Bitcoin Forum

This month that bitcoin has risen abruptly compared to the previous months, a lot of people have created new topics asking for help about their funds. For example this gentleman (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1429182) appeared out of nowhere after 9 years that had bought bitcoins and created a new thread, explaining that he found a paper wallet that was damaged (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5311473.0) in his closet. And now I'm asking myself, why now? Let's assume that he had bought 100 bitcoins in 2012. By 2016, he would have a great fortune. By the end of 2017 an even bigger.

Don't they read the news? Because if I had bought that amount of coins a decade ago, I'm sure that I'd see out of curiosity how well it has gone. Since the paper wallet was in his closet, it means that he didn't care that much.

Another bad example is this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5308709.0) in which iwoswinvs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2958348) (who is probably a liar) announces on a forum that he owns 50,000 bitcoins. I think there are more people like the first one, though.

These stories, regardless of whether they are true or not, give a picture of what really happened at that time. A lot of people were mining or getting Bitcoins but since they were worth almost nothing they didn't give it much thought. Many of them lost the keys, and therefore the bitcoins. In some cases there is talk of millions of Bitcoins lost:

Lost Bitcoin: 3.7 million Bitcoin are probably gone forever (https://decrypt.co/37171/lost-bitcoin-3-7-million-bitcoin-are-probably-gone-forever)

Nearly 4 Million Bitcoins Lost Forever, New Study Says (https://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/)

It is sad on the one hand, but on the other hand, better for us because more scarcity gives more value to our holdings.

The answer for your question is very simple, they didn't sell those Bitcoins they bought too early maybe because they are not yet satisfied with Bitcoin's price, maybe they were waiting for this very right moment, because selling all of their Bitcoins now is surely a big profit. Luckily he still find his paper wallet, because that's the most important thing to your treasure. I assume that this guy was busy with something else in his life that's why he forgot about his Bitcoin until now.

Don't think so, these people who bought bitcoin back then did not know that it will come this far, if they knew then they would have taken care of their bitcoin and the address as to prevent it from being lost. I am happy that the person still has the wallet, but I don't think that it is being busy that caused that person to lost track of the bitcoin that the person has bought because bitcoin is not a big deal for many back then, maybe that person just jump in and bought some then forget about it.

I don't care what you guys say. If I had bought <enter whatever you want here> bitcoins, I may wouldn't be that careful with the private keys, but I would surely see how things have gone. How far it has gone since the day I made my purchase. If I knew I had lost them for good, then there wouldn't be any point on reading the news. But if I just hadn't searched enough? Really?

Oh boy, imagine seeing your 100 bitcoins on the blockchain, but knowing that you can't access them. It must hurt.

How busy can you be to avoid a huge fortune you have lost somewhere in your house?

Well in the end it happened, even if it is hard to imagine. I can understand though. If I bought Bitcoin so early, I probably just do it for fun since it was fairly unknown and nobody knows how far it will go, and then they forgot to check again and never bothered to check crypto again, or at some point only read the bad news.

Things would be different If I already planned to invest for the long term and believes the assets will grow in value though. Just last week ago I decided to buy a bunch of cryptos and then decide to 'quit' from crypto for a while, and see how it will go 3 years later. Hopefully, it turned into a fortune.

It was valueless to them back then, it's still worthless to them now. Otherwise they would have taken care of it.

Even in 2010 or 2011, there were multiple warnings about private keys and seed words and to back them up, we've seen people engrave or stamp them on metal blocks or sheets, and paper wallets are easy to take care of.

Passports, birth certificates, other important papers, how does one take care of those? Paper wallets can be stored the same way.

People also forget much more important things than if they bought something 9 years ago and paid the same just a few dollars - it's not an investment you think about every night before you go to bed. Since that person offers 0.2 BTC as a reward, it’s probably a max of 2 BTC or maybe less.

