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.
I once got a reddit DM from a guy offering to be my sugar daddy. All I had to do was give up family, friends, hobbies, career, move in with him and have his babies. He assured me I would want for nothing. I turned him down, but I was just a simple “yes” away from being so wealthy and happy. He was also highly complimentary of my looks, despite never seeing even a photo of me, so I know he wasn’t shallow.
Edit: ok, that’s all a lie. I got like 6 DMs like this. And that’s when I turned direct messaging off for my reddit account.
I always wonder how many of those are actually wealthy men and how many are guys with low rent and high hormones.
If I had to put down money, I would bet 0% are actually wealthy with stable jobs capable of providing a spouse and multiple children with a “will want for nothing” lifestyle. I would guess 50-70% are attempting some sort of pig butchering or other scam. And the remainder are so disillusioned, they think their offer is actually a temptation for anyone beyond those trying to escape from an even worse situation.
When you put long hair on your stupid snoo and suddenly male redditors think you’re the sexiest woman to walk the earth.
Why didn’t you??? /s
Well, he didn’t assure me he was 6 foot or taller, ofc. Us ladies be wanting our 6-6-6 men.
Six feet or taller, six-pack abs, six-figure salary or GTFO.
Completely understandable, have a nice day 🤙
In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.
I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.
I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.
But I “could have” if it wasn’t so hot out. ;)
My friend told me about Bitcoin when it was about $8 per coin. I was young and making some extra cash from working and not really buying too much stuff so I could have easily tossed down $100 on some crypto and let it ride.
The very next time I even bothered paying attention to crypto was when Bitcoin shot up to 78k from like 60k.
So yeah, I feel this lol.
Bitcoin showed up on my radar when they were worth pennies, but I was young and had no way to buy them and didn’t have a computer that could really mine them. Once I had the means to buy, I had no money. By the time I had a little extra money, they were already in the thousands.
Same story with Tesla. They weren’t public when they popped up on my radar, and when they made their IPO I had no money to invest.
Same, I just had no cash. I was very much involved in the discussions around it though.
I had the same experience with bitcoin. I had friends excitedly talking about it when it was around $1-$2 a coin and I dismissed it as a neat idea that would never fly. When BTC “crashed” at $10, I felt vindicated. Now I feel completely foolish :)
HODL failed.
Around the same time I almost bought around 250$ worth of BTC. I was broke rent was coming up, it would have made my month difficult so I passed.
I made six months’ worth of rent off the 2017 surge. I sold in the 18k range, because people’s greed at the time was legit scary. I knew a guy who took out a second mortgage on his house to buy more $18,000-priced BTC.
And if he still had it now he would have tripled his money lol
Or been unable to pay his bills and been forced to sell at 4k / coin.
Crypto’s too volatile to put that much risk into it, if you ask me.
Same. I bought some 70 bitcoins for 50€ when I first heard of it. Kept mining on a radeon 9770 or something at about 1BTC or 5€ per week. Electricity was included in my rent then, but I stopped because fan noise.
I lost a bunch on mtgox. Cashed out for a down payment on a house way too early (2016). I’d be rich if I had hodled.
My great uncle was a nice dude fucked up from war. It made he introverted and he turned to trucking and the road to make ends meet. It was basically all he ended up doing. He never married or had kids, and stacked up all this cash. Before he died, he had put 1 million in cash in a suitcase, put it in the trunk of a car, and gave it to my grandparents. They couldn’t get the trunk open, didn’t investigate, sold the car.
So how does everyone know about the money?
What money?
The million in cash inside the suitcase of the car with the locked trunk
Wooooosh
I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00’s. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea… but my boss thought I was nuts.
I’m not sure how much money I would have made, but it’s got to be better than this!
OK, it was a basic pattern recognition model, nothing nearly as sophisticated as we have now, but I think it would have performed significantly faster.
I was big into crypto at the very beginning. Lost a hard drive that now has about $8 million on it somewhere.
I sold about $200 in Bitcoin I mined back in the early days, like 2009 and 10. Missed out on over $80 million.
