Dealing with Crypto Regret: Missed Opportunities and Bad Trades
You had $1,000 sitting in a savings account earning 2% in 2020. You thought about Bitcoin at $9,000. You talked yourself out of it. You watched it hit $69,000 in 2021. You calculated what that $1,000 would have been. You felt sick. Or maybe you actually bought Bitcoin, held it all the way through 2022, panicked when it dropped below $17,000, and sold. Then watched it recover to over $126,000 by October 2025. You have a different kind of sick feeling, but it is equally real. Crypto regret is one of the most psychologically specific experiences in modern finance. This blog does not dismiss it. It explains it, contextualises it, and gives you a framework for moving through it without letting it destroy your future investment decisions or your peace of mind.
By CryptoAcademy Team | Published: 2026-04-04 | 18 min read time read | Category: Educational
You Are Not Alone: The Scale of Crypto Regret
Before anything else, it is worth establishing that what you are feeling is not unusual, not dramatic, and not a sign that you are doing anything wrong as an investor or as a person.
A study of 3,009 people in Australia found that over 40% of under-35s say they regret not investing in cryptocurrency over the past decade, with 80% of Australians under 50 saying they regretted the investment choices they had made over the last decade overall. This was the single most commonly cited missed opportunity, ahead of property and shares in major tech companies.
A 2024 Kraken survey of 1,248 US crypto holders revealed that 63% reported that emotional decisions had negatively impacted their portfolios. When asked about FOMO specifically, 84% admitted to making decisions based on it. When asked about FUD-driven decisions, 81% admitted to those too.
These are not statistics about people who are bad at investing. They are statistics about the normal human experience of participating in one of the most volatile, psychologically demanding, and socially visible asset markets ever created. The numbers are high because the market itself is designed, either deliberately or as an emergent property of its structure, to generate exactly these emotional responses.
There are two distinct categories of crypto regret, and they work differently in the brain. Understanding the distinction helps you work through each more effectively.
---
Two Flavours of Regret: Omission vs Commission
Cognitive psychology has recognised for some time that many decisions are based on the desire to minimise anticipated regret, and that there is a fundamental asymmetry between two types of regret.
Regret of omission is the pain of not doing something. Not buying Bitcoin. Not adding more during the dip. Not moving to a hardware wallet before the exchange collapse. The psychological mechanism here is counterfactual thinking: you imagine the action you did not tak