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I wanted to buy $100 of bitcoin in HS and couldn’t figure out how. Would have been like $60,000,000 :ccc
I have a similar story, except the people I asked about it convinced me it might be a scam. I bought some later, but it wasn’t the lifechanging amount it could’ve been.
Yeah I am so pissed about this too.
I had the money I was trying to convince my mum for months that I give her 100 dollars and she buys me a one time use card from the post office. She was convinced they could keep scamming more money from it somehow.
Today it’s still a sore topic when I visit her.
Millions and millions lost because my mum doesn’t know how a one time use card works
In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.
I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.
I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.
But I “could have” if it wasn’t so hot out. ;)
My friend told me about Bitcoin when it was about $8 per coin. I was young and making some extra cash from working and not really buying too much stuff so I could have easily tossed down $100 on some crypto and let it ride.
The very next time I even bothered paying attention to crypto was when Bitcoin shot up to 78k from like 60k.
So yeah, I feel this lol.
HODL failed.
Around the same time I almost bought around 250$ worth of BTC. I was broke rent was coming up, it would have made my month difficult so I passed.
I made six months’ worth of rent off the 2017 surge. I sold in the 18k range, because people’s greed at the time was legit scary. I knew a guy who took out a second mortgage on his house to buy more $18,000-priced BTC.
And if he still had it now he would have tripled his money lol
Or been unable to pay his bills and been forced to sell at 4k / coin.
Crypto’s too volatile to put that much risk into it, if you ask me.
Same. I bought some 70 bitcoins for 50€ when I first heard of it. Kept mining on a radeon 9770 or something at about 1BTC or 5€ per week. Electricity was included in my rent then, but I stopped because fan noise.
I lost a bunch on mtgox. Cashed out for a down payment on a house way too early (2016). I’d be rich if I had hodled.
Bitcoin showed up on my radar when they were worth pennies, but I was young and had no way to buy them and didn’t have a computer that could really mine them. Once I had the means to buy, I had no money. By the time I had a little extra money, they were already in the thousands.
Same story with Tesla. They weren’t public when they popped up on my radar, and when they made their IPO I had no money to invest.
I had the same experience with bitcoin. I had friends excitedly talking about it when it was around $1-$2 a coin and I dismissed it as a neat idea that would never fly. When BTC “crashed” at $10, I felt vindicated. Now I feel completely foolish :)
Same, I just had no cash. I was very much involved in the discussions around it though.
I mined one Bitcoin back in college with my home computer. Now, I did sell it for a lot of money and I’m not complaining, don’t misunderstand, but hoo boy. If I mined more? Goodness.
It took like a week or more to get. I was living in a bonus room with basically no air conditioning at the time, just an okay at best window unit. This was during the summer. My room got miserable lmao. And I couldn’t use my computer for anything, especially not gaming. So when I finally got my payout and went to see how much it was worth it felt stupid to keep going. It was worth like 10 bucks at the time. Pretty much nowhere took them either. I think one of the few things you could buy was alpaca wool socks or something.
As an aside, I think the only thing I ever directly bought with them was a Windows 10 key from r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap that stopped working. I believe because the user sold it again to someone else. I think I got that for $20 which was a better bargain but long term that would’ve been like $200 at least because of how much more Bitcoin is worth. The insane volatility of it is stressful and I’m happy to not have any crypto “investments” today.
Before bitcoin even slightly took off, i was on a website to buy something and they accepted bitcoin. I had to look up what bitcoin was, and thought fuck it, i’ll buy like 15 bitcoin an buy the thing for 5 and have 10 more bitcoin if i ever need more. But it was way more “complicated” that i anticipated, and i was high as fuck, and suddenly though that i might being scammed or something, because like i said, i saw the name bitcoin maybe twice until then. I’m not too sad, because i’m pretty sure even if i bought it, i would’ve lost it anyway, forgot the password, or never bothered to figure out how to cash out.
Be glad you’re not that guy that had hundreds on a hard drive and has to do the analysis on whether trying to dig it up from a landfill would be profitable.
James Howells. Quite a sad story. For those unaware, I’ll give you the short version:
In 2013, Howells mined close to 8,000 BTC and saved his private keys (which is like a password to get access to your BTC) to his laptop’s hard drive. Months later he absent-mindedly throws it in the trash. Next morning he realizes what he’s done and tries going to the local garbage dump to search for it. He grew obsessed with finding the hard drive. It got to the point where his wife left him and took the kids with her. To this day he’s still trying to get his local government to give him permission to dig through the city’s garbage dump.
Semi-rant
His plan to retrieve his lost crypto was doomed from the start. When the garbage truck came to pick up his garbage, it had its own trash compactor inside, which would have crushed the hard drive to bits, meaning the hard drive most likely died before it even got to the landfill. And even if the HDD wasn’t destroyed, the data on it would have likely been corrupted after sitting in garbage for 10+ years. And even if they managed to recover the data, if he tried to sell any of his BTC it would crash the market. He should have just cut his losses from the beginning and spent more time with his wife and kids. Now, this fool’s errand to retrieve the (likely-dead) hard drive will be his legacy.
It’s very easy to say that when you didn’t throw something out that would’ve been worth about half a billion dollars today. I hope he finds peace.
