How has Bitcoin performed each calendar year?

Bitcoin's price has spanned four orders of magnitude since 2015, which makes raw price charts almost useless for comparing one year against another — the early years compress into a flat line at the bottom. Rebasing each year to 0% on January 1 removes the magnitude problem entirely. What is left is shape: when in the year the move happened, how steep it was, and how much was given back.

The calendar year is an arbitrary window, and that is worth saying plainly. Bitcoin's cycle runs on roughly four years, anchored loosely to the halving, and it has no reason to respect January 1. A calendar view is useful for a specific question — what a year in this asset has actually looked like — not for locating where the cycle stands.

Three patterns come out of the overlay. The dispersion is extreme: the best and worst years differ by hundreds of percentage points, a spread no major asset class approaches. Positive years are substantially outnumbered by the size of their moves rather than their count — a handful of very large years carry the entire long-run return.

Second, the big years are front- or back-loaded rather than steady; a large annual return usually came from a few concentrated weeks. Third, drawdowns inside positive years are routine — years that finished up strongly still spent time deeply negative. That last point is the practical one, because it is what a strategy has to survive to capture the annual figure.

Annual returns describe outcomes, not entries. Nobody buys on January 1 and sells on December 31, and the intra-year paths on this chart show how different the experience was from the endpoint. That gap is the argument for a rules-based approach rather than a discretionary one: the years that finished best were frequently the hardest to hold through. The DCA calculator applies contribution rules across these same price series, and the cycles page reframes the identical data on the four-year clock the asset actually seems to run on.