My other recent graph/data crypto posts:

1. How many Bricks/Moons you'd need to spend to buy lunch
2. Comparing a 5-year investment in the top 5 crypto versus traditional investments
3. YTD changes in top 10 coin market cap versus subreddit subscriber counts.

Please check these posts out if you want some easy to read graphs and data; I plan to continue making these for the foreseeable future. Without further ado:

What did the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap look like in 2016?

As a note, I collected these data/rankings from a CoinMarketCap historical snapshot, and I found these coin's current prices on CMC first, or CoinGecko if I couldn't find them on CMC. If they showed up on neither website, I assumed the coin was worthless.

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Fig. 1 – Top 100 coins by market cap in 2016.

Have you even heard of most of these coins? For real, I recognize maybe 25% of them, and I have been in the crypto realm since 2017.

Bitcoin, at the top, had a market cap of around $10 B, while the #100 coin, Infinitecoin, had a market cap of around $420,000. For reference, a coin with a market cap of $420,000 today would be roughly rank #1,950 (BEER is that coin, if you're curious).

Now, let's see how many coins lost value and how many coins gained value in the last five years.

Fig. 2 – How many of the top 100 coins from 2016 increased or decreased in value in 2021.

I really like this second figure, as it illustrates your odds of being profitable if you had only bought a single coin in 2016 and didn't sell it until today. You had a 53% chance of picking a coin that went up in value and a 46% chance of picking a coin that went down in value. Also, a 1% chance to pick Tether. So, a single pick would have been risky. I didn't graph these data, but I'll note that 9 of the top 10 coins from 2016 went up in value by today, with only STEEM losing 60% of its value.

Now, let's look at how many coins increased in value in bins. This will give us a better idea of how much you'd increase your investment depending on if you had a profitable coin or not.

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Fig. 3 – A histogram showing "bins" of the top 100 coins, grouped by how much their value changed from 2016 to 2021.

So, the first bin, ranging from 0% to 100%, had 47 coins. This is the same as the orange slice of the pie chart above plus Tether (which was flat, having exactly 100% of its value from 2016 in 2021). The other 46 coins in that first bin lost anywhere from 1% to 100% of their value in the last five years.

To write out the above: 7 coins increased in value by 1%-100%, 6 coins increased in value by 101-200%, 1 coin increased in value by 300-400% (Peercoin, 311%, for those curious)… and what's really interesting is that 39 coins increased by at least 400%.

What this means is that if you bought only one coin in 2016 and sold it today, you had a 47% chance to breakeven or lose money, you had a 14% chance to make a 1% to 300% profit, and you had a 39% chance to gain at least a 400% profit. This is basically a massive example of feast or famine, where you either lost your money or you made a 4x or greater gain with very little in-between.

Now, let's say you're a wise person that doesn't YOLO into a single coin, but rather, divides up your investment based on arbitrary cutoffs and not emotional decisions. How would your money look today?

Fig. 4 – How much would you gain if you had invested in subsets of the top 100 coins from 2016 and sold today?

This is my favorite figure. Imagine this: you had X number of dollars in 2016 and you decided to split all that money up evenly across the top 5 coins only… you would be up 12,726% today.

Top 10 only? 8,448% gain

Top 25? 11,027% gain

The BOTTOM 50 coins? You'd still be up 2,133%. That's more than a 20x increase if you'd evenly invested into the bottom 50 coins and didn't sell until today.

For comparison, I added an S&P500 index fund investment over the same 5 years – you'd be up a very respectable (by stock market standards) 105% in only 5 years… which very, very much beats the average rate of return for the S&P500 on a long-term historical basis. That still pales in comparison to even the worst-case investment of throwing money at the 50 bottom coins in my above example, returning less than 5% of what you would get with that bottom 50 investment plan.

Keep in mind: past performance neither guarantees or predicts future returns. If you invested in any of the above subsets right now and held for 5 years, you may or may not see similar results – I would only recommend people never invest more than they can afford to lose when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

tl;dr: the top 100 coins on average did quite well, especially if you invested in more of them evenly rather than trying to pick 1-2 (although 9 of the top 10 increased dramatically).