Key Points
-
Sports bets can sometimes offer the promise of a big payday at high risk.
-
Cryptocurrency investments are known for offering that same thing.
-
That doesn’t make them equally risky or equally worthwhile.
It’s obviously quite stimulating to place a $1,000 bet on a sporting event. The payoff could make you rich overnight, and the act of betting feels like putting some weight behind your hunch about which team is the more likely to win. In contrast, putting a $1,000 investment into an asset like Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) feels like surrendering to time and uncertainty, and the payoff can often seem even more improbable than a sports bet.
So which of these two plays is the better option for building your wealth over the long term?
Will AI create the world’s first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an “Indispensable Monopoly” providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue »
Two friends in a store are cheering while finding some good news on one friend’s phone.
Image source: Getty Images.
The house always wins
Let’s start by evaluating the economic proposition of sports betting.
As you may know, sportsbooks track “hold,” which is the share of total wagers they keep after paying winners. Sportsbooks would go out of business if they didn’t retain more money than they pay out. This is important to understand, as it means the average bettor must lose more than they win over time. There simply wouldn’t be so many sports betting companies if it weren’t a profitable service to offer.
On that note, Motley Fool research found that during recent football seasons, bettors lost around 8% to 9% of their wagers, and sports bettors as a whole were expected to wager about $1.7 billion in February 2026. Of that sum, sportsbooks were expected to keep about $100 million, or a 6% hold. Put differently, that means with average results, gamblers will experience roughly $6 lost per $100 wagered.
So if you keep recycling $1,000 through bets, the expected outcome is that your bankroll will slowly shrink over time even if you get some wins along the way. And that’s the opposite of building wealth.
Bitcoin isn’t stacked against you
As a volatile cryptocurrency, Bitcoin can and does experience ugly drawdowns of around 80%. With or without an investing strategy, there is absolutely no guarantee that you’ll be able to take out more money than you put into it.
But Bitcoin is not a negative-expectation use of your money in the same way that sports betting is. Buying it grants you control of an asset that will likely always have at least some value.
Advertisement
The asset’s core propositions are its scarce supply, which can never surpass 21 million Bitcoins, and the difficulty of its mining, which increases dramatically every four years. Because of those supply constraints, and the population of people who are willing to buy it at any price, the chances of a $1,000 investment in it becoming $0 over the long term are fairly small.
Unless you click “sell,” you’ll even be able to hold your position underwater for as long as you have the fortitude, thereby granting you the possibility of eventually seeing its value recover. In fact, its price is up by more than 15,000% over the last 10 years.
So if you’re trying to choose between putting $1,000 into sports bets, where you’re guaranteed to lose money over time, or into Bitcoin, Bitcoin obviously has by far the better odds of building your wealth.
Should you buy stock in Bitcoin right now?
Before you buy stock in Bitcoin, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Bitcoin wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $534,008!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,090,073!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 949% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 192% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
*Stock Advisor returns as of March 7, 2026.
Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.