There are many examples where some people (much more informed) have lost real wealth because they were careless as is the case with a person who threw an HDD in the trash with a few thousand BTC (and this is not the only such case). One can say whatever one wants, but until 2017 happened people were pretty careless with private keys/seed, and the same thing that is happening now was happening three years ago when many remembered they had something quite valuable.

Specifically, it's not a problem that the paper was in the closet - the problem is that it wasn't protected in a way that someone couldn't just damage it - children and pets don't care too much about the paper, they both destroy it while playing with it.

Or maybe the news isn't just reaching them, and have forgotten completely that they have this magic internet money at some point. It could happen, especially since it's been more than a decade since bitcoin first existed, and you can't expect everyone that was once a part of the early days to remember that they have something left on them that they could try to recover.

Many people sure got disconnected from the updates on bitcoin, and have heard about it on a news just lately. You know, life happens, stuff gets forgotten on the daily and maybe that's what also happened to them.

So, you want to say he doesn't watch the news. BTC even got hyped in 2017 because of its price. He was continuously busy from 2017.
Dude really?
I would have left everything to find it if I have that amount of BTC.
I think its complete fraud news.

If these guys are lying, it's honestly sad. Why would you do that, besides getting a few kids on the internet preaching you about your fake fortune?

Have you ever lost something for so long you completely forgot about its existence? Think of being a teen and finding out about this new project called Bitcoin. You download the Core, you mine it but after a while you get bored of it. Many years later, you find out about this new currency called Bitcoin which topped >$1k, you find the name familiar but you have no idea why.

It happens. In fact, I found some old Bitcoin paper wallets that were still loaded a few weeks ago. The paper wallets were dated years before. This is the non-perfect human brain at work... that's it.

something strange too if he had something that at that time was not something of high value and only to be able to buy extension games online only. but he keeps it and forgets it for something that may seem reasonable and trustworthy but he forgets that by cheating in any way there will be a gap where the fraud committed will be openly open because of the fault of himself who made up the story does not make sense .

Moreover, the story that was built seemed to impose the will that actually happened, because if all this time he had never even heard the news about bitcoin. because we know a lot of news about hackers who do the trick by asking for a ransom with bitcoin. this news quite seizes almost all existing media and does he not know !!! strange thing.
not to mention the news that bitcoin reached ATH in two periods in 2013 and 2017, even this has taken a lot of attention from the media and maybe also social media.

but this we cannot blame because there are also people who have such assumptions because they think that if I have a certain amount of bitcoin and how do people react to the story, of course if it goes viral he feels that there is his own happiness.

Am also wondering the same thing, except the person is completely out of touch of nature i don't see why someone will have btc for so long and during the great 2017/18 bull run still the person did not bother to access their wallet or feel the need to do so! who does that? it is most certainly strange and have no meaningful explanation.

Perhaps the person was medically ill and was unable to do anything with his/her investment at the time, even if you lost your password i think the time gap is too much to come out now and say it, if you actually hold btc and can't find your password i don't think you will stay so long before seeking help.

This question will be asked again and again , even if anyone pretend to be forgotten some precious things which is more valuable than others. Also, it's more likely an account of those users who are already on this forum and want to make jokes on others. Just checkout recent reply of that user who makes an announcement of giving bitcoin to others which is ridiculous. Only newbies will fall for that without knowing the rules.

When people buy bitcoin at the very lowest price, they do not even think that the price will be like what bitcoin has now.
They think that it is a joke, and they do not store bitcoin at a safe place, and mostly they abandon it into an HDD or other place that they do not remember where that place.
But suddenly, they read the news about the bitcoin price increase so high, and they remember that they already had bitcoin from a long time ago, and they tried to search for it but they can not found it.
If we see 100 bitcoin in a blockchain, but we can not access the wallet, that will be very sad to us, but we can not do anything if we do not remember anything about it.

unfortunately most of the topics we have been seeing in this forum over the past couple of months were from people who had bought some sort of fake wallet thinking there is a lot of money in it and have been wasting other people's time trying to help them recover these "wallets".

the reality is that whenever price rises it attracts another group of newcomers some of whom fall for the old scams. fake wallets and malwares are the most common methods among them.

