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Comment by rspeele | Hacker News Reader

True. Had I been involved with Bitcoin, I probably would've done that, myself, and regretted it.

But then again, if we're talking about cashing out for an amount of money on which you can pursue hobbies, live comfortably, and never have to work for another person again... I can't imagine I would regret it that much.

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I had bitcoin worth about $50 in 2009/10 go poof when I reimaged a laptop and forgot to backup.

Back of the napkin level calculation says that if you had about 675 bitcoin in 2010, it would've been worth $10,625,000 if you'd sold it at the $17,000 peak.

Bitcoin traded between $0.003 and $0.39 in 2009-2010. Source: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/ Therefore "$50" worth back then could be any amount between 128 and 16667 BTC, worth between $800k and $103M today.

You weren’t kidding about back of the napkin because that’s not 675 * 17k.

He clearly calculated for 625 BTC (it divides evenly to the precise multi-million dollar amount) but had either a typo in his post or in the calculating.

Yes, I typoed 625.

I’m very glad you were wrong. :)

I never calculated the actual potential amount, because I figured it would be depressing, but 9-figures would be beyond depressing.

I’m not sure what I actually paid because I bought it from a friend directly. It was somewhere around 100 BTC. Definitely a cautionary tale about backups and bad luck. But on the other hand, I’ve in whole been the recipient to more than my share of good fortune.

And you habe not been killed by frozen poop falling from an airplane in the sky. Which would have been as likely as Bitcoin becoming a speculative hype. Celebrate that!

Absolutely. A few months earlier I lucked out by selling a ton of stock/funds when I consolidated retirement accounts (I didn’t like the trade restriction during the transfer period). I missed the crash as a result.

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