Just over 10 years old, Bitcoin might already be the best-performing investment of all time. It might also be the most volatile, and volatility has a way of luring people into ill-timed and costly investing choices. So with all the headlines about Bitcoin¡¯s meteoric rise, it seems reasonable to ask how its investors are doing.

There¡¯s no denying Bitcoin¡¯s astonishing success. Its price has grown a stupefying 796,933 times since 2010. For perspective, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has grown 869 times since its inception in 1896. That means Bitcoin¡¯s price appreciation has been 917 times that of the Dow in less than a tenth of the time.

With a surge like that, it doesn¡¯t take a big investment to make a pile of money. A measly $100 bet on Bitcoin on day one, or close to it, would have blossomed into close to $80 million. And investors didn¡¯t have to be there from the beginning to rack up big gains. They just had to hop on somewhere along the line and hang on to their coins.