Crypto vs Stocks: Bitcoin & Tech in the Digital Era
We measure Bitcoin, Nvidia, Apple and the Nasdaq against money supply growth to settle crypto vs stocks, and to see how much faster tech built real wealth.
Topic
Digital Assets: Tech, Crypto and the Money Supply
By digital assets we mean both the tech companies built on the microchip and the internet and Bitcoin itself, and Part V tests them together against the money supply from 1980 to 2026, because what they seemed to share was speed.
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Nvidia returned 836x after M2 in 27 years and Bitcoin grew 721,902-fold from its early recorded pricing in 2010, figures that took industrial companies most of a lifetime to approach.
On a 100-year chart that whole period gets squashed flat, so we split it into three stretches and reset everything to 1.0 at the start of each. Since 2000 M2 has grown 4.7x, gold and the S&P 500 have barely kept their heads above water, and most of the real gains have gone to digital assets.
- 721,902x Bitcoin since 2010 From its early recorded pricing, as covered in Part V.
- 836x NVIDIA M2-adjusted since 1999 4,190x nominal, compounding at 36.2% a year.
- 489x Apple M2-adjusted since 1985 Compounding at 22.8% a year over 41 years.
Articles on Digital Assets
1 article from our research on this topic.
Plain-English definitions
Key terms for digital assets
- Fixed supply 21m BTC
- Bitcoin’s code caps the number of coins at 21 million, which is the scarcity the series compares with expanding fiat money.
- Rolling holding period
- Every possible holding period of a set length, such as each five-year window since 2010, rather than one chosen start date.
- CAGR
- Compound annual growth rate: the steady yearly rate that would turn the starting value into the ending value over the period.
- M2-adjusted value 1.0 = break-even
- An asset’s growth divided by M2 growth over the same years. Above 1.0 it gained share of the money pool, below 1.0 it lost share.
FAQ
Questions about digital assets
Answers drawn from the figures in our research. Educational only, not financial advice.
Did digital assets beat traditional investments?
Over the last 10 and 20 years, clearly. From 2016 to 2026 gold, the S&P 500 and Berkshire roughly doubled in real terms (1.9x to 2.1x), Apple and Microsoft returned 4.5x to 6.7x, and Nvidia and Bitcoin about 80x. Over 2006 to 2026, Apple reached 40.6x and Nvidia 138.2x after M2, while the S&P 500 and gold stayed below 2.5x.
Were digital asset gains just a product of COVID money printing?
Only partly. The COVID response added roughly $4.8 trillion and M2 rose 1.52x from January 2019, which helped every asset. Nvidia rose 44.5x and Bitcoin 16.9x over the same stretch, though, and we could not see how new money alone could produce a gap that wide.
Important information
Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
Cryptoassets are largely unregulated in the UK, so you are unlikely to have access to the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme if something goes wrong. Educational information only, not financial advice. Read our disclaimer.
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