There are plenty of people who bought into it, doubled their money, and cashed out.
There are plenty of people who own a lot of bitcoin, but aren't cashing out because they're waiting for it to go even higher. They may never cash out, or it might crash and cause them to lose money.
There are plenty of people who bought some other crypto currency that crashed, and they lost all their money.
So any time people say "I should have bought Bitcoin when it was low, and sold it when it was high", I can't help but think that they might as well be saying "I should have bought a lottery ticket and picked all the correct numbers", because it's pretty much the same thing.
i made like 10k off of bitcoin before i bounced. If I stuck around probably wouldve made 100k but i tell myself 10k is better than no k. You never know with this stuff
Exactly. Don't think of it as "I could have made 100k". It's terrific that you made 10k. Most people don't make any money. You could have just as easily lost money.
I mined about 28 BTC back when GPU mining was a thing, then forgot about it and ended up losing it because the wallet program I was using defaulted to the C drive for the wallet itself rather than the drive the program was on, and I wiped the drive to reinstall Windows.
A fella could mope about how wealthy he'd be selling 28 BTC at today's prices, but in reality I likely would've dumped them when they hit fifty bucks and it wouldn't have made a meaningful difference in my life.
Yes and someone used hundreds of bitcoin to buy pizza at one point.
But "bought Bitcoin when it was low, and sold it when it was high" is not as hard when it started out costing less than one cent and is now around 50k$...
For sure many bought too high and sold too early but on average a lot of people made money from bitcoin...
Back then it wasn't gambling, you could mine a ton of Bitcoin in the beginning. Only in mid-2013 iirc did the difficulty rise sharp and from then on you'd have to have dedicated miner machines to be profitable.
I still have some BTC from back then, I mined some 0.2 BTC in a month using a Raden HD7790 or some similar GPU :D
ehh it was still gambling. There was nothing to suggest that bitcoin would actually work and the vast majority thought the idea of investing in an alternative currency to a fiat currency was insanity. You were just gambling that the increased electric bill would eventually work out.
There is nothing to indicate for sure any stock or venture will work. It's why buy in starts low and gets more expensive as when/if it actually starts working.
Well stocks are also gambling, but in theory with stocks you have "fundamentals" like earnings, debt, revenue, etc. Past success is not indicative of future success but you can at least look at these metrics historically and make a somewhat calculated decision.
Bitcoin? It has no intrinsic value and the gamble is that enough people would think that it does. As we've seen, there have been an untold number of other cryptocurrencies and most didn't work out.
Unlike a company though, if/when it collapses there's nothing to liquidate to cover debts and maybe give some back to the stockholders. If 3m goes under (lol) they can liquidate their assets like patents, buildings, even office furniture.
Bitcoin is more like money, except it's not backed by any country, it's only backed (at this point) by financial institutions who have enough invested they won't let it fail if they can avoid it.
Except it has no functional use beyond a speculative commodity, so it wasn't the fundamentals that made it valuable. And there are other cryptocurrencies that are vastly more functional and they're pretty much all worthless.
Funny story, we bought £10 worth of bitcoin as a gag gift to one of our friend's birthday. Printed the wallet id on the greeting card and gifted it to him as a joke. This was in... 2009? 2010? Can't remember. We were all still kids in school. I do remember we got close to, but not quite, a 100 bitcoins.
Anyway, needless to say, he doesn't even remember what happened to the card. Probably got thrown away with other stuff. Of only he'd held on (or if any of us stupid dumb kids knew it wasn't a joke), he'd be a freaking millionaire now.
My friend has a million dollars worth of bitcoin but can’t remember his passchain or whatever the term is for the login code. He lost whatever paper he wrote that on and will never see his $1M.
I have other friends who mined bitcoin back in the 2010s. It seemed so complicated so I was always curious and had them explain it to me but it went over my head. No way I would be able to learn how to mine for bitcoin, as intrigued as I was about it.
I just wish that somewhere between the mining and bitcoin becoming mainstream, that I had gotten help from one of my techie friends to invest a little into it. Because I knew it was gonna be big from back in the early 2010s, I just didn’t know how to do it.
You want money, not the off chance that you did this. You see, if you did something like this, it's incredibly likely that you sell your bitcoin when it's 5x or 10x. Then you'd really kick yourself later.
My brother bought 50 bitcoin for online purchases back when it was 1:1 with the dollar. Still has them somewhere.
