At first glance, it might seem that investing in cryptocurrencies in 2014 was a surefire way to get rich. For some coins, that’s certainly true. But what if someone just bought the biggest cryptocurrencies at the time, without any special research? Let’s analyze this scenario: suppose a person invested $1,000 in each of the top 10 cryptocurrencies of 2014.
The biggest coin back then was Bitcoin, priced at… $362. Yeah, okay, your first glance was correct – you’d be up over 17,000% from investing in Bitcoin back then. Even if you lost money on all nine other coins, you’d still have almost doubled your total investment. But how about those other coins?
The second-largest coin was XRP. Again, you’d see astronomical gains – over 11,300%! Third on the list was Litecoin, nearing $4 at a time. In this case, your investment would have grown by only 1,734%.
Things get interesting with the fourth place: BitShares. What’s that? It’s a decentralized “Blockchain as Organization,” a cryptocurrency that had an extreme bull run in 2018. If you sold it back then, you’d be up over 3,000%. Assuming you held onto it until 2024, though, you’d be down around 84%, and considering the coin hasn’t seen much price movement in the last two years, there’s little chance of recovery.
You wouldn’t need to worry too much, because the fifth biggest crypto – Dogecoin – would cover all your losses. If you invested in 2014, you’d be up 39,418%, an even better return than Bitcoin!
Sadly, many other coins wouldn’t deliver. NXT would have fallen from $0.024 to $0.000899 – almost 98% down. Peercoin and Namecoin, once in 7th and 8th place, are now outside the top 1,000 cryptos. That said, since you invested in them relatively early, you’d have lost only 62% on Peercoin and 48% on Namecoin.
At number nine was DASH, which was worth $2.16. While it’s not as popular as before, you’d be up 991%! The last coin, Counterparty (XCP) fell from 10th place below the top 800 cryptos, but you’d still be up 107%.
In the end, if you invested $10,000 ($1,000 in each coin), you’d end up with around $702,000. This money would probably be worth a little less due to inflation over those ten years, but who wouldn’t take that any day?
However, over half of those gains come from Dogecoin, and 96% from Dogecoin, XRP, and Bitcoin. The other coins didn’t have such crazy growth, and many have been forgotten for years. It was surprising to see that 2014 was so early that you’d still recover a considerable amount from those coins.
What if you also bought stocks, ETFs and physical gold back then? We’ve analyzed that too!
Can The History Repeat?
Does investing $10,000 in today’s top 10 coins will make you very rich in ten years? Well, it’s not that simple.
Firstly, 2014 was the very early days of the cryptocurrency world. It’s likely that whatever you bought then, you’d be up today, as we’ve seen even with “dead” coins. The total market cap was less than $5.5 billion. Today, single coins like SUI, NEAR Protocol, or Polkadot have bigger market caps, and they’re not even in the top 10!
Secondly, it really depends on when you buy them. If you bought coins at their peak in 2022 – or March 2024 for that matter – you’re very likely to be down now. If you bought during the crypto winter, you might have come out ahead even if your coins didn’t perform exceptionally well.
Thirdly, the biggest coins (especially Bitcoin and Ethereum) are so large now that it’s very hard for them to experience such rallies again. If Bitcoin went up 170 times again, it would be worth more than the entire USA!
That being said, it’s fascinating to think about what will happen with today’s top 10 coins in the future. Are some of them hidden gems that we don’t appreciate today? Or will they be largely forgotten, like Peercoin, NXT, and other once-great coins?
