Bitcoin vs other assets: 15 you could buy, 4 you couldn't

From 17 September 2014 to 1 April 2026, $50 a week — 603 purchases, $30,150 — into each of 19 of the simulator's 22 assets. Nvidia turned it into $1,963,969, or 65.2× what went in. Bitcoin finished 2nd at 44.5×. 14 of the 19 finished below 4×, and 3 failed to beat inflation.

The honest way to start is with the result that does not help me: Nvidia beat Bitcoin.

Same money, same schedule, same eleven and a half years. $30,150 went into each of 19 of the simulator's 22 assets at $50 a week, and Bitcoin came 2nd.

Two numbers in that sentence need qualifying before anything else does. The other three assets are cryptocurrencies with no price that far back, and they are accounted for below. And of the 19 measured, only 15 were actually purchasable — the other 4 are two price indices, US housing and commercial real estate, and two modeled savings products. They are in the ranking because the simulator offers them and because they are the honest yardsticks most people measure Bitcoin against. They are not rivals in the way a stock is, and this post does not pretend they are. Bitcoin is 2nd of 19 and 2nd of the 15.

What was measured

One plan, run 19 times.

Everything is ranked on final value ÷ money paid in, not on total return. Those are different numbers for a schedule that buys over time, and the ratio is the one that stays comparable when two plans do not pay in exactly the same amount.

Three things to know before the table

I would rather put these above the result than in a footnote under it.

The window ends 1 April 2026, not today. House-price indices are published quarterly. If Bitcoin were measured to its own last close and housing to a date months earlier, Bitcoin would be credited with months that housing never got — a comparison that looks rigorous and is not. So every asset shares one window, and the window ends where the slowest-reporting member of it ends.

A quarterly series buys at a stale price. A weekly plan buying a quarterly index pays the last published figure for up to three months. That is a real modeling artifact, it applies to both real estate rows and to the monthly CPI line, and there is no way around it short of dropping them.

A house-price index is not a housing return. It excludes mortgage leverage, rental income, property taxes, maintenance and transaction costs — which between them are most of what actually happens to someone who buys a house. Treat the housing row, and the commercial real estate one, as what the index did, not as what a landlord made.

The shape of it

14 of the 19 finished below 4×. Two finished above 40×. That gap is the whole story of the eleven years, and it is why the axis has to be logarithmic — on a linear one, everything but the top two would crowd into the left fifth of the chart.

The block below 4× is where the sensible alternatives live: all three stock indices, gold, silver and oil, the bonds, both real estate indices and both modeled savings products — and three of the seven big tech stocks. It runs from 1.10× to 3.60×.

What beat Bitcoin, and what that costs the argument

Nvidia. One thing, out of 19.

Bitcoin is 2nd out of 19 overall and 2nd among the 15 things you could actually have bought. That is a strong result. It is not the result the average Bitcoin comparison page reports, because the average Bitcoin comparison page picks the three assets it wants to be compared against.

The cut-off date is not what produces this. A reader is entitled to suspect that a window ending months in the past was chosen to flatter something. So the same two assets, measured to 21 September 2026 — the latest date both still post a price for — give Bitcoin 54.5× and Nvidia 79.7×. Both finish higher, the order does not change, and Nvidia's lead stays about the same in proportion. The shared window costs both of them something; it does not manufacture the result.

The inflation line

16 of the 19 beat CPI. Over 11.5 years the dollar's own purchasing power came to 1.23×, and almost everything cleared it. CPI is not a row in the table — no plan can buy it — but it is measured on the same schedule and dates, so it can be a line across it.

The 3 that did not: the 3% CD, bonds and commercial real estate.

That is the sentence worth sitting with. A 1.19× outcome from the modeled 3% CD is not a loss in dollars — it finishes with more money than went in — but it finishes with less than the money was worth when it went in. The safest row in the table is one of the three that lost.

The modeled 7% college-savings plan lands at 1.51×, 15th of 19 — just ahead of US housing at 1.48×, and behind every stock, every stock index and every commodity in the set. Both of these are constant-yield assumptions rather than measured markets, which is why they carry a modeled tag; a real 529 does not return exactly 7% a year and a real CD ladder does not return exactly 3%.

The full ranking

Nothing in the set finished below what was paid into it. The weakest, commercial real estate, still came to 1.10×. That is a fact about this specific 11.5-year window — one that contained no decade-long bear market in anything measured — and not a general property of these assets.

What is not in here, and why

Three assets the simulator offers are missing from this ranking: Ethereum (no price before 9 November 2017), Solana (no price before 10 April 2020) and XRP (no price before 9 November 2017).

Each was dropped for the same reason: it cannot cover the full window, and shortening everyone else's window to accommodate it would move every other row to accommodate one. Ethereum and Solana in particular would look very different measured from their own first close, and they deserve that treatment rather than this one. It now exists: the Ethereum, Solana and XRP DCA calculators each start at the coin's own first close and run Bitcoin on the same dates beside it.

Housing is here once. The simulator carries a house-price index for each of the 50 states as well as the national one, and treats them as one asset with a choice of region. An earlier version of this ranking gave every state its own row, and CPI one too, which filled most of the table with indices of the same kind; Bitcoin's place was the same. The row here is the national index. Pick your own state in the simulator to put it beside Bitcoin on the same schedule. CPI is not an asset at all — the simulator offers it as an overlay — so it is the line in the inflation section rather than a row.

What this does not tell you

One schedule is not the distribution. Every figure here starts on 17 September 2014 and buys every week. Change the start date and the ranking moves — sometimes a lot. The companion piece on start dates measures that directly for Bitcoin, across every weekly start on record.

Past order is not future order. Nvidia won this window on a semiconductor cycle that had not happened when the window opened. Nothing here forecasts the next eleven years, and a ranking built on a period that ended in a rising market for nearly everything is not a neutral sample.

Fees, spreads and taxes are absent. Dividends are not. No transaction costs on 603 purchases and no capital-gains treatment. Income is counted wherever the instrument pays it: the S&P row is the total-return index, and the ETF and bond rows are dividend-adjusted, so a dividend-paying holding is not understated here.

The rows do not all measure the same quantity, and the sources page says which is which. Every series carries a declared basis: total return for the equities and the bond fund, price only for the metals and oil — front-month futures pay nothing and roll — and price index for the two real estate rows and CPI, which are levels rather than anything you could hold. That matters most at the bottom of the table: a bond fund measured on total return against a house-price index measured without rent are not comparable in the way a single ranked list implies.

The survivors are the ones being measured. The 15 purchasable rows are the tickers worth carrying in 2026, chosen with the answer already known. Nvidia is in this table because of how it turned out; the companies that would have taken $30,150 to nothing are not here at all, and neither are the coins. A ranking assembled from what survived always reads better than the choice that was actually in front of you on 17 September 2014.

The universe is what this simulator carries, which is a choice: seven large US stocks, three US stock indices, gold, silver, oil, a bond fund, US housing, commercial real estate, two modeled savings products and four cryptocurrencies, only one of them with history back to 2014. Where each series comes from — feed, first reading and cadence — is on the sources page, the method is in the knowledge base, and who is writing this is on the about page.

Run it on your own numbers

The whole table above is one schedule. If yours starts on a different date, or buys a different amount, or stops early, the answer is different. Open the simulator and use your own.