Lump sum means investing your full amount the moment you decide to invest. Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) means splitting that same amount into equal buys spread across a fixed schedule — weekly or monthly — regardless of price.

Bitcoin has trended upward over most multi-year windows in its history. If an asset trends up more often than not, the earliest possible entry — all at once — captures more of that upside than an entry spread out over months, because DCA is by definition average-timed, not best-timed.

This is the same reason lump sum tends to beat DCA in most backtests on broad stock indices too: markets go up more years than they go down, so 'invest sooner' beats 'invest gradually' more often than not, purely on expected return.

Expected return isn't the only thing that matters — regret does too. DCA removes the single highest-stakes decision (exactly when to buy) and replaces it with a mechanical schedule, which is easier to actually stick to during a 30% drawdown.

For a volatile asset like Bitcoin specifically, the cost of badly-timed lump sum (buying right before a major drop) is larger and more common than for a diversified index. DCA caps how bad your worst single entry can be, at the cost of also capping your best one.

The honest answer depends entirely on the window you test — that's not evasion, it's the actual finding. Run the same $100/week plan starting in different months and you'll get very different total returns, because a handful of large single-day moves account for most of Bitcoin's long-term gains.

That's why our DCA simulator runs on real historical prices instead of a smoothed assumption — the point isn't to prove DCA wins or loses, it's to let you see what a specific plan would actually have done.