Bitcoin Forum

i found this old article on theguardian about a Norwegian guy bought $27 worth of bitcoin in 2009 not even knowing it can go that high, and in 2013 after finding out how much it is worth he recovered those coins and could buy a house with it.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

The price chart of that time if anybody was interested (http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#czsg2009-07-01zeg2013-04-30ztgCzm1g10zm2g25)

I heard of this guy too, a few weeks ago...... I was impressed as soon as I heard of him, and at the same time jealous because I didn't do that :) This is exactly like gambling, and he's one of the few persons which were so lucky that they became milionaires from .. nothing.

it is not gambling, you didn't get the point. he bought 5000BTC as a part of his thesis on encryption back in 2009.

i have bought so much material (metals for testing, etc) and paid at least ten times what he has paid for his thesis, i would have loved if one of my testing materials turned into a $886,000 :D

Early Adopters. Many people made a lot of money in the early stages :) It's just that they keep anonymous to avoid attacks.

Bottom line: He was a good investor. All my congrats to him and his family.

Anyways now 5000BTC is around 3.2M, which is insane ROI. But 886k is an brilliant ROI too!

such articles just lighting up my sci-fi / porn / action / mix feelings imagination...
making me need a time machine so bad.. so baddddd!
good for him he just hit the jackpot, with a amount acceptable to lose it etc, but .. but.. there is no but !
i hope to find a train like that someday somehow..!
my gad !
i really hope our efforts for those you saving bitcoin and believing in a better future for btc & our pockets become true in 10-20 years !

It's probably the same thing that's going to happen to people who start investing now and take another look to the price in 2020 or above .

This reminds me of the opposite situation. A guy had 2000BTC on his computer and forgot about them, then he thrown his computer away to get a new one, and after a while remmeberd he had the BTC but couldn't find his computer in the town dumpster.

Talking with someone I met a few weeks ago and Bitcoin came up, he mentioned that years ago he had bought about 1,000 bitcoin for $1 each.
He said he had sold some of them but still had about half, so thats 500 BTC X $650 = $325,000
I have no way to verify that he actually has that many coins, but he knows a lot about computers, programming etc and I don't think he has any reason to lie.

I doubt the Bitcoin price can increase 30 000x as in the OP example even in next 30 years (20 million USD/Bitcoin), yet alone in about 5 years as you suggest. There might be price increase, but not so big one anymore.

I wonder how he could forget about the $27 in Bitcoin after writing the thesis though, as it is amount worth the time to get back. For example I would never leave $27 in paypal account with the intention to not use paypal anymore. Only one dollar or so in ballance might be not worth the time to claim anymore.

I am so jealous to sell 12 BTC for crap and then bang my head later. I hate these guys :P But I am happy he got somewhere to stay. 
I hope another miracle takes place soon.

I feel that most of you guys are missing the point of "investing money" into bitcoin in the first place...

It is to get your fiat into a digitalized, peer to peer, gold/cash system to transfer funds from anywhere in the world; not to get rich in terms of fiat.  I mean, yeah it would be nice to be rich and buy anything you want... but I mean it seems you guys dream about having essentially a lot of worthless paper "money" instead of having a lot of valuable digital currency such as bitcoin...

I just hate it when people talk about stories like this in terms of "getting rich quick", and that we should "invest" now because we don't want to miss our train to getting rich in fiat notes.

This guy went about it the right way. he completely and utterly forgot about it.

Because of that he wasn't tempted by scams. he didn't trade it into oblivion. he didn't try to move it to a new wallet and forget the password. he didn't sell it at a much lower peak when he believed it couldn't go any higher. he didn't burn out on it staring at charts for 25 hours a day.

I wish i could program myself to do the same thing.


this was 2009 don't forget. it was almost worthless. you couldn't spend it anywhere. you couldn't do anything with it. this forum had less than a few hundred members well into 2010. paypal is something you encounter every day and you can use it anywhere. bitcoin back then was a bunch of confusing numbers supported by a few tens of freaks.

if i know about bitcoin in 2009, maybe i wont bought it. because im not a good investor like him.

I'm happy for the guy, he made a pretty good investment and got rewarded for it multiple times over.

Something else I find interesting is that it seems like a majority of these miracle stories happen to people from Scandinavia; I think there have been two or three similar events that happened with people that come from the region.

he wasn't an investor. there were no investors back then. he lucked out via academic research. you could hardly find anyone to let go of real money for it in 2010, let alone 2009.

read this - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92.0

this guy's auctioning 10,000 btc in march 2010 and the starting bid is $50.

quote from the thread -

'$50 is somewhat of a high starting bid considering there is over ฿22,000 available for not much more per bitcoin than your starting bid. Not to mention that realistically there's probably a lot more than ฿22,000 available because if somebody bought a bunch of those bitcoins, I'm sure some people would step forward to sell more bitcoins. Anyway, I'll bite for sake of the experiment. I bid $25. How about you change the minimum bid to $30 and tell us a maximum time between bids. Perhaps three days?'

think about that. that was a little over six years ago and look where we are today.

Lend me money ECB  :P
And i discovered today 2 cute stories that I am not aware of... Argh that time  :)
Edit :
Agree  :)

hey, i only print it. they don't let me keep it.

one of the things i think this forum should do is have a curated sticky that links to the most historic and educational threads. there ain't nearly enough perspective here sometimes.

Looking at his sentences again, just exactly and not gambling, his means buying a coin just exactly with gambling because anytime it's not in accordance with expectation, maybe they who buying bitcoin at first bitcoin is starting building their historical is exactly winning the gamble.

Its means its just an accident that they buy bitcoin and use it for its thesis and forgot about because they didn't expect that the price will be bigger more, means he's so lucky to have the attention of bitcoin and use it for her thesis .

