If You Bought $100 of Bitcoin 7 Years Ago, You'd Be Sitting on $72.9 Million Now

Megalith

Megalith

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Talk about a serious case of regret: assuming the math is actually correct, those who were smart enough to buy $100 of bitcoin at the 0.003 cent price on May 22, 2010 are now definitive millionaires. The price of bitcoin hit a fresh record high on Monday nearing $2,200. Seven years ago today, someone spent 10,000 bitcoin on two Papa John's pizzas: this was the first transaction using the cryptocurrency.

Monday marks the seven-year anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day – the moment a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoin on two Papa John's pizzas. More important than the episode being widely recognized as the first transaction using the cryptocurrency is what it tells us about the bitcoin rally that saw it break through the $2,100 mark on Monday. Bitcoin was trading as high as $2,185.89 in the early hours of Monday morning, hitting a fresh record high, after first powering through the $2,000 barrier over the weekend, according to CoinDesk data.
 
Yeah, I regret not buying it back then it was a dollar-a-piece. Would easily have paid-off my house on the return if I dropped a hundred on it.

I didn't think about how huge it would e in countries like China, because I live in a relatively free market.
 
Huge shout-out to the united states government for not allowing me to send money to japan back in the day.

thanks, guys.
 
I have over a million in monopoly board game money, somebody want to buy it from me ?
who knows.....in 7 years you could be king
 
illram said:
Where would one cash out their $72 million exactly?
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Coinbase has a starter limit of $10k per day, and that's before you verify your identity. And that's just one trading site. Assuming you can only sell 5 days a week, that's about 2.5 million dollars a month. Long as you are paying taxes on it (i'd guess in the form of quarterly deposits) and are honest with the tax man about what's going on you just sell it off on a few sites every day.

making $50k a day wouldn't be too hard, hire a tax guy/lawyer just in case and let the money flow in as fast as you can click the button. subtract out your taxes and just call it $40k a day, do it for 2 or 3 months and the average joe wouldn't ever have to work again.
 
Still have part of a bit-coin sitting in my wallet. At these prices it's now worth a few hundred.
Now I have to decide, should I wait longer, or should I buy something?
 
i had over 5 bitcoins at one point but had to sell them (was like 2 years ago) wish i had gone the route of buying bitcoins when they was at less than $100

seems like a good idea to just buy into crypto currency early and sit on them for years, ethereum seem like that is going up quite fast now and that was until last months was only $20-30 each now its hitting $170
 
The real question you need to ask is, what is Papa Johns doing with all the Bit Coins people spent on Pizza's back in May 2010?
 
Probably funded that trip during March Madness
 

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likeman said:
i had over 5 bitcoins at one point but had to sell them (was like 2 years ago) wish i had gone the route of buying bitcoins when they was at less than $100

seems like a good idea to just buy into crypto currency early and sit on them for years, ethereum seem like that is going up quite fast now and that was until last months was only $20-30 each now its hitting $170
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you can't actually buy much with ETH yet. i'm not telling anyone what to do, but most of the people buying ETH are bitcoin holders manipulating the etc market as a protest for internal disputes which i don't feel like going into. i anticipate most of the money going back into bitcoin at some point down the road.
 
This feels like a colossal game of musical chairs.
 
If you wanted to cash it out you'd probably have to find a BTC investor who already has sizable $ reserves, like another millionaire who's willing to just trade $ for BTC for you.
 
Kelby said:
If you had that much bitcoin, it probably would have been stolen from you.
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First, is there a Bitcoin exchange that's ever been in business for 7+ years without ripping off its customers (or getting "hacked" and having its Bitcoin "stolen")?

Second, in theory, your $100 worth of Bitcoin is now worth $72 Million. In reality, how likely is it that you can find someone who will actually give you $72 Million.
 
Dick Johnson said:
First, is there a Bitcoin exchange that's ever been in business for 7+ years without ripping off its customers (or getting "hacked" and having its Bitcoin "stolen")?

Second, in theory, your $100 worth of Bitcoin is now worth $72 Million. In reality, how likely is it that you can find someone who will actually give you $72 Million.
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First, BTC-E comes to mind

Second, with daily transaction volumes approaching .5 billion dollars a day, you would affect the price by dumping 36,000 bitcoins on one exchange all at once, but if you spread it across exchanges and over the course of weeks, you would find your bitcoins exchanged for whatever your national currency of choice is.
 
I bought "something" a while back that required BTC. I had some leftover in there and I forgot about it. The other day I needed to buy "something" again and there was $80 "worth" of BTC in there. Sweet. Just leave that there for when I need to buy "things".
 
TwiceOver said:
I bought "something" a while back that required BTC. I had some leftover in there and I forgot about it. The other day I needed to buy "something" again and there was $80 "worth" of BTC in there. Sweet. Just leave that there for when I need to buy "things".
Click to expand...


