If you had purchased bitcoin astatine the marketplace adjacent connected Dec. 10, you would’ve paid $92,020.95. As of the marketplace adjacent 1 week later, connected Dec. 17, it was worthy $86,143.76. So your concern would’ve declined by $5,877.19, oregon astir 6.4%.
Does this mean that bitcoin is simply a atrocious investment? Or that it’s excessively precocious to get successful connected the large gains? That whitethorn not beryllium the case. But cryptocurrency is not an concern for the faint of heart. Let’s instrumentality a look astatine the past of bitcoin and its humanities show arsenic an investment.
Bitcoin launched successful 2009, making it older than galore radical realize. By 2011, bitcoin archetypal traded astatine implicit $1. Since then, bitcoin has seen plentifulness of volatility — soaring to caller heights and past falling backmost down to Earth.
In 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the archetypal bitcoin exchange-traded money (ETF). And successful 2025, determination has been plentifulness of quality surrounding bitcoin, with President Donald Trump signing a enforcement bid to found a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
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Looking astatine the information that bitcoin traded astatine $1 successful 2011 and is present trading astatine astir $100,000, 1 mightiness reason that bitcoin arsenic an concern has been an unthinkable success. But it has been thing if not volatile. The ups and downs of cryptocurrency person made and mislaid fortunes successful precise abbreviated periods of time, although, obviously, the trajectory has been sharply up.
If you look astatine humanities bitcoin prices, you’ll spot gains and losses alternating. For example, successful November 2025, bitcoin traded implicit $111,000 and arsenic debased arsenic astir $80,000.
When you look implicit the agelong term, though, bitcoin’s upward trajectory becomes overmuch clearer. Over the past 5 years, bitcoin is up 273.63% arsenic of Dec. 18.
Bitcoin is an absorbing concern successful respective ways, its meteoric emergence successful worth being conscionable 1 of them. It’s an investment, but it’s besides a currency, though it’s not tied to immoderate country. It is secure, which makes it safe, but it is besides decentralized, which makes it susceptible to exploitation.
No 1 knows however precocious bitcoin tin go, oregon whether it volition travel crashing down. All we cognize is what we’ve seen, which has been a sharp, albeit bumpy, way upward.
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This nonfiction primitively appeared connected GOBankingRates.com: Bought Some Bitcoin Last Week? Here’s How Much It’s Worth Today

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