There was a post yesterday that included a snapshot of the Top 100 coins from exactly 4 years ago. I decided to crunch some numbers to see how those coins progressed over time and where they stand today. Here are my findings, with some interesting tidbits

Edit: I fucked up and missed a decimal place regarding XLM. That has been corrected. Thanks, /u/TRossW18. Good catch! That changed things significantly. In thanks, $10 is going to the charity of your choice.

That post got me to thinking just how many coins completely tanked, so I decided to jump in headfirst and do some research. I apologize in advance for my formatting; I haven't actually tried to type out a legitimately formatted post on reddit in a long time.

First, I am going to show a table of all 100 coins, broken down into sections. The first section will be the Top 10 coins from 4 years ago. Included will be their ticker (their new ticker will be in parentheses, if applicable); the price on July 23, 2017; the current price (the date they ceased to exist in parentheses, if applicable); the percent increase/decrease over the past 4 years; and the ATH price (and date); the percent increase from the snapshot date to ATH (if the ATH was prior to July 23, 2017, it will show a decrease). I will talk about each section a bit before moving on to the next section and, after all the coins are posted, I'll provide some overview and some interesting tidbits.

Note: The Current Price is as of sometime yesterday, as I did my initial research throughout the day. Also, dates are in MMDDYY format. *=Current Top 100, as of the time of my research. Some coins are borderline and may have moved into or out of the current 100 as of this posting.

Below is a table with some stats from the Top 10 from 4 years ago (for monetary stats, I assume a $100 investment across the board, for a total of $10,000 invested). The stats included are: Total Profit (including initial investment); Profit per coin (in this case, the Total Profit/10); how many total coins turned a profit; how many coins went to zero; How many coins went at least 2x; how many coins went at least 4x; how many coins are still in the Top 100 today; which coin had the largest percent increase.

Out of this group, obviously BTC performed the best, although ETH is right on its heels. Most of the coins here have had solid run-ups overall. Half of them had their ATH reached in 2021 and, assuming the upward trend eventually picks back up and new ATHs are reached, they will likely have a different ATH in the future.

XRP especially went bananas in early 2018 and, even though it is was centralized, it was one of /r/cryptocurrency's most shilled coins during that holiday period. Out of these 10 coins, only STRAT is unlikely to ever reach it's July 23, 2017 price point in the future.

The next grouping will be coins 11-25 from 4 years ago. They had robust market caps, especially for the time, all ranging between $250M-$450M. It is really interesting to see the wild swings in this group, as this is where the gambles really start to take place. It is also where we see our first Zero Coin (coin that drops to nothing). I'm sure some of y'all might be able to guess what it is.

Here are the totals for this group of 15:

Looking at the coins in this group, I was expecting NEO to have the most profit over time. Seeing WAVES slightly higher was surprising. What wasn't surprising was seeing Bitconnect (BCC) be the first Zero Coin Casualty. As an aside, if you had bought BCC on 07/23/17 and sold the day after Carlos Matos yelled his WASO WASO WASO WASO BITCONNNNNEEEEECCCCCTTTT!!!!! meme, you would have gotten out shortly before it reached an ATH and would have gotten about 5.5x return on your investment. That meme was the moment everyone with a brain realized that BCC was a complete scam and the writing was on the wall for a huge dump forthcoming.

This group did pretty well, even with the BCC, ICN and BCN duds, but this is where the huge swings can be seen for the first time, with the exception of Tether, the one and only stablecoin in the Top 100 from 4 years ago. An abnormality in this group is EOS with its ATH date of April 2018, a good 3 months after the crash started. Intriguing. Next up are the remainder of the Top 50 from 4 years ago, including the biggest gainer of all (I'm sure you all know what it is already).

Here are the totals for this group of 25:

One of the most eye-opening stats here is that there were only 2 Zero Coins in the entire group. That equals the number of Zero Coins from the 11-25 group, with 10 extra coins in this grouping. If you were to pick a coin at random from this group on this date in 2017, you would have a 92% chance of choosing a coin that still exists today. That's pretty impressive.

