2017 was a great year for Bitcoin. It rose 1,369%. However this was not enough to even put it in the Top 20 performing coins for the year.
Quartz just published a story "Ripple Was The Best Performing Cryptocurrency of 2017", and listed what they believe were the top 10. However their information is not correct.
I ran the numbers myself, using data from coinmarketcap - opening price on 1/1/2017 (or the first trading date, for newer coins) to closing price on 12/31/2017. I applied it to the Top 30 coins by market cap, and added 2 from the Quartz story that ranked lower (Golem and BinanceCoin) plus - since we're on Steemit - Steem Dollars (SBD).
Here are the results. Ripple was actually 5th, Bitcoin was 24th. By far the star performer was Verge, with an incredible 1.17 million % gain for the year - more than the rest of the list combined.
I calculate the % gain as (closing price - opening price)/opening price, I'm not sure how Joon Ian Wong at Quartz came up with their numbers. With my method, if you add the % gain to the opening price you get the closing price. So if a coin starts at $1 and makes a 100% gain, it will close at $2. This seems logical and accurate to me.
Unless you bought Bitcoin Gold, it seems like you just can't go wrong with Crypto.
The market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined was $17.73 billion on Jan 1 2017, and $613.68 billion on Dec 31 2017 - a gain of 3361%. As I write this it is just shy of $700 billion. It seems like we will push through the trillion dollar mark very soon...maybe even this month.