Not rich, but definitely more well off. As a one off thing, bought myself a scratch ticket and almost won somewhere around $20,000. Luck almost shined on me.
wdym almost? it’s a scratch ticket, the chance of winning is tiny.
Slim chance, but for my first and only scratch ticket, being only one away from winning is pretty cool in my book.
You’re always just one away from winning. What the ticket wins is decided first and then the symbols get printed accordingly in a way that makes it look like you were oh so close
I would guess that many tickets are “one away from winning”, so that you keep playing.
I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00’s. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea… but my boss thought I was nuts.
I’m not sure how much money I would have made, but it’s got to be better than this!
OK, it was a basic pattern recognition model, nothing nearly as sophisticated as we have now, but I think it would have performed significantly faster.
My finger was hovering over the “buy” button for $10000 worth of Bitcoin when one Bitcoin cost $50.
I bought some GameStop when it was $10 but chickened out and sold it a few days before it went to like $420 a share cuz I thought I was being baited by wallstreetbetters. I only later found out a close friend of mine who is a generally responsible investor was heavily in that and sold at like $200~ to pay off all his medical debt. He’s not rich either, but financially better off than before that happened.
I don’t mess with stocks now.
I could’ve been born to someone else
Nearly 30 years ago ago, I worked for a tiny li’l anti-virus software company that got acquired by one of the big boys, and everyone’s performance-based options they were holding were suddenly worth a lot. Being hungry for career growth at the time, I’d left the company and forfeited those options. Less than 6 months later, they announced the sale of the company.
My options woulda been worth a few million at the time, maybe double that in today’s money. Importantly, it would’ve set me up with a nice house, car, etc, without any debt, in my early 20s.
Not rich, but certainly comfortable.
I’m sorry but how is a couple million “not rich”
In my mind, rich means not having to work again. A couple million doesn’t even get close, sadly.
The word you’re looking for is “wealthy.”
Please give me a couple millions.
What the hell is your lifestyle? The returns on an investment of 2 million dollars is like high 5 figures low 6 figures every year.
Here in Australia, it’s costing our family of five about $100k a year to live, excluding our mortgage. 4% return ($80K) is conservatively realistic here (for low risk investment), and still isn’t enough.
Like I said, while it would’ve set me up with a house and no debt, I’d still have to work to pay for the cost of living.
I’d agree with this guy’s definition of rich
I once got a reddit DM from a guy offering to be my sugar daddy. All I had to do was give up family, friends, hobbies, career, move in with him and have his babies. He assured me I would want for nothing. I turned him down, but I was just a simple “yes” away from being so wealthy and happy. He was also highly complimentary of my looks, despite never seeing even a photo of me, so I know he wasn’t shallow.
Edit: ok, that’s all a lie. I got like 6 DMs like this. And that’s when I turned direct messaging off for my reddit account.
Why didn’t you??? /s
Well, he didn’t assure me he was 6 foot or taller, ofc. Us ladies be wanting our 6-6-6 men.
Six feet or taller, six-pack abs, six-figure salary or GTFO.
Completely understandable, have a nice day 🤙
When you put long hair on your stupid snoo and suddenly male redditors think you’re the sexiest woman to walk the earth.
I always wonder how many of those are actually wealthy men and how many are guys with low rent and high hormones.
If I had to put down money, I would bet 0% are actually wealthy with stable jobs capable of providing a spouse and multiple children with a “will want for nothing” lifestyle. I would guess 50-70% are attempting some sort of pig butchering or other scam. And the remainder are so disillusioned, they think their offer is actually a temptation for anyone beyond those trying to escape from an even worse situation.
My great uncle was a nice dude fucked up from war. It made he introverted and he turned to trucking and the road to make ends meet. It was basically all he ended up doing. He never married or had kids, and stacked up all this cash. Before he died, he had put 1 million in cash in a suitcase, put it in the trunk of a car, and gave it to my grandparents. They couldn’t get the trunk open, didn’t investigate, sold the car.
So how does everyone know about the money?
What money?
The million in cash inside the suitcase of the car with the locked trunk
Wooooosh
I was big into crypto at the very beginning. Lost a hard drive that now has about $8 million on it somewhere.
Not super rich, but we’d be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.
The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.
A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! “Holy shit,” I said, “I made money on penny stocks!” I promptly sold all of it.
Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.
My condolences, that must sting.
Out of curiosity, what was the name of the company?
Rezolute. They’re a biopharma company.
This is the lesson I learned watching Bitcoin: cash out half.
well shit !
Were you already wealthy or just a gambler? For me the idea of throwing $800 on a random share just because it was the cheapest is unfathomable
Just a one off gamble aided by a cocktail of ADHD impulsiveness, COVID anxiety, and the stress of living in a 5th wheel with three cats, a dog, and my wife. We did some weird shit.
We were living with family and we had no rent/mortgage for a few months. We live in a high cost of living area, so not having that payment means having an extra $2k+ per month. I miss that part but not much else.
Had about €5 in a prepaid credit card ready to buy bitcoin back when that got you a couple hundred of them. Website didn’t like the prepaid credit card, so I used it to buy something else (Runescape membership I think?).
Also gave up on Bitcoin mining after a few hours because I didn’t see the point back when anyone with a reasonable GPU could mine.
Realistically, I would’ve sold the moment this stuff would’ve become worth about a hundred bucks, but it’s nice to imagine what could’ve been.