Two obvious PNDs exist in this group (PAY and BNT), who both had their ATH prior to the date and both were over 90% off their ATH, reached within 4 weeks of the listing. BNT dropped from its ATH of 23.73 down to 2.15 in a matter of 6 days, while PAY dropped from 86.26 to 1.05 in 24 HOURS. That crash is almost as impressive as TITAN's.

DOGE obviously carried this group with its 9540% increase. Hypothetically, if you were to invest $100 in each of the 100 coins in this list and all of them crashed to 0 except DOGE, which maintained its trajectory, you would have only lost $460 total out of your $10,000. If you were to cash out DOGE at its ATH, that $100 investment alone would have netted you $36,880. XLM also had much, much better gains than I initially calculated. Very impressive, as well.

Also, I was confused by DGD because it increased by 6.8x but is still only 481st in market cap today. DigixDAO is a unique crypto that is directly tied to gold whereby 1 DGD=1 gram of gold. Supposedly. I'd be interested to hear more about it in the comments if any of you have any working knowledge on how it works, since the price swings look similar to most other crypto.

The next group is the remaining 50 coins. The real gambles. 38 of the remaining 50 at the time had a market cap of <$50M, with one of them being in the Top 50 for only one day, which happened to be the day of the snapshot. Here are the next 50:

Here are the totals for the bottom 50:

I found it a bit odd that none of the Top 100 from 4 years ago are currently in the Top 100 now (even though a few are close). There also wasn't nearly as much capitulation as I thought there would be. There are 5 Zero Coins in this group, which is more than the other groups combined (comparing Top 50 to Bottom 50, it was actually close, though). There are a lot of coins with 75% losses, and many that are on the verge of dying completely.

The most fascinating coin to me in this group, and maybe out of the entire research, is COE. It just so happened that this coin debuted on 07/23/17 and was actually off its ATH (or hadn't reached it yet) at the time the Wayback Machine performed its timestamp. That coin hit 1400 during the same day, a few days later was trading under 50 and within 3 months was completely dead. There were other obvious PND's to stay away from in this group. DCT dropped from 19.19 to 3.02 over 4 days just a month prior. MCO had its ICO date 6 weeks prior and was already 77.78% in the red.

OMNI, while not an obvious PND, was way off it's ATH, which was in late 2013 at 1150. By July 2017, it was trading at 42.99. Now, it's at $4.20. That reminds me of a current coin that is in the Top 25 right now that had a much higher valuation than it currently does cough cough ICP cough. It'll be interesting to see where that coin stands in 4 years, if it does at all.

Over 60% of coins in this list had their ATH occur between December 2017 and January 2018. EOS is an anomaly in the fact that it is the only coin to have its ATH in 2018 but not in January. There are 18 coins who had their ATH in 2021 and, assuming the crypto market recovers to reach new ATH's, they are poised to potentially also have new ATH's in the future. The 18 coins are:

BTC, ETH, LTC, ETC, XMR, WAVES, DOGE, MAID, DGB, DCR, BAT, DGD, DAWN, ANT, LEO, NMR, RLC and STORJ.

Finally, out of the 100 coins:

35% turned a profit over 4 years.

12% lost between 75-90% in value. 23% lost between 90-99.98% in value. 10% became casualties and are Zero Coins.

If you threw a dart at the board, you'd have roughly a 1 in 3 shot of making a profit and a 1 in 5 shot of doubling your money.

The chances were greater if you saw obvious PND's and either avoided them or invested but got out in time. The easiest one to predict was BCC. Personally, I was invested in BCC and got out within 15 minutes of seeing their promo video in Singapore, headlined by Carlos Matos. That shit was laughable and it was time to nope the fuck out of there.

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of these numbers. Personally, it was fun to look into some coins that I haven't thought about in years and to research some that I'd never heard of before. It will be interesting to visit today's Top 100 in 4 years to see which ones have survived and which ones will either be struggling or will be non-existent. Questions and comments are welcome. It's late here (2:30 am), but if I don't get to your question tonight, I'll be sure to look into it tomorrow!

Edit: I forgot to post the total. $100/coin invested makes the total investment $10,000. The total today would be $22,595.80. Over 40% of that is DOGE. The Top 5 Gainers (DOGE, BTC, XLM, ETH, XVG) would account for $13,331.89 of that total, or 60%.