Is buy-and-hold better than trading crypto?

Often, yes — and that's measurable rather than philosophical. Buy-and-hold is itself a strategy with an outstanding historical return profile and a horrifying drawdown profile: BTC bought in early 2018 spent years underwater and endured an ~80% drawdown before its recovery. Whether you'd actually have held through that is the question the return number hides.

The right comparison is empirical: for each coin and period, compare buy-and-hold against a rules-based strategy on return AND max drawdown AND time underwater. Our per-coin results pages show strategy vs buy-and-hold side by side, and the buy-and-hold pages show exactly what holding felt like per entry year. Some periods trading wins, some holding wins — data settles it per case.