Bitcoin's 9,000,000% Decade Traces to a Bank of America Note

A carousel from the account watcher.guru is going round again with a simple premise. One asset per decade, ranked by return, from the 1970s through the 2010s. Bitcoin closes the set at +9,000,000%. That number is real, and it traces to a specific piece of December 2019 research. The four stock figures ahead of it are harder to stand behind, and one of them has a competing record against it.

Where the nine million comes from

The bitcoin figure originated in a Bank of America Securities note reported in mid-December 2019. It put $1 invested in bitcoin at the start of the decade at about $90,000 by the end of it. That is 9,000,000%. The same note ranked American stocks at roughly $3.46 on the dollar, 30-year Treasuries at $2.08, gold at $1.34 and crude oil at $0.74. Two separate write-ups of the note carry the identical $1-to-$90,000 framing, which is the closest thing to confirmation available without the note itself.

CryptoPotato ran its own tally on 29 December 2019 and reached 8,900,000%, working from a start price near $0.07 and a close of $7,300. The two figures do not reconcile. The gap is arithmetic, not dispute. The slide takes the rounder number.

The starting price does most of the work

Joakim Book took the claim apart for The Daily Economy on 7 January 2020, and his objection was not to the arithmetic. It was to the base. The commonly quoted July 2010 range of $0.07 to $0.09, measured against a 31 December 2019 close of $7,180, gives about 10 million percent. Push the start back to $0.003 in March 2010 and the same close yields roughly 240 million percent. Go back further, to the earliest quote of $0.00076 in late 2009, and it reaches about 944 million percent.

"The effect of a very low base is what drives" the headline percentages, Book wrote.

The decade return is therefore not one number. It is a family of them, and the slide reports one member. This desk has checked a bitcoin history post before, and an $8 anniversary slide missed its own date by eight months.

Four stocks, one that does not match

The earlier slides carry figures we could not confirm against a second outlet by publication time. Three of them stand on the post's own authority and are reported here as the author's figures.

1970s, Nabors Industries: +605%
1980s, MDU Resources: +36,792%
1990s, Cisco Systems: +72,357%
2000s, Monster: +7,075%

The last of those has something to argue with. A ranking of the Russell 3000 across that decade, published by HuffPost, put Medifast first at +16,209%, a move from 19 cents to $30.58. It named Hansen Natural, the company that later became Monster Beverage, among the decade's strong performers rather than at the head of them. Both figures are on the record. They do not reconcile.

The laptop on the last slide

The 2010s panel is illustration, not data. It shows a wallet interface reading 50.00000000 BTC with incoming entries of +10.00000000 BTC, beside a physical coin, a stack of books and a mug. None of it is sourced to a chain, an address or a date, and it reads as art direction. A 50-coin balance would still sit far above the line for owning a whole bitcoin, which River estimates about 825,000 people clear.

The author's framing is that these assets dominated their decades and that some delivered generational wealth. That is the post's claim, not a finding. What the carousel establishes is narrower. One figure has a traceable source and a rival tally beside it, three have neither, and a fourth runs into a decade-end stock ranking that puts a different company first.