Buy the same dollar amount every month, no matter what price does — that's the entire idea behind dollar-cost averaging. It sounds like it should neutralize the question of when to start. It doesn't, not fully: this calculator replays any historical start date, frequency, and dollar amount against real price data, and even a disciplined monthly plan comes out looking very different depending on which multi-year stretch it happened to run through.
What DCA actually does
Dollar-cost averaging means committing to buy a fixed dollar amount at fixed intervals (weekly, monthly) regardless of price, rather than trying to time a single lump-sum entry. Mechanically, this means buying more units of the asset when price is low and fewer when price is high, which lowers your average cost basis compared to buying the same total dollar amount at a single random point in time — a mathematical property of the strategy, not a market-timing skill.
Why it doesn't eliminate the start-date problem
DCA smooths out the risk of picking one specific bad entry day, but it doesn't eliminate the importance of which multi-year period you choose to backtest. A monthly DCA plan started right before a multi-year bear market behaves very differently from one started right before a multi-year bull run, even though both are "DCA." This site's calculator lets you test any historical start date directly against real price data rather than relying on a single cited example.
What this calculator computes
Given a start date, contribution frequency, and dollar amount, the calculator replays real historical Bitcoin prices to compute exactly how many BTC would have accumulated and what that position is worth today — a live backtest against actual data rather than a simulated or theoretical average.
What DCA doesn't solve
DCA reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the impact of volatility on entry timing. It doesn't change the underlying asset's risk, doesn't guarantee a positive return over any given window, and a sufficiently long, sufficiently severe drawdown can still leave a DCA plan underwater for extended periods, exactly as it can for a lump-sum position.
Pick your own start date, frequency, and amount and run it against real price data on the DCA Calculator.