Bitcoin Celebrates 14th Anniversary with 1,690,706,971% Increase in Value

Happy birthday, Bitcoin! Today marks 14 years since the first Bitcoin block was mined. Despite numerous doubters and haters, Bitcoin has performed quite impressively. Here's to many more years of success!

It took a while for the coins to have a market price after the first block was mined. In October 2009, 5050 coins were sold for $5.02, giving each one a price of roughly $0.00099. Since then, the price has increased by around 1,690,706,971%. Not bad at all.

Bitcoin has delivered returns unlike any other asset in history, with a return of 1,690,706,971% since its inception. However, this unique performance is somewhat of a mirage, as there are no publicly quoted prices for Bitcoin prior to its launch.

Meta Platforms Inc. (then Facebook.Inc) was launched in February 2004. Fourteen years after its existence, in February 2018, it had a market cap of around $500 billion. By comparison, Bitcoin’s market cap is just $322 billion, according to CoinGecko. In other words, if you start counting both since their inception, Meta has accrued more value than Bitcoin. The difference is, of course, that Meta didn’t have a publicly quoted price so early in its existence. The company only went public in 2012, by which point it had a $70 billion market cap already.

Meta is a good comparison for several reasons. Both Bitcoin and Meta are network-effects entities, whose value is dependent on achieving a critical mass of users or owners. Neither is useful or valuable as a standalone piece of technology. There’s no point in owning Bitcoin if nobody else will accept it or buy it. There’s no point of posting a photo to Facebook if there’s nobody else there to look at it or comment on it. Both are global. Both are associated with a single founder. Bitcoin hasn’t changed the world like Meta has. So Meta has a headstart, but who ultimately knows. Both Meta and Bitcoin more or less created new categories, with each having seen several competitors emerge.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen their prices stagnate over the past five years, after surging during the 2020-2021 boom. This suggests that from an investor perspective, they are seen as similar types of assets.

Satoshi Nakamoto deserves credit for creating Bitcoin. 14 years later, Bitcoin hasn't changed the world, but it has performed well compared to other tech stocks in the last decade.