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How much money would you have made if you'd bought $1000 worth of bitcoin on that day?

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There were no exchanges before 2010.

In late 2009, the most visible seller was NewLibertyStandard[1], who had a unique pricing methodology[2].

You could buy roughly a thousand bitcoins for $1. This was widely considered overcharging.

[1]: http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/2009+Exchange+Ra...

[2]: "During 2009 my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days."

This was posted in May 2009. On October 5th, 2009, $1 = 1,309.03 BTC [1], so you'd have bought about 1.3 million bitcoin. Which means you'd have over $500M dollars in Bitcoin. I bet that spending $1000 back then would have considerably changed the exchange rate though, and selling $500M now would definitely aversely affect the economy.

1: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History

so you'd have bought about 1.3 million bitcoin

There weren't even 1.3 million bitcoin in circulation at that point [1]. If you bought every bitcoin, you could have accumulated about 1.1 million BTC for $850.

[1] http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&sh...

I see claims like this all the time but it's important to realize that the price you can buy a small amount of something is generally the lowest price any seller will take, not a price all sellers will take.

This holds for financial markets, but I can think of several examples where the opposite is true (i.e. bulk buying gets you a better price).

Weird, and people are now paying close to that 850usd just for 1 coin.

However, if someone had bought coints for even 100usd back in 2010 that would have been weird too and affected the network perhaps a little too negatively.

Not positively?

Block 24400 (http://blockchain.info/block-height/24400) was created on October 5th, 2009. It created the 1,220,000th Bitcoin. So not only would you have a hard time finding people to sell you Bitcoin, there wouldn't even be enough in existence to buy $1000 worth at that price.

People were giving Bitcoins away at that point, as a way to spread the idea of the currency (people still do, just in smaller divisions of coins). But, no one was giving away, or selling, all of their coins because it would have destroyed the economy before it started. At that stage, the goal was to grow, spread awareness, and test the concept...not get rich.

> selling $500M now would definitely aversely affect the economy.

Indeed, 1.3 million is over 10% of all bitcoins available at the moment.

The problem today would be finding a buyer for those bitcoins.

eh, sell them for a bargain price of 50% of the going rate and you'd still be insanely rich.

No Bitcoin exchange was running on May 8, 2009. But there is this one famous trade of the guy who bought 5000 bitcoins with $26.06 in "2009" and then bought an apartment in 2013 [1]. This puts the value of one bitcoin at $0.0053. With $1000 you could have bought 189,000, which would be worth $113 million today at $600 per bitcoin.

But there is no doubt that buying that many bitcoins at that time would have been difficult. The few sellers you would have been able to find would have probably raised their price when seeing your interest.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-fo...

Except if you tried to unload 189,000 bitcoin you would crash the value back down significantly. The BTC's low volume is th reason why the price rises and falls so quickly.

You are mistaken. In the last 30 days, on the top 3 exchanges (btcchina, mtgox, bitstamp), there has been more than 3 million bitcoins sold [1], and yet we saw the exchange rate increase over the last month. So it would be relatively easy to sell 189,000 bitcoins, spreading the trades over 30 days, even on only 1 of these exchanges, without causing a big crash.

[1] http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d

You don't have to sell those all at once. You can do it over a period of time.

Corollary: how many bitcoins would you have mined if you'd bought $1000 worth of the best mining GPUs on that day?

I'm still kicking myself because when I first heard about Bitcoin (in 2010) I was working on a research project that required three GPU clusters (each costing between $15k and $20k). The contract for the project was delayed and I seriously thought about "benchmarking" the hardware by Bitcoin mining until work on the project could continue. I never actually did any mining and the hardware sat idle in our lab for a couple of months. I don't have the stomach to calculate what the Bitcoins that hardware was capable of generating would be worth today.

Bitcoin has had the ability to make nearly everyone look foolish at one point or another. Try not to kick yourself too hard over it.

Exactly. A lot of people sold all of their bitcoins when it reached insanely high rate of $1, and those who bought at $1 probably sold them at $10.

It wasn't until over a year later (July 2010) that the first block was likely mined using GPUs.

Satoshi implored people in December 2009 (several months after this post) to postpone mining using GPUs for as long as possible[1].

[1]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54

Actually the first person known to GPU-mine (supposedly an Apple OS engineer, friend of "BitcoinEXpress" on bitcointalk.org) claims he did it in May 2010, wrote his own miner, running on 3 x AMD Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards. The claim sounds plausible. There was a small bump in the global hashrate in May that seems to correspond to the power of this setup.

I commented on it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40876.msg520645#msg5...

Satoshi's pleading to not port bitcoin to big endian machines is shocking. Hopefully that has been fixed!

The earliest price I can find for BTC is $0.074 USD/BTC from about a year later, but if you bought $1000 then, you'd be sitting on about $9.7MM worth of Bitcoin today.

At the current coinbase exchange rate, your BTC holdings would be worth about $576,000,000. It would have been tough to buy $1000 worth back then, though.

Don't rub salt in fresh wounds, man.

That bastard probably actually got a bunch of them for cheap too. YC was aware of bitcoins pretty early. I mean they have Coinbase...

I'm curious what the legal/tax consequences would have been, assuming someone had the luck or foresight to be aware of the money they could have made. There's no way someone could have just gotten away with making hundreds of millions of dollars on this, right?

I would think it would be taxed as capital gains just like any other commodity that rises in value.

How much depends on what day you sell it. At current prices I guess you would be a multi-millionaire.

At today's rate... millions.

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