Had the ability to buy in on Google right after they went public - passed on it
Had the ability to buy in on Apple in the mid 1990s -passed
Had the ability to buy bitcoin at $5 a coin, could have put in $5k at the time -passed
Had the ability to buy in on Amazon shortly after they went public -passed
Ebay -passed
Starting to see a trend?
Let me know next time you decide to pass on a stock.
Will do
Quickly what was the last investment opportunity you were presented with?
Nvidia about a year and a half ago
Damn lmk when the next one comes up
Can we subscribe to your opportunities, so we can invest?
Just $29.99 /month for my ideas. Please note I’m not an adviser just a guy putting his thoughts out there.
Rivian
Congrats! You passed all your tests with flying colors.
I shall wear this badge with honor
inscription on badge “I’m a Moron”
you had the opportunity to buy the winning lottery numbers last week and you BLEW IT
One parent had a growing business when I was super young, they brought home well into the 6 figures. However two things happened 1: the internet started getting bigger so that started to hurt their business and 2: the 2008 housing crash happened and for a business that worked with banks on mortgages (I was too young to fully understand what the business did) it was fatal. Then we were dirt poor! The family never really recovered but after many years we did manage to get on our feet, then a parent died and shit went down hill again lmao.
I could’ve grown up a rich kid, instead I grew up with a family oats pot for meals. Though I’m probably a healthier grounded human for it.
2: the 2008 housing crash happened
My dad’s 50 year-old roofing business never fully recovered either, which is partly why I hate our government and how it works for the wealthy.
He now drives for DoorDash, at age 80, using my car. The alternative is starvation.
Well, isn’t it exciting? We may just witness a second crash! /S
But for real, it’s getting really bad again, it doesn’t seem sustainable and I honestly expected something to crack by now, but it hasn’t. The longer it gets delayed the worse it’s gonna be
There will be, no doubt.
The thing with crypto is to just add small amounts over time, so when those spikes happen you can take advantage. It’s pointless to try and time it.
I was talking about the housing climate, but crypto is fairly volitle too so I wouldn’t be surprised
Ah, yeah. Thanks for clarifying.
There has to be more to the story than that. Your parents probably didn’t disclose to you the other hardships they faced, whether they were self induced or not
Oh there definitely was as far as why the business went down, I just clipped it. But it caused one side of my family to be permanently removed from our lives as well. Though the increased stressors of the crash also aided in that whole deal
Didn’t get “rich” per se, but I got in on dogecoin when it was at a penny, missed the peak, and ended up selling in the 30 cent range. I also picked up a ton of oil stocks in March 2020 when it bottomed out that I later sold for more than 15x their original value.
The irony is that I invested in dogecoin because Robbing Hood locked down investments into Gamestop. I didn’t realize that would be such a lucky development at the time.
Those investments paid off my student loans and got me a down payment on a condo. I still have five-figures in my investment account that I’m growing into early retirement. My current focus is gambling stocks, in large part because every election year it seems like there’s a smattering of states legalizing online sports betting. (MO and NE have it on the ballot for this year.)
Not fuck you money or ‘rich’, but life-changing.
Bro you got the “what could have been” ending
I didn’t quite get that but I am in a way better place than I expected to be thanks to those choices.
Had about €5 in a prepaid credit card ready to buy bitcoin back when that got you a couple hundred of them. Website didn’t like the prepaid credit card, so I used it to buy something else (Runescape membership I think?).
Also gave up on Bitcoin mining after a few hours because I didn’t see the point back when anyone with a reasonable GPU could mine.
Realistically, I would’ve sold the moment this stuff would’ve become worth about a hundred bucks, but it’s nice to imagine what could’ve been.
Idk how well this would actually sell but years ago in my early 20s, I came up with the idea for a beer coozie for 40oz bottles.
40s are great if you are poor and want just enough of a buzz but unless you chug them, they get warm halfway through. Which is also why 12oz cans/bottles are probably also more appealing.
Just a big ass coozie to keep your Bud Ice cold in a Sunday afternoon of porch drinking.
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.
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).
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.
