestling regulatory authority on the crypto industry away from US states.

Trump’s pro-crypto stance has convinced traders that the US will relax regulations on the digital currency market.

The Bitcoin rally has been bolstered by vocal and unequivocal support of Trump from the world’s richest man — Elon Musk.

The tech billionaire is a big advocate of crypto, and his pronouncements on Bitcoin and other digital currencies like Dogecoin have impacted market movements.

However, other Bitcoin watchers have said that the current price surge was always expected due to its cyclical nature.

Every four years, Bitcoin halves the rewards paid to miners for validating transactions on the blockchain. It completed its fourth halving event in April.

Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, sought to use the halving mechanism to prevent the cryptocurrency from becoming inflationary. The maximum supply of Bitcoin will eventually cap at 21 million.

This latest halving will result in the daily reward paid to miners dropping from 900 Bitcoin to 450.

Specifically, it reduced miner block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Being an intangible and speculative commodity that is still shrouded in mystery for many investors, Bitcoin’s price is often highly volatile.

It can experience big and sometimes unpredictable swings upwards or downwards over shorter periods.

That has made it attractive to traders who try to exploit the volatility to make a quick profit — and seen it shunned by more conservative investors.

However, over the longer term, Bitcoin’s price has increased spectacularly, making a good case for the so-called “hodlers”.

MyBroadband calculated just how good the Bitcoin faithful had it amid the crypto market rally by analysing how much R1,000 in the cryptocurrency bought over the past 10 years would be worth in November 2024.

For our analysis, we assumed an investor bought R1,000 in Bitcoin on 14 November every year from 2014 to 2023.

When the first investment was made on 14 November 2014, the price of Bitcoin was $418.42, while the rand was trading at R11.14.

An investor would have been able to buy around a fifth of a Bitcoin with R1,000.

With the price of a Bitcoin at $90,575 on 14 November 2024, 0.214 Bitcoin would be worth roughly $19,432 or R352,880.

That represents a 353-fold or 35,188% increase from a decade ago.

Those who invested a year later would been able to buy 0.208 Bitcoin, worth R342,181 today.

While the rand had weakened significantly by November 2015, the Bitcoin price had also dropped, meaning R1,000 could buy nearly the same Bitcoin as a year earlier.

The worst time to have bought Bitcoin in the past 10 years relative to today was 2021, when the cryptocurrency’s price was at its previous record levels.

Even so, the latest rally is so big that R1,000 in Bitcoin bought at $64,455 on 14 November 2021 would be worth R1,669 three years later, which still makes for an impressive 67% increase.

That is far better than the returns an investor in all South African stocks and most US stocks would have seen over the same period.

With the crypto slump that followed 2021’s record levels, investors who bought their Bitcoin in November 2022 or November 2023 would have also realised massive returns of 582% and 245%, respectively.

The table below shows the current value of a R1,000 Bitcoin investment made each year over the past decade.

Note that 2016 and 2020 were halving years. They are indicated in italics.