Bitcoin is not the fast route to wealth

The days of scorching bitcoin gains – and by that we mean 200-300% a year – may be behind us. Perhaps it's time to start treating bitcoin(BTC) as sound money and a hedge against inflation rather than the best performing asset of the last five years.

In fact, BTC is not the best performing asset of the last five years. Nvidia beats it handily, though let’s not pour too much cold water on bitcoin – after all, it has grown an average compound 65% over the last five years.

How bitcoin stacks up against other assets over 5 years

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BTC has dropped roughly 31% of its $126k peak reached inOctober 2025. Panic has set in and billions of institutional funds have exited the exchange traded funds that have been all the rage in 2024 and 2025.

Is this a good time to buy?

It’s certainly better than it was a month ago. But let’s see if there is a better way to accumulate BTC than trying to time the tops and bottoms of the market.

Dollar cost averaging (DCA)

Here’s a proven strategy – dollar cost averaging (or rand cost averaging if you’re South African) – to accumulate bitcoin over time.

DCA is the simple habit of buying a fixed dollar amount of Bitcoin at regular intervals, regardless of price. Over the past decade, this strategy has turned many modest investors into millionaires. Here’s why it remains one of the smartest ways to accumulate BTC in 2025—and why some critics still hate it.

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The above shows what happens if you accumulate R1,000 worth of BTC every month for five years. Your investment amount over that period would have been R60,000, but your portfolio value today – even after the recent market crash – would be R93,000.

The idea is to ignore price and accumulate BTC regularly.

There are several benefits to doing this:

1.  It removes emotion and the belief that you need to time your investment. No you don’t. You just invest R1,000 a month, or a week. But do it like clockwork. If you can do more than R1,000 a month and feel comfortable with this, increase the monthly purchase of BTC (80eight allows you to dollar cost average automatically).

2.  It exploits BTC’s long-term upward bias.The table above shows BTC yielding a 65% annual return over the last five years. Going back to 2013, that return is north of 100% a year.

3. This allows for small investments to be turned into something meaningful, rather than saving a large lump sum to be invested (which then puts you into the game of trying to time the market, which is usually very hard to do).

4. The chart above shows continued increases in portfolio value, even during market crashes.

For 95 % of people, DCA remains the highest-probability path to life-changing bitcoin wealth without losing sleep or blowing up your finances. It won’t make you the richest person in any single cycle, but it dramatically increases the odds you’ll still be around when the next parabolic leg arrives.