I heard about it when it was about $30 and it looked expensive to me back then and even if I bought some, I wold have sold them long time ago at 2,3,5x as I much prefer the stock market (and even real estate) for investing...

I held on to them for so long because my old laptop’s motherboard died and I had the wallet there. I forgot about them till around 2014, when I looked for them and surprisingly managed to extract them from the hard disk as everything was dead in that laptop not just the motherboard. Then I secured them and forgot about them again until Covid time, when they skyrocketed in value. So I don’t deserve all the credit for holding them, but rather my poor laptop and memory.

Inaction regularly is the best move

Buying bitcoin in 2010 absolutely wasn't inaction, it was a painful process. The problem is identifying when not to do anything. Tell me one thing to do once in 2024 and then forget about it until 2038. Subscription to an AI service? Nah...

Same here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.

I bought £5 worth in 2017 or so and (after remembering I even had them) sold for ~£20 a few years later. 4x! Yay!

…shame I didn’t invest my entire life’s savings.

Hindsight is rough. I wanted to buy some when I was in college living of student loans, they were at $600… I should have use my student loans to buy bitcoin instead of the hobbies I had in college…

Almost by definition these things are very difficult to predict. That’s life!

The question is: what’s worth very little now that will be worth millions in ten years? Presumably at any given point in time there exist such things.

True. I have no idea, not even a clue where to start looking for such thing. It seems to me that the best one can do is just diversify, acquire a bunch of stuff that might grow and hold them for 20 years.

if everyone who wish they had bought had bought , the price would have been 50k long ago and crashed to $5 probably equally fast. People missing out is why the price has gone up for as long as it has.

If everyone who has been holding bitcoin for years cashed in their balance today, the price would rapidly approach zero.

Emperors, clothes, and all.

Except at this point, that won't ever happen. I certainly wouldn't ever sell. If it starts heading to zero, I would just start buying as much as I could. I know I'm not the only one.

It's called supply and demand. If the demand for something drops to zero, so does the price. This goes for anything in the world.

I have no regrets, if I can see the future, I have better strategies to make money and can make an easy 10 000 000 x every week...

Do you view it as a security hazard to talk about this publicly (or tied to your username)?

I presume that bitcoin is now worth millions of dollars (at the very least)?

That’s a valid point, but I wouldn’t call it a hazard since not much information is available (as your second question implies). It’s similar to seeing someone with a luxury car on the road, except that one is physically accessible and the other is not.

There are, I would guess, hundreds of people on HN who are millionaires and happily lead public lives without fear of being hit by $5 wrenches until they give up their passwords.

I know a guy who stopped saying how many Bitcoins he had after he mined few thousands (by then Bitcoin was skyrocketing to single digit dollar values!) I know he kept mining for years.

I know for a fact he only sold 2 of those since then.

Now here's the interesting fact: he wasn't early into Bitcoin because of the technology, but because he was a full blown lunatic crypto anarchist. The guy literally works at some low paying job and has a normal life and lives dreaming about a world where Bitcoin's a common way to trade goods.

Seriously, he's easily worth hundreds of millions since years and he lives like a normal dude and spends his time just blogging and being a bitcoin evangelist.

>Seriously, he's easily worth hundreds of millions since years and he lives like a normal dude and spends his time just blogging and being a bitcoin evangelist.

Maybe I'm just reading it this way, but it seems like you are implying that this is a negative and I'm really not sure why a millionaire living like a normal dude could possibly be considered negative.

You're right.

I actually like him for that.

What I inherently dislike is anarcho-capitalism of which he's a huge supporter.

What's wrong with anarcho-capitalism?

kinda true. A lot of users were targeted by outing themselves as having crypto wealth.

No because whether he owns a bitcoin at $30 or at $30k a bitcoin is a bitcoin and at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities.

>at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities.

The point being made is that once a wallet is connected to a real identity (as opposed to just knowing that wallet X has Y amount of BTC), the attack surface for that wallet is increased by magnitudes and entire vectors of attack are opened up (e.g. phishing).

what a weird demand to make

to be fair, the comment they were responding to is just some weird flex without substance, fishing for attention.

a good thing about being a bitcoin millionaire is that you can prove it while remaining anonymous, in like three clicks

Who cares?

I do, because people online tend to flex about things that seem like really tall tales. Someone who held on this long is exceptionally rare in the first place, and I like when someone makes a claim, they back it up with evidence.

Even if they were lying and have now been outed as lying, who cares? I could see a point if they somehow used this claim to enrich themselves at the cost of others but I don't anything of the sort happening here. The only enrichment is the internet points they can get from a popular comment.