Even now there are people who don't believe in Bitcoin but are waiting for the market to see if it's profitable to enter or not. many people bought or mined in the first years, now they don't have any coins left. even if you sell your coins now, you will have no coins in the future. the secret of Bitcoin is in holding for long long time. the legend of HODLING.

Easy to say, hard to prove. Some are presenting 'proofs' but we all know how unrealistic this market is. Many people are making stories which are not true in the first place. Purpose? Looking for sympathy? Merit(most of the time)? Or they just want to do so. All I know is that, those people who are really having such huge amounts will not be found in this forum telling other people what they have. They are more likely busy making profit from continuing their investment and trading habits. They won't spend time arguing with other people or just being boastful at them.

Should I say, they didn't expect the unexpected. We aren't sure if those stories are legit but let's assume it's true. In the first year of bitcoin it doesn't have a good value, they thought of it as worthless or shouldn't give effort to earn it. Some of them already lost the keys, can't access the wallets and it's their greatest regret for not giving to attention to it. But we can't blame them as they don't have any idea that BTC will soon to rise.

They might didn't expect bitcoin to reach this price and didn't comprehend how to store bitcoin correctly or just forget the password. They might have tried, but failed, no one could help them to obtain the lost coins, if someone could, then we should be worried about satoshi's coins.

There are quite a few people who might have bought at extremely low prices, when it first started, forgot about them when they saw little to no progression in their investment (Whom might have considered the whole Bitcoin thing as a phase/trend or a joke). Thus, some lost their wallet credentials, dumped them by mistake in old HDDs, or even just completely forgot they had actually bought at some point.

Several stories pop up every once in a while, especially when Bitcoin is receiving extensive publicity (during bull markets, similar to 2017's or the current one). Some of them might be fake, but some others are definitely true. Me, myself found two old wallets which I had completely forgotten about. (Only $100 worth though).

My perspective for this story was this guy owned a huge quantity of bitcoin, and technically he'd going to accumulate many times and multiply his asset once there's a dip. I believed that this person owned not only bitcoin, but also had a physical business earning good profit which going to capitalized bitcoin as holdings. Bitcoin all alone won't sustain, that why we need other sources of income, and if someone who bought so early and not planning to dump it; then another opportunity will happen if they won't panic about speculations.

It was very clear that the author of that thread forgot about those BTC, so no matter what the news is, if you forgot that you bought some you wouldn't do a thing.  This also reminds me of the BTC I left on an exchange.  I forgot that I used that exchange and lucky, before the exchange shutdown they send an email to their user asking them to withdraw their fund.  That is when I knew that I left some BTC on that exchange, it had been 3 years that passed before I received that email and realized that I have some BTC to withdraw from their site.  I think it's not that he doesn't care, it is that during those time BTC was too cheap that forgetting it is not a big deal.

Actually, yes, there are a lot of people that never thought that btc price will be this big. So those early users that had good amount of btc, they ignored their coins for long time. And when the price goes up, they started to uncover those lost keys/pw to open their wallets. And in  my case, as we all know, a lot of us are using different exchanges to trade coins, I keep all the login details in one place and check every once in a while. Some exchanges actually closed down already, remember nova/tradesat/cryptopia and many others. I bet a lot of them had their coins that were not recovered because of the shutdown.

For someone who has had Bitcoin and forgot the keys would have been looking for a way to recover and access the wallets. Well it's a very frustrating situation, anyone who can't find his wallet details after several trials should just relax and hope some miracles happen if not then learn from it and move on.

Anyway, I don't believe their stories, they are only in the hype. If people will think that it real and they are telling the truth, I really don't think about it. Because there is no reason why you will forget your investment and then you can just remember at this time, a thing to be ridiculous and obviously pretty lies.

