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Comment by bfwi | Hacker News Reader

I sold at $22 thinking the bubble was going to burst soon. Damnit.

There's an understanding that a few big players have a lot of the total amount of bitcoins in circulation. This price must be extremely tempting for them to sell at. That could cause a crash like last time. I would be careful of buying at the current price.

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Me at $24 by accident (stupid misclick on Mt. Gox, and didn't think paying the trade fee again would be worth it). Wanted to wait till $27, then the socks I bought would have been free. Free, as in, I earned them back.

I do wonder from whom I stole though; these socks cost labor but I did pay the laborer. Then the price rose and I got an equal amount of euros back as I put in. Who did I steal from, the Bitcoin community in general?

it's the same with stock price. say there's a giant correction. the value disappears. it wasn't stolen from anyone. the same way the global economy has grown over thousands of years, and people are much wealthier - that isn't because they stole from anyone but the total value of the entire economy grew and "everyone" became wealthier.

Hmm I think I understand. It's hard to wrap my head around though: I gained socks (and didn't loose money), the sock maker gained money but lost time and resources, but nobody's money was stolen.

There's also a lot of early bitcoin that has been lost entirely, which probably skews the market a little bit.

I feel like I should go on my old laptop and dig up my ~0.5 bitcoins.

I wonder just how many bitcoins have been permanently lost already.

Early in the blockchain there are thousands of addresses with a single 50BTC block reward in them. Presumably people downloaded the client, mined a block and got bored. At that time you could only mine using Bitcoin-QT, which reuses the same addresses for each block reward. Most, if not all coins mined in this way are lost forever.

If it goes high enough, it will be worth mining trashed HDs for lost wallets.

I have a few on my old desktop in my parents garage from the CPU mining days. If bitcoins REALLY take off, I'm gonna have to recover them.

If it does take off, and your drive didn't store well, you'll be facepalming. :P

Ug, somewhere I have a failed SSD with 10 of them on it.

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