Short-Term Churn vs Long-Term Conviction: 30 Days of Bitcoin UTXO Flows

This chart looks at all coins that moved on-chain between 2025-10-19 and 2025-11-19 and breaks them down by how long they had been sitting before they were spent.

Left: BTC spent (PnL-covered UTXOs) by age band.
Right: Realized profit (top) and realized loss (bottom), with pie slices showing each age band’s share.

A few things stand out:

• Almost all of the realized losses come from coins younger than a few months. That’s the short-term churn (the reason the numbers add up to more than 21m is because of how much of the short term simply trades back and forth) trying to time entries and exits.
• The older bands (multi-month to multi-year coins) are overwhelmingly on the profit side when they finally move.
• In other words, every UTXO that survives long enough tends to be sitting on a cushion — it’s the frequent flipping in the short-term bands that crystallizes losses.

This is why “timing” Bitcoin with constant in-and-out trades is so hard. The chain keeps showing the same pattern:
short-term traders provide liquidity and often realize the drawdowns, while long-term holders mostly wait until the move is obviously in their favor before they spend.

Chart and data from my local node