The story that gets passed around is a specific one: $30 of bitcoin, bought every single day since January 2017. Rather than retell it, this page recomputes it live — and lets you change the numbers. The famous run is the starting point — its million-dollar crossing was covered by Benzinga and crypto.news, and retold in the essay this tool grew out of. Every other start date and amount is one drag away. It is the record of what a habit did, not a recommendation to run one.
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Value
?The bitcoin accumulated, re-priced at today's live spot when a fetch succeeds, otherwise at the latest price in the series.
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Multiple on inputs
?Value now divided by total invested — how many times over the contributions have grown.
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Longest underwater
?The longest unbroken stretch where the stack was worth less than the total put in — i.e. price sat below the buyer's average cost basis. The psychological price of the habit.
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The inputs are linear; the outcome is not — that gap is the whole point, so the value axis is linear, not logarithmic. Computed from the site's PL_DATA price series (about 12-day samples, interpolated to a daily price in log space), so figures are close to, but not identical to, true daily closes. The habit auto-updates with each monthly price refresh.
The record, not a recommendation
Two of the cards above are the story most retellings skip. Deepest drawdown is what the stack did from peak to trough — for the $30/day run, a fall of about 73%, a paper loss most people never actually sit through. And longest underwater is the stretch where the stack was worth less than every dollar put in. Averaging in keeps that second number small: the daily buyer above spends only a few weeks underwater across nine years, because each purchase lowers the average cost. That is the quiet case for a boring habit — not that it dodges the drawdown, but that it is the vehicle most people can actually hold through one. Start a year ago instead and the stretch runs months, not weeks — the date input above will show you.
This page deliberately stops at what the habit did. Why the trend keeps pulling away from intuition — the exponential-blindness that makes these numbers feel impossible — belongs to the Doubling Ladder. Whether to spread buying out at all, versus deploying a lump sum, belongs to Wait or Deploy Now. And the channel these blind daily buys actually land in — floor, trend, upper band — is the Power Law. This page only answers one question: what did the drip buy.
Common questions
What would $30 a day of bitcoin be worth?
Computed from bitcoin's real price history, $30 of bitcoin bought every day since January 1, 2017 put in about $105,000 over roughly nine and a half years and accumulated about 11.3 BTC. Its value first crossed $1,000,000 on November 19, 2024 (about $86,400 contributed by then), and at the latest price in the series sits near $715,000 — below the million, in the current drawdown. Change the start date or the daily amount on this page to replay any other version.
What is a bitcoin DCA backtest?
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is buying a fixed dollar amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price. A backtest replays that habit against real historical prices to show what it would have accumulated, what it cost, and what it is worth. This page is a retrospective backtest — the record of what a past daily habit did, not a forecast of what a future one will do.
How long was a daily bitcoin buyer underwater?
Underwater means the stack is worth less than the total put into it. Averaging in keeps the cost basis low, so a $30/day buyer since January 2017 was underwater only for the first few weeks and never again — even through the deepest stack drawdown, which fell about 73% from its peak while still staying well above the amount contributed. A worse-timed start date makes that underwater stretch longer; the tool lets you see how much.
Is this page a prediction of future returns?
No. It is retrospective only — it computes what a past habit actually did against real price history, and shows the deep drawdowns along the way. Past results do not predict future ones, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy on any schedule.