I had bitcoin worth about $50 in 2009/10 go poof when I reimaged a laptop and forgot to backup.

And you habe not been killed by frozen poop falling from an airplane in the sky. Which would have been as likely as Bitcoin becoming a speculative hype. Celebrate that!

Absolutely. A few months earlier I lucked out by selling a ton of stock/funds when I consolidated retirement accounts (I didn’t like the trade restriction during the transfer period). I missed the crash as a result.

Back of the napkin level calculation says that if you had about 675 bitcoin in 2010, it would've been worth $10,625,000 if you'd sold it at the $17,000 peak.

Bitcoin traded between $0.003 and $0.39 in 2009-2010. Source: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/ Therefore "$50" worth back then could be any amount between 128 and 16667 BTC, worth between $800k and $103M today.

You weren’t kidding about back of the napkin because that’s not 675 * 17k.

He clearly calculated for 625 BTC (it divides evenly to the precise multi-million dollar amount) but had either a typo in his post or in the calculating.

Yes, I typoed 625.

I’m very glad you were wrong. :)

I never calculated the actual potential amount, because I figured it would be depressing, but 9-figures would be beyond depressing.

I’m not sure what I actually paid because I bought it from a friend directly. It was somewhere around 100 BTC. Definitely a cautionary tale about backups and bad luck. But on the other hand, I’ve in whole been the recipient to more than my share of good fortune.