Wish I had done more stuff like that when I was younger. I did get some bitcoin back before it was worth anything, but not nearly as much as I could have if I was serious about it.

But of course back then most people didn't know what the potential ceiling was going to be on them. $30 a coin was a ridiculously high price we might never see again at the time. I remember when it crashed after that and went down to ~$7 a coin and trying to get a few through some website, but having trouble getting the transaction to go through and giving up on it.

And I still remember when they were worth like 4 cents per coin, but it was almost impossible to get them since there wasn't a good way to buy them except from other people who had them, although it was possible to mine them from your computer back then.

Really, though, that's like saying you wished you had bought Beanie Babies, MtG cards, or even tulips before the Dutch mania. Bitcoin isn't an investment vehicle, it's a cypherpunk Pog, and its value is completely dependent on the behavior of other collectors. There was no logical reason to believe btc would get within an order of magnitude of its current value, and no reason to think it'll be there ten years from now, absent some institutional shift to its use beyond treating it as a curiosity (which would require a degree of liquidity that I don't believe currently exists).

Some people got very lucky -- which is great! But don't lament that you didn't do something that, at the time and without the benefit of hindsight, wasn't really rational.

It was a little different with Bitcoin. There was a time where it was a very passive thing.

You leave the computer on and you mined bitcoins (whole blocks, not just a fraction of a fraction of a reward from a mining group). I left the bitcoin software on for a single week back then. I could have left it on for a few months and mined like 1000+ bitcoins, but I only left it on for a week. I was excited about it too, and thought this could be the future of money, but even back then it didn't occur to me that the price of them would ever shoot up like that. So after a week I got bored and was like "I'll check it out again in a year or so once more people are into it."

You had to actively buy Beanie Babies (or request them as gifts), and sometimes wait in ridiculous lines for hours, etc. A closer analogy would be if someone sent you brand new Beanie Babies for free every week, as long as you said you wanted them.

Granted, you could have taken more active measures to acquire Bitcoin even back then (like that 10,000 bitcoin pizza, for example), but it doesn't require the amount of headspace that something like Beanie Babies would (hunting down the uniques, knowing how much each one is worth, etc). I never got into selling Magic:The Gathering cards even though I played the game for the same reason.

I'm not actually beating myself up about it, I'm just realizing the trajectory of my life would have gone a lot differently if only I let that software keep running several years ago.

Thank you, I also feel less shitty now after passing on an opportunity like this (opportunity only in hindsight).

Similar story here - I mined 40-50BTC and offloaded them pretty much straightaway (2011; price was $2-3/BTC).

On one hand, I wish I'd kept some (price was $30/BTC a few weeks later, then hit $1000/BTC briefly two years later). On the other, it more than paid for my new GPU, so can't complain too much!

But now, even if you had 2 Titan X cards you couldn't mine 40-50 bitcoins any time soon, right?

> 1 million dollars at what time, the time he had it?

That's correct.