I made a free game: retire on Bitcoin with $500k in any month since 2013, then live through the real price history. Does your stack survive?

I made a free Bitcoin retirement simulator a while ago, and I got curious about a simple question: if you’d retired on Bitcoin some time in the past, would your money have lasted? It turns out the answer depends a lot on when you retired. So I turned it into a game: HODL or Fold.

https://bitcoinlifespan.com/hodl-or-fold/

How it works

• You start with $500,000 of BTC at the price of the month you choose (anything from 2013 on), plus a lifestyle: $3k, $5k or $8k a month, rising with inflation.
• Then you relive the real price history from that month to today. When the big moments hit (the 2013 crash, the 2017 top, COVID, the 2021 top, the 2022 winter and so on), you choose: HODL, sell half for cash, buy back in, or spend 25% less for a year.
• At the end you get a rank (???? Diamond Hands, ???? Paper Hands, ???? Pizza Guy, ????️ Wen Lambo…) and a comparison with pure HODL from the same start.

Things I tried to get right

• Choices aren’t rigged. Selling before a crash can beat holding, and selling at the bottom can sink you. The game just shows what history did next.
• Real data: month-end prices from Coin Metrics’ free community data.
• The interesting finding: in real history, holding usually survives, unless you spend big and retire near a peak. Late 2013, late 2017 and most of 2021 are brutal on an $8k/month budget. “Surprise me” drops you into those most of the time.

Privacy, because people rightly ask: there’s no sign-up, and the game runs entirely in your browser and saves nothing. The site itself has the usual Google Analytics and a cookie banner, like most sites.

It’s my site, it’s free, and it has no ads or paywall. Not financial advice, obviously: it’s a game about the past.

I’d love feedback, especially on which moments I should add and whether the ranks feel fair. Post your rank and start month below. I retired in Jan 2016 on $8,000 a month. Still standing after 10.8 years, with $36,973,917 left today.

https://bitcoinlifespan.com/hodl-or-fold/