I think the current $450 price might well be enough to act as a tipping point for the cautious to start buying and holding.
We have wanted people to buy regularly but to date the outcomes have been very choppy. Now bitcoin has been around long enough that the numbers show that it is a very good thing to do even with some choppiness.
Lets say you buy just 1 bitcoin a year on your birthday which is 30 November ( the date of the gox ath so the “worst’ date possible to buy).
below is the average price you will have paid for your bitcoins if you started in 2010, then 2011 etc, The number in brackets is the number of bitcoins you would have.
$315(6)
$378(5)
$472(4)
$626(3)
$376(2)
$376(1)
So:
starting in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2015 your av bitcojn cost price is below the current price.
starting in 2012 you are roughly breaking even
starting in 2013 you are in a loss
if bitcoin stays $450+ for a few years then even with the very unlucky start date in 2013 you might come out ok.
the lesson here it seems to me is that historically buying bitcoin has been a good investment aside from the other benefits that bitcoin offers.
I'm not sure if I understand your chart exactly,
but I do know one thing, the world has not been priced in bitcoin between 2010 and present.
Therefore, it would make more sense to price your birthday gift in some form of fiat.
For example, every b-day, November 30, you buy $365 in BTC ($1 for each day of the year, blah blah blah), then your average is going to come out much better, but the scenario would be much more realistic, in the way that I have outlined it..
yes you are quite correct. you would come out much better off and your buying pattern in $ is more normal. However I did it this way to show even looking at it from a very bad angle (using bitcoins) the outcome is fine. That should convince even the doomsayers to get out and buy and we need both the optimists and pessimists to be buyers.
You can paint conservative scenarios by eliminating some of the advantages of earlier years, or changing amounts purchased or even trading BTC and making mistakes, but you should not undermine the very explosive scenario of BTC's price history.
I put together a quickie Excel chart to flesh out my above-described tweaking of aspects of your earlier scenario, and BTC's price looks outrageously explosive, even if you were to attempt to tweak some more and to paint such asepects in more conservative scenarios.
One of the issues, however, is that most of us probably did not even know about BTC until 2012 or 2013.. so to be more realistic, it may be better to eliminate some of the earlier years because we would not have known or have been able to invest.
Date BTC Price buy amount BTC quantity Total BTC bought Total fiat invested Average per BTC
11/30/10 $0.30 $365.00 1,216.66666667 1,216.66666667 $365.00 $0.30
11/30/11 $3.00 $365.00 121.66666667 1,338.33333333 $730.00 $0.55
11/30/12 $12.50 $365.00 29.20000000 1,367.53333333 $1,095.00 $0.80
11/30/13 $1,150.00 $365.00 0.31739130 1,367.85072464 $1,460.00 $1.07
11/30/14 $380.00 $365.00 0.96052632 1,368.81125095 $1,825.00 $1.33
11/30/15 $380.00 $365.00 0.96052632 1,369.77177727 $2,190.00 $1.60