Yep. Except I bought in at around 1k worth, delayed the order indefinitely. Ended up cashing out almost an entire year of salary.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Coinbase has a starter limit of $10k per day, and that's before you verify your identity. And that's just one trading site. Assuming you can only sell 5 days a week, that's about 2.5 million dollars a month. Long as you are paying taxes on it (i'd guess in the form of quarterly deposits) and are honest with the tax man about what's going on you just sell it off on a few sites every day.

making $50k a day wouldn't be too hard, hire a tax guy/lawyer just in case and let the money flow in as fast as you can click the button. subtract out your taxes and just call it $40k a day, do it for 2 or 3 months and the average joe wouldn't ever have to work again.
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How do they consider bitcoin?

Is it considered standard income, or is it a capital gain w/ 15% max for long term?
 
TwiceOver said:
I bought "something" a while back that required BTC. I had some leftover in there and I forgot about it. The other day I needed to buy "something" again and there was $80 "worth" of BTC in there. Sweet. Just leave that there for when I need to buy "things".
Click to expand...

Pretty much the same. I had around $0.83 at one time remaining in my account in BTC. I got an email the other day about a credit card expiring, and checked the account, and it was now worth $12!!! Maybe by the time I retire, it might be worth enough to pay for a night at the cinema.
 
protip for those challenged by remedial math.

cashing out 72 million can be done in a 36 billion dollar market.
 
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https://btc-e.com/ is a place to trade BTC into USD, and cash it out using one of numerous payment services. Some of their connected withdraw services require a minimum of $1000 USD to be withdrawn at a time.


Dead Parrot said:
Then there are these two folks:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/it-worker-throws-out-hard-drive-loses-7-5-million-f2D11669738

and
https://news.bitcoin.com/guy-lost-bitcoin-computer-upgrade/
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The guy's $7.3 million BTC in 2013 would be worth way more now.
 
Today there was about 1.9 billion dollars traded.
It's a safe bet there were some large holders making multiple sales or buys.
 
How about 220 BTC 6 years ago? ($0.5M) Oh well, who knew?

When I sold all my coins, GPU mining was just about no longer profitable. Also, it was apparent to me then that the size of the blockchain seemed to doom Bitcoin (it still will, I think - an alternative crypto currency will takeover). Never would have guessed the resurgence.
 
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collegeboy69us said:
Coinbase has a starter limit of $10k per day, and that's before you verify your identity. And that's just one trading site. Assuming you can only sell 5 days a week, that's about 2.5 million dollars a month. Long as you are paying taxes on it (i'd guess in the form of quarterly deposits) and are honest with the tax man about what's going on you just sell it off on a few sites every day.

making $50k a day wouldn't be too hard, hire a tax guy/lawyer just in case and let the money flow in as fast as you can click the button. subtract out your taxes and just call it $40k a day, do it for 2 or 3 months and the average joe wouldn't ever have to work again.
Click to expand...
I think that's too much work for the naysayers. A few million per month isn't worth all the effort!
 
I'm probably the only one, who still has no idea what cryptocurrency is. And how the hell it actually works. It seems like monopoly money to me, in the end all you can do is put it back in the box. But you can't actually use it to pay your way in life.
 
M76 said:
I'm probably the only one, who still has no idea what cryptocurrency is. And how the hell it actually works. It seems like monopoly money to me, in the end all you can do is put it back in the box. But you can't actually use it to pay your way in life.
Click to expand...

I don't really know either. But I remember back in the day Bitcoin mining was pretty popular - AMD was pretty much cleaned off the shelves for their faster processing (I can't remember exactly why). I also remember it being a "Grey" money market at the time too. Launder Money, black market, etc.

But if any of it's true I don't know.

But 72 Million. That would buy a lot of computer parts and water cooling. I'd maybe be able to afford my own custom loop!


Thanks for making me regret life, Megalith. You made the case of the Monday's worse.
 
M76 said:
I'm probably the only one, who still has no idea what cryptocurrency is. And how the hell it actually works. It seems like monopoly money to me, in the end all you can do is put it back in the box. But you can't actually use it to pay your way in life.
Click to expand...

While I have a working understanding of how the underlying technical bits of Bitcoin (block chaining etc) works, I don't understand how it creates purchasing power. You need to be an economist I think to be able to connect the dots.

In a way it's a lot like traditional stock markets - how it is possible to sacrifice $100 worth of purchasing power and 7 years later have that increased by a factor of over 700,000 absolutely blows my mind.

I remember when first hearing about it and thinking - this shit is dodgy, I'm staying away. It struck me as some sort of Ponzi scheme and that feeling lingers, but it's because it eclipses my understanding.
 
Kelby said:
If you had that much bitcoin, it probably would have been stolen from you.
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I don't know, but it sure would pay a lot of ransoms.

There's tons of stuff I could have invested in 7 years ago that would have made me filthy rich. Hell, if I had invested a few thousand dollars in Apple in the mid 1990s I'd also be a millionaire many, many times over.
 
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