Digital currencies are back, at least if you ask the crypto faithful. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has at last approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds­— begrudgingly, with a hard nudge from the courts. Renewed investor enthusiasm in risky assets such as technology stocks seems to have rubbed off on tokens, too. If you bought Bitcoin in the depths of the crypto winter at the end of 2022, you’re up more than 180%. You’re entitled to brag.

But for the rest of us, who might feel a shade of the old fear of missing out, a discussion of survivor bias is in order. The prices of a few big coins such as Bitcoin and Ether don’t provide a full picture of what crypto traders have been through. Imagine an investor who got into crypto in 2021: Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange could have seemed a reasonable place to keep those coins. And besides Bitcoin, there were 12,000 smaller “altcoins” to dabble in, many of them now dead or illiquid, specters of a rampant pump-and-dump trading trend that made tokens look more valuable than they really were.