[The 10-Year Question] The People Who Bought Bitcoin in 2013 and Forgot the Password on Purpose

I got the timing wrong. That's the confession I want to start with, because everyone in this space pretends they didn't.

In late 2017 I was watching Bitcoin push toward $19,000 and I remember thinking, very clearly, "this is the top, take some off." I was right. It was the top. By December 2018 the price had fallen to around $3,200. I felt like a genius for about eleven months. Then I spent the next three years watching the thing I'd been "smart" about go somewhere I never followed it to. Being right about a top is worth almost nothing if you're wrong about the decade.

That's the whole game, and almost nobody plays it.

Everyone wants the next hour. $LONG wants the next decade. And the difference between those two sentences is not a personality quirk — it's the difference between the returns most people actually capture and the returns that existed on paper. There's a famous, awkward gap in investing that the research firm DALBAR has tracked for years: the average fund investor consistently underperforms the very funds they're invested in. Not the market — the specific funds they own. How is that even possible? Because they buy after it's gone up and sell after it's gone down. They trade their own emotions and call it strategy. The asset did fine. The human ruined it.

Crypto just runs that same experiment at ten times the speed and with neon lights on.

What patience actually costs

Here's the part nobody tells you about long-term thinking: it isn't relaxing. People imagine the patient investor as some serene monk who bought once and went to sleep. The truth is the opposite. Holding through a real drawdown is one of the more uncomfortable things you can do with money, and Bitcoin has handed out several that would test anyone.

If you'd bought at the 2013 peak near $1,100, you watched it fall to roughly $170 by early 2015. That's an 84% decline. If you bought the 2017 top I mentioned, you sat through an 84% decline again into 2018. Buy the November 2021 high around $69,000, and you watched it bottom near $16,000 a year later — another drop of roughly 77%. Three separate times, this asset took most of its value away from the people holding it.

And each time, the people who did nothing eventually looked prescient. Not because they predicted anything. Because they outlasted the part where prediction stops working.

I want to be honest about what I'm claiming here, because "just hold" is the laziest advice in finance and I refuse to hand it to you dressed up as wisdom. Holding is not automatically smart. Holding a thing that has no reason to exist in ten years is just slow-motion loss. The patience only pays when it's attached to something you actually believe survives the decade — and that belief has to be earned by understanding what you own, not by watching a chart. The chart is the enemy of the ten-year question. The chart is entirely about the next hour.

The password they threw away

There's a category of Bitcoin holder I think about a lot, and they're mostly accidental. People who bought a small amount in 2012 or 2013, when it was a curiosity, and then genuinely forgot about it. Lost the drive. Threw out the laptop. Couldn't remember the password. Chainalysis has estimated that a large share of the total Bitcoin supply — often cited in the range of millions of coins — hasn't moved in many years, and some meaningful portion of that is simply gone, unreachable forever.

We usually tell that story as a tragedy. The guy who threw away the hard drive with 7,500 coins on it. And sure, for him, painful.

But flip it around. The single best-performing group of crypto holders in history is, functionally, the people who couldn't sell. Not the smart ones. The ones who were removed from the decision entirely. They didn't panic in 2015 because they'd forgotten they owned it. They didn't take profits in 2017 because they couldn't find the keys. Forced patience, by accident, beat almost every active strategy run by people who were paying close attention.

I'm not suggesting you lose your password. I'm suggesting that the market punishes attention and rewards conviction, and most of us have the ratio backwards. We pay attention constantly and hold conviction rarely. The forgetful holders did the opposite by accident, and the accident made them rich.

The lesson isn't "do nothing." It's "decide once, deliberately, and then stop letting the next hour vote on a decade-long decision."

Long vs Short, in one honest sentence

The short-term trader and the long-term holder are not looking at the same asset even when they own the same coin. The trader owns a price. The holder owns a thesis. When the price moves, the trader's entire world moves with it, because the price was the whole point. When the price moves, the holder checks it against the thesis and, most of the time, does nothing — because a 40% drawdown doesn't disprove a ten-year idea. It just tests whether you actually had one.

I'll leave the price predictions to people who enjoy being wrong publicly. I don't know where any of this goes and neither do they. What I know is that the compounding machine — whether it's Bitcoin, an index fund, or a business you own — pays the people who stay in their seat, and it pays them out of the pockets of the people who couldn't.

So here's my actual ten-year question, and I'd genuinely like your answer, not a "great post" — of everything you hold right now, which single position would you be comfortable being unable to touch until 2036? If the honest answer is "none of them," that's not a reason to feel bad. It's the most useful thing this post could have told you. It means what you own is a collection of next-hours, and somewhere in there is the decade you keep meaning to buy.

Everyone wants the next hour. Go find your next decade.