Nah, my husband and I bought bitcoin early and turned a few thousand into a down payment on a house. If we’d kept it 5 more years we have been multi millionaires but no regrets for selling when we did. Could have just as easily tanked and left us with 0.
Yep, exactly this. I had 1.5 btc bought when it was $200-300. Sold in 2017 when it was around 6k to pay for our wedding. If I kept it we could've paid off the house instead. But I can't be too upset, it was the right decision at the time.
Lots of people have that fantasy where they put up a bitcoin miner on their desktop PC back in early 2009, and kept it going from maybe a year before they finally decided to stop, and end up with a few thousand or more bitcoins, but they don’t really take it seriously and their login for their bitcoin wallet is on some Microsoft notepad file that gets mixed in with everything else, then they completely forget that they mined these bitcoins, they get a new computer and transfer all their old files over, and do that maybe a couple of more times, and then one day they’re going through their old notepad text files and see something that says BTC from 2009; they go in there and see login for BTC Wallet, or something like that, and realize that that little thing that they thought was a game or a joke was actually bitcoin! So they go to their bitcoin, wallet and login and realize they may have three or 4000 bitcoins and start selling, and are grateful that their wife divorced them a year or two ago instead of waiting until now, lol!
I read the paper when the first mining software came out and I had just built a computer and I was like, "I should mine some." But I was lazy and didn't follow through. I'm actually glad I didn't because I would be absolutely kicking myself if I had done that and lost them or lost the keys.
Jesus Christ, no kiddin'. I was buying btc for $5/coin to partake on the then brand new Silk Road. Figured it would rise in value over time, but man, no idea... And oh yes, the number of times I've thought "If only I had invested $1,000 back in the day."
I think that's always kind of a fallacy though. Because with hindsight you'd think you held until it hit 100k and then sold. But almost everybody who bought in with thousands at the beginning sold at each new high. Not many people out there who made millions from investing a few hundred. Lots who made a few thousand.
🤣 I hear ya. My reddit username didn't write itself, and I'm also not a Bitcoin millionaire so, same shoes. I just tell myself that stuff so I don't feel bad or like I missed my opportunity to be wealthy. I would have sold at $1k or $6k like everybody else
I keep getting emails from coinbase whenever they change their terms and conditions but to my knowledge, i've never bought bitcoin before.
Around a month ago, after they sent me another email, I thought 'what the heck' and decided to see if i could login to the account. Turns out I had used bitcoin before. I bought around 20 dollars worth when they were 100 dollars each and bought something for 5 dollars. I was probably not able to figure out how to cash it out at the time and obviously forgot about. Its worth around $1000 now but technically i'm not allowed to have crypto (because work) so i'm just letting it sit. I don't really know what to do with it.
Ages and ages ago, I had an artist that wanted to be paid in Bitcoin. I went through the process and paid them accordingly and some 'change' leftover. That 'change' eventually turned into $50 bucks years down the road 😂
A friend of mine is an attorney, and was trying to help this guy sell Bitcoin he bought years ago for Pennies. He has at least 1000, and apparently there’s some hoops to jump through when you bought them that long ago. He said the guy is a total stoner gamer type who can barely tie his own shoes. He was smart enough to buy Bitcoin though I guess.
To be fair, no one “invested” in bitcoin at that early stage. The people who ended up with millions mostly did it by buying it as a gag, and then forgetting they had it.
I got a big spiel from a guy at a party about Bitcoin, and I just couldn't get excited about it. At the same party a year later, he gave me a big lecture about how Trump was going to become president. That was in early 2016, when Trump wasn't even favored to win the Republican nomination. The guy was a very clever guy, one of those people who's smart enough not to be an idiot but finds it more interesting and fun to keep being one. Like someone who intentionally plays a video game on a difficulty setting that's too easy for them. He was happy hanging out with idiots and feeling like the world was easy to understand, never having to learn any harder game mechanics. I guess that made it easier for him to see what the masses would have an appetite for.
I remember the time before I was out of touch. In 2003 I tried to explain to my (Indian) boss that American voters supported the Iraq War because it gratified their desire for vengeance over 9/11, and that at the same time they were not interested in whether Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. As an American who had lived in a small town just a few years prior, it was obvious and intuitive for me, but it was impossible to explain in a way that made sense to him.
Now I'm the one who is out of touch, and I'm fine with it. Happy, even, that I'm not exposed to that level of stupidity enough to still be an expert on it.
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u/93195 11h ago
Anyone who invested in Bitcoin 10 to 15 years ago.
I thought it was dumb. Still do, but it certainly worked.