It possible that there are a lot of lost bitcoins but I don't think it can be of this amount hold by a single person. Usually, it happens that they lost their private keys, abandoned wallet address,  stuck on the exchanges, and etc...

This is either a made up stories or an attempt to buy Bitcoin back when it's worth merely a buck and decided not to. It's "almost" impossible for someone who bought Bitcoin and totally forget about it when in the first place he had been hiding his paper wallet inside a closet for almost 10 years and then heard the news all over the television, in the internet, and literally everywhere about how Bitcoin has been booming since the late of 2017.
I doubt there were only a handful of ordinary people who had Bitcoin just before the price went over a hundred bucks and still holding up until now or sold in 2017 or earlier.

Well, aside from feeling sad and also the regret of what happened to them (and probably others also), I also thought the same, why did they just realize to sell BTC right now.
I don't think that the reason is that the price is not satisfying enough in 2016. If they bought it in 2012, they have had so many profits selling it in 2017, multiple times amounts to get.
Or, didn't they realize that they had Bitcoin? Or, they also realized that they had no key at that year and he just let it go. And now when the price multiple times higher again, they tried to find the key again?
If this is the case, it means that careless is the first reason. Whatever the condition that they had in the past, if you are really a careful person, you will always save the key safely, making the backup and also ensure that they are safe. Whether one of them is gone, they still have the backup. 

whether it's a true story or just a fiction, the fact is there are many people who initially think bitcoin is worthless and so don't manage its storage properly. so a lot of news from some people who have lost access to their wallet, which has a lot of BTC in it, which used to be easy to get.
I can not imagine how much regret the people who lost the key, even though he had a lot of money in his wallet. this new treasure model, :D

When you do help up soo much coins then you would really still forget those specially if you have bought nor earned those coins in early years to believe that it wasnt really that valuable into those times.
When the price had skyrocketed then its just normal for someone to look for his coins and made out some unexpected fortune along the way.Those amounts are enourmous which you would really
be eager on finding those coins back.For those who havent able to recover then its game over for them, its sad to hear off but there no way you can get access those coins back as long
you dont have the keys thats why its always important to secure those things up because you wouldnt know on what would be the future looks like.
You would really be ending up on regretting.

I was a bit late to enter the cryptocurrency sector. I purchased by first coins in 2014, when the price was around $600 per coin. But I know a few guys who were involved since 2012. Their story is also similar. Back then, no one really thought that the exchange  rates would go up by 1,000x. So they were careless about storing their coins. Those who are fortunate enough managed to recover them. But I know a few cases where the coins were lost due to careless handling.

There had been a lot of stories like this where people had lost and found their old hard disk, their private keys, and so on. I guess some of them are true. It can happen to anyone especially those who have bought crypto early and had lost their access to their wallet or even forgot where they kept it since no one knew that BTC price will reach this kind of price. Some people don't care that much about their crypto in its early days. Take for example the pizza guys who have bought a pizza paying thousands of BTC for it.

btc was undervalued decades ago and you can rarely see it in the news . investors read news so that they will know if what are the status of their assets and if there are news that may affect their assets and also investors dont just often check their asset but after buying it they forget it for many years and prolly that had happen to that guy .

 and when should we store our paper wallets ? i didnt find it wrong storing in the closet because this is also where i store my important files .

Why go somewhere far and ask who bought earlier and then sold or lost, forgot or donated. Many people among us received bitcoins on the forum, bought bitcoins. And then they sold or simply lost interest in the forum, their accounts are simply dead today. I read the message histories of many legends on this forum. Many had hoped for big profits, but despite this, for one reason or another, people were forced to sell their assets.
This is, I think, life, we cannot look into our future, we cannot but make mistakes. Another thing is important. It is important to draw the right conclusions and not make the same mistakes today.
And to regret very much that you lost and could have, this is the easiest path to madness.

