Should You Forget Altcoins and Just Buy Bitcoin Instead?

Picture a casual investor who in June 2021 split $5,000 evenly across a basket containing Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), Litecoin, Polkadot, Cardano, and Avalanche. Only Bitcoin provided a positive return. Every other position is underwater, anywhere from 40% to more than 94% below the entry point.

Bitcoin is up 72% in the same period. Even if you were to pick a handful of other altcoins to compare in the basket, or if you were to go back further in time for the starting point, the result would be the same in nearly all cases: Bitcoin up, and the rest into the abyss. So should investors even bother with altcoins at all, or just commit to buying and holding Bitcoin and call it a day?

The scoreboard reads like a horror story for altcoin investors

To drive the point home, take a look at this chart of altcoin performance versus Bitcoin during the past five years.

Bitcoin Price data by YCharts.

The broader picture is darker still.

CoinGecko's research found that of the millions of cryptocurrencies launched since 2021, the majority are already extinct. In 2025 alone, 11.6 million projects failed, many of which were pump-and-dump scams. A few launches outperformed Bitcoin, and a few new major cryptocurrencies managed to emerge, but almost none were coins that a casual investor would have heard of in 2021.

Most of the time, betting on a new launch in hopes of it surviving over the long term is a fool's errand. There are simply too many coins chasing too little capital, and established assets like Bitcoin don't have that problem. What's more, the volatility of altcoins relative to Bitcoin means that investors can potentially buy a decent asset at a price that's too expensive to ever result in them getting a good return. That's before even getting into the difficulties of pinning an accurate valuation to a given crypto project.

The case for keeping it simple

For someone who wants crypto exposure without the risk or time commitment of researching and investing in altcoins, there isn't much of a contest here.

Sorting through hundreds of chains and decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, and understanding each asset's tokenomics and investment thesis, demands real time and attention, as well as analytical aptitude and a very high tolerance for risk. Most of these projects will not be around in five years, and most of the survivors will still trail Bitcoin. Buying a sprawling basket of altcoins is usually akin to paying full price for the privilege of underperforming.

Buying altcoins looks like an even worse proposition given that it's easy to accumulate Bitcoin automatically over time, reducing the risk of buying in at an inopportune point. Dollar-cost averaging (DCAing), or buying a fixed dollar amount of an asset on a set schedule regardless of price, works best when the underlying asset has the highest probability of compounding over time. Bitcoin's capped supply, its halving-driven supply reduction, and its degree of institutional adoption via spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) all skew the odds in its favor over the long run for those who use a DCA strategy.

So, for most investors, the best answer is to forget altcoins and just buy Bitcoin. The exceptions are people who already own Bitcoin, have done the work to research a specific altcoin thesis, and have already built and diversified their (hopefully more conservative) traditional financial investment portfolio. It's very likely that anyone who takes this approach will miss out on some outrageous returns with specific altcoins. But that reality is a byproduct of survivorship bias, wherein only a tiny sliver of viable assets outperforms, so it's important to make peace with it.

Bitcoin's future performance is not guaranteed to be as good as it was in the past. But if you're the betting type, it's pretty much a no-brainer to bet that it will outperform the overwhelming majority of altcoins, even if its growth slows down a bit.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Aave, Avalanche, Bitcoin, and Chainlink. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.