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Comment by jeffasinger | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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?

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).

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.

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