People forgets and btc in the early stage is really cheap like if I ask you where you put your pennies 10 years ago will you remember it? I bet you don't. but, your statement holds truth aswell though. Some of them might just trying to seek attention.
But, actually whether those story really true or not actually none of our business. If we can help them retrieving the privkey that was lost, good. Otherwise, better to just leave that topic. However, it shouldn't be a strange thing to see people seeking a way and asking such question because honestly this forum frequently appears first page in google search engine when it comes to cryptocurrency problems.

Don't blame yourself, did your past self know that the price of bitcoin will be this high? If not then you are regretting about something that you don't have a control with. I do agree that it is frustrating but what can you do, you already lost it right? On the plus side, you are one of the contributors to the increase of the price of bitcoin so give yourself a pat on the back. The worst that you can do is you get obsessed to it and get lost in your way of life that the only thing you are thinking is those lost coins from the yesteryear, unable to move forward and didn't have a chance to turn your life back around. About those people claiming they lost more than 2 digit of bitcoin, I think that they should get their storytelling skills up a notch because some people can easily see through their BS.

Storing Bitcoin in a paper wallet carries a huge risk of loss when the paper is damaged as experienced by someone told by the OP. Hardware wallets in 2012 may not have been very popular, so using paper wallets is easier to do. However, if you are not careful when you save it, it will be damaged and cannot be opened again.
He should also have a copy of the see phrase elsewhere so that if the first backup breaks there are still others. But I don't know, maybe because in 2012 the price of bitcoin was still very cheap, that person didn't pay attention to that security.

You are right. There is a greater risk of loss in pap wallet compared to hardware, my friend had an experience with these.
Maybe it’s our nature, to not over mind something that is not yet valuable for us. Like you said, BTC price is just cheap back then.
We should all learn a lesson from many experiences of forgotten keys and passwords in this forum. Save it anywhere you can.

In life, there are always difficulties and difficulties with money, almost the most important thing. I do not think that it is 100% likely to be called a mistake in selling your assets in the past. Life difficulties with money always accompany us throughout all our lives.

I don't think it matters if they are lying or saying the truth, moreover there is no way to know the truth or what really happened, but however it goes to show two things; first a lot of people who had participated in the early of life of Bitcoin acquired a lot and because of its less price didn't value it for much and hence disregarded it, wherein a lot lost their private keys and so on, and now with the worth of Bitcoin they are trying their best to recover it, this shows that, in fact many people participated during the early life of Bitcoin. Secondly, it shows that, with the increasing worth of Bitcoin today, many of these stories will keep coming up, with people looking for ways to recover their wallet or access their abandoned harddrive etc. And lastly, there is every tendency that many people who had a lot, sold for a Penny and today would be regretting that decision.

It is literally impossible to recover the wallets if you forget the password, you can try with multiple combinations and try your luck and most of the users who abandoned their hard drives will remove the junk in due time and the possibility of regaining that is slim as well, there were many that got lucky after getting hard drives from dumpster and able to find bitcoin in the past i have these kind of stories and one thing is true that many of the early adopters had huge amount of coins but most of them booked their profit already.

I wouldn't blame them. They just didn't believe bitcoin is going to amount to anything not to talk of being worth this much. Many people don't even know they've got some bitcoins stashed away in some wallet because they can't remember.
Truth be told, this is just like many of us. There are some altcoins you bought and didn't remember to keep tabs on them simply because they didn't worth much when you bought them. If by chance, these coins increase in value just like bitcoin is some years to come, they'll also ask you this question.

If that is happening to me, I will certainly be moving on and forget about it. No chance to recover the lost BTC if we don't have any clue on the keys. A wild guess is not enough...

---

It is crazy to think that these people just come out talking about their "lost BTC, lost keys" which I don't think they have any from it.
I heard a lot of the same stories since before. I don't think that they are so careless before because it is just of a very cheap price, it becomes multi-fold this time that makes them remember their Bitcoin.

