46% of US crypto investors reported their investments did worse than expected, according to Pew Research Center’s nationally representative 2022 survey of 6,034 adults. That figure captures the core tension: cryptocurrency attracted mainstream adoption with promises of outsized returns, but nearly half of those who acted on the opportunity came away disappointed. On the other side, 16% of Americans who did not buy cryptocurrency told ConsumerAffairs in a 2022 survey of 1,074 adults that they regretted staying out — a real but minority experience of inaction regret (34% were glad they didn’t, and 51% were neutral).
The numbers are regime-dependent in ways that matter. Pew’s 46% was recorded near the post-Terra/LUNA collapse, when Bitcoin had fallen roughly 70% from its 2021 peak. A survey taken at the top of a bull market would show higher inaction regret and lower action regret; a survey taken deeper in a bear market might produce even higher action regret. The ConsumerAffairs inaction figure was also captured in 2022, near the same drawdown, which likely muted the missed-gains regret that a bull-market survey would have surfaced. The S&P 500’s roughly 150% gain from 2019 to 2024 provided traditional-asset holders with strong objective grounds for contentment, which likely held down their regret rate.
Gilovich’s temporal model predicts that action regrets are more salient in the short run but fade as people adapt, while inaction regrets persist. That pattern may play out differently here: crypto investors who took large losses have a concrete, specific loss to mourn, while non-investors who missed a bull run are haunted by a counterfactual that grows and shrinks with every market cycle. The 30-point gap favoring action regret is real but unusually volatile for this asset class. Unlike missing a decade of S&P returns, missing a crypto bull run is not a one-time counterfactual — it recurs every time the price makes headlines.