I sold about $200 in Bitcoin I mined back in the early days, like 2009 and 10. Missed out on over $80 million.
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When bitcoin first came out I looked into out of academic curiosity. I owned a high end video card. I never bothered mining because “I don’t have any desire to buy drugs on silkroad.”
I played the stock market game in grade school and noticed this one stock, BerkHA that was moving thousands of dollars daily. Considering the others would only move a fraction of a dollar daily out was a goal to get one share for the game.
I should have tried to pressure my parents into at least one share. By the time I was 18 it would have been worth 70k, and these days it’s up to… Nearly 700k per share.
I would’ve likely sold it on my 18th birthday and been able to languish a bit longer than I did. All in all it wouldn’t have been worth doing.
My parents are fairly rich but stingy and boomers. I recently stood up for my principles and my kids and I give myself 1:6 odds they’ll cut me from the will as the last surviving child.
I bought Bitcoin in highschool. Not much, though, because it was just a neat concept. There’s no reason it would actually skyrocket in value (still isn’t).
I had a teacher ask me for help investing in it, too. There was another guy in Canada that turned that exact situation into a nice ponzi scheme.
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.
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.
My condolences, that must sting.
Out of curiosity, what was the name of the company?
Rezolute. They’re a biopharma company.
well shit !
This is the lesson I learned watching Bitcoin: cash out half.
My finger was hovering over the “buy” button for $10000 worth of Bitcoin when one Bitcoin cost $50.
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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 was ready to drop $2,000 on AMD stock when it was $3 a share. Someone talked me out of it.
While it wouldn’t have made me “rich”, I’d be much better off than I am now.
You shouldn’t regret not gambling $2000 just because you saw it would’ve worked out.
… you should regret not gambling $200, “because fuck it.” If you’re really worried about any greedy investment, just lower the stakes.
Buying a bunch of AMD at 19 was my best trade. I haven’t sold.
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.
In 2009 I had 13k AMD shares at an average cost basis of $2.12.
I sold them in 2011 for ~$8/share.
Those shares are worth around $1.5M today.
Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.
The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.
I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.
I had a similar school project around the same era. My wealthy grandfather suggested I invest in Phillip Morris. You should have seen the look on my teachers face when I bought the fake stock!. I actually ended up getting extremely into it and sold all of those “evil” fake stocks for an early tech company. I was quite certain it would do well, and I was right and I ended up winning the project by a wide margin. I tried to get my parent to let me use most of my savings account to buy real stock but they dismissed the idea because I was just a kid. It would have paid for my college education entirely if they had let me (they certainly didn’t help).
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.
I would guess that many tickets are “one away from winning”, so that you keep playing.
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 bought 100 shares of Gamestop when it was $4 in November 2020 and sold at around $10