Wow! That's just so damn lucky! I also heard of a guy who had collected like 150 or so BTC and then forget about it, but when he found out that its now worth 65k dollars, he tried to open his wallet but couldn't as his hard disk went bad... so that was kinda shock too.

Haha, yeah lucky people like this can not be imitated. On the other hand the people at that time did not believe bitcoin, these people actually buy bitcoin and dare to take risks. And what would he even successful with bitcoin without him knowing. Very nice story :)

I dont think that the same thing will be happened again in the future. Maybe bitcoin price will increase in 2020 but not that big as what happened to that guy.
But if you think that the same thing is going to happen, so you can start to buy and collect btc as many as you can and good luck for that if you are going to do it.

I agree with you, it's bad to repeat or just remember about the gold moment is past period. I think it's not possible to happen in the future because we know in this time the bitcoin is feeling comfort with her condition.

So soon in 5 years i dont think so either , but if you think we are still considered early adopters , ofc it is hard that much heavy markets to moved and from 650 goes to 6500 and its only 10 times up not even close to 10.000 times up like from 0.07$ to 700$, but i believe also this will not happen btc price reach 6.500.000$
So keep your eyes & ears open for an alt! its more close to reallity to hit the x100 multiplier !

Lucky for him because it might go the other way around. If Bitcoin hasn’t become successful then he would just forget about it. Sometimes I would just wish that I had discovered it a few years ago then I would have become a millionaire too but then no one knows the future. Generally people do not adapt quickly to changes or be out of their comfort zone and try new things because they are afraid that it might ruin their current situation but sometimes in doing so, they were able to let an opportunity pass by that might change their life. In the case of the guy who bought it for his thesis, maybe it’s really destined that he will buy those bitcoins never realizing that in a few years, he will become a millionaire because of it.

this was such a nice story, and I always wanted to see one of these stories about people who bought/used bitcoin back then in the very beginning. and the rise in those years was really huge over a year price went up a lot and in a couple of years bitcoin reached the ATH.

I am sure if I bought bitcoin back then I would have lost the private keys a while after and regret it for the rest of my life ;)

I know it's not going to rise that much but there will be a lot of profit (by taking in consideration that there will be another halving block reward before 2020 and many other events that could trigger price increase)

I've never heard of this guy. I know of bitcoin way back in 2013 but I've really never heard of this guy since I wasn't that much enthusiastic about bitcoins before.

But man! from $27 to $886k in just 4 years. That's one good successful investment he did! But imagine if he waited a few more years like up to this point, he might have ~$3.35M and that's enough for me to live in a small house in a far away island and live peacefully. (Jk I'd rather start my own business and reinvest some)

I think this has very little to do with luck... A lot of those people got lucky because they heard about it early... but deciding to invest in such a new technology... took a lot of guts. Yes, you might have

spend only a few dollars at the time, and you got a hand full of coins.. but it's still money and nobody just piss away money on every new thing that comes out on the market, uhm.. on second thought..

yes, they do.  ;D ... I know if someone told me about this back then... I would be more than sceptical and would possibly have written it off as a scam.  ::)

I do think luck has something to do with it. If you make such an investment to get a return on it, you would have probably sold it sooner.
It would be pretty difficult to predict such a huge rise.

And to respond to the person who you replied to: If that happened to me, I would spend several thousands of dollars to have a professional try and retrieve the data from that hard drive.

That's actually fantastic, maybe people think that "you just have to wait til the price raise up and don't spend your Bitcoin. Well in fact, doing that is not an easy thing to do. You will always want to spend it even tho you know that you don't have to spend it, this guy was very lucky.

Well you can time lock your Bitcoins so you cant spend your Bitcoins sonner, but I dont recommend it even if you plan to hold your Bitcoins long term because you never know if you really gonna need the Bitcoins sonner.

I dont think such huge price increase is possible anymore, because Bitcoin is now well estabilished and much less riskier investment than back in 2009. There should be price appreciation over time though, so definitively worth keeping part of my wealth in Bitcoin long term.

For sure those person didnt believed he were able to make such income from 27 dollars, no one could predict it, the same way there are sucess histories around bitcoin, i remember read someone who send his disk with several bitcoins to trash, can you imagine being rich and wasted it because an act you made. I doubt if i were you or me would had waited any moment more to see where bitcoin could go, he made the right investment and the right choise.

that type of return is now impossible but I think bitcoin can go two ways. either it stalls not too far off from the current price level, maybe that's because scaling never gets solved or something new catches on. in that case it'll gradually fade away or stay in its niche until mining grinds to a halt and leaves it too vulnerable to continue.

second option is that most of the stuff holding it back gets ironed out and the rest of the world actually starts to get interested and starts to roll with it. in that case your returns are still going to be very, very handsome and multiples of what they are now.  

His story is a fantastic one. Lucky early investors!

It is called luck :) He bought just for thesis and leave it and after 4 years the price soars that it can even buy an apartment.He is  good investor if that is his idea as he has foresight in the future and it paids him a good um of money. But if you leave your wallet for that 4 long years, be sure to have a backup, with your keys :) or you'll lose it forever.

This is really a classic and imagine if you were the one who sold two pizzas for 10,000 BTC! Maybe this is why there are so many alt-coins coming up, hoping that they will be just like bitcoin.

We shouldn't give up hope yet. Maybe if you invest now you might be rich (or slightly richer) in 5-10 years' time.

yeah that is the best part of this. buying bitcoin without having any intention of keeping it as an investment and only for other purposes like for his thesis in this case.
and i am sure there are many similar stories like this who bought or even received free bitcoin in the early days like that faucet that paid 5BTC per claim.

similar thing happened to me but i didnt have a chance to buy lol