Well, we are just the same, I heard this multiple times that someone lost their bitcoin because they are just a newbie and don't know how to properly store their bitcoin into the right wallet. Perhaps, it is countless that there are people who held bitcoin and purchase at the cheap price like investing in 2010 and until now holding. And how many of them lost their bitcoin and stuck up in the wallet forever and they cant able use it. It will increase the supply of bitcoin amount.

You might many people who purchased the coin during the early stages and some are waiting for the price to hit the peak to move the coins, if you look at the old wallets you will find many addresses with coins that are not moved for almost a decade, so it is a possibility that they either lost those coins or are holding on until it reach some astronomical figures.

Things like that happen, and people lose their money. These people are the ones who never believed in Bitcoin since the last decade the price wasn’t worth anything and they couldn’t believe in it that it will grow this much and they had invested little money, so they didn’t regard it at all.

I have seen so many of the stories like this, they buy it and they abandon it. I have also seen the thread of the guy saying he owns 50,000 bitcoins, I can’t tell if he’s telling the truth or not, but that’s his business. I saw the one of a programmer that can’t get access to his wallet.

In this kind of situation, there are some that are telling the truth where they were able to buy bitcoin in the past and they just forget it until they were able to get some clue that they have really bought a bitcoin.

But for those people who wants only an attention to their future target to scam then we should stay away from them as much as possible as many of them are creating only a scenario that didn't even happen at all just to get the attention of the forum members and proceed with their plan if they will get the chance.

We cannot certainly blame those people who have bought Bitcoin long years ago because certainly maybe they have just lost into their mind that they have kept a desirable amount of Bitcoin way back then that they have keep into hold since the price of Bitcoin way back then is far to be comparable into where it is right now. Maybe they have just focused into other necessary things while waiting for the price to grow and have forgotten it until now that they have saw a big improvement and now wanting to reclaim what they truly deserve after years of holding. But we cannot still be certain if all the stories being shared by some random stranger is true or not here in the forum but I guess some of those are true and maybe the least we can do is just assist them on how they can regain access with those long hold funds.

We can't verify if it's true or not but the way they care about their access to their bitcoin stash is just simply unacceptable.
Some people who bought early may only make it as an experiment and they don't matter it a lot since they only spend a bucks to buy those bitcoins.

now, maybe they read some news and realize they have bought bitcoin in the past, but we can't blame them really because we don't know the real story, and for sure they are already blaming themselves for losing millions of dollars.

That's what humans are, we only value things when it's already valuable.

Just like investors, instead of buying bitcoin when it struggle, they buy it when its in bull run, which is wrong IMO.

In an investment  you will be optimistic at first. But not all investors would truly believe about the potential of Bitcoin by that time simply because its concept is a bit revolutionary. And with that, there will surely be ideas that would cross in the minds of those who invested at its early years, that perhaps, investing won't yield to that much of profit. We are all surprised about what happened in 2017. It is easy to say that ''I' ve expected the occurrence of this thing that this currency will be this big in the future", but only few people managed to truly believe.

I heard a lot of stories about people losing their access on their bitcoin that they bought a long time ago. Thing is, they get interested when they know the value of bitcoin has already skyrocketed, I believe bitcoin has started to be popular last 2017 and it has caught a lot of attention from the people and that makes some people realized that they hold bitcoin in the past, and unfortunately can't recover anymore.

It's a lesson learned for everyone, we learn from other people's experience, we don't need to loss bitcoin to learn, and nowadays that we have a lot of options to hold, we should choose the best security which is the hard wallet and keep it always at a safe place.

I've never had paper wallet experience. But I have many friends who used to start using paper wallets and there were many who complained about the loss of their private keys stored in the paper wallet due to a lack of caution. Right now I have used a hardware wallet which of course is safe, but even so, we have to keep it safe. have backups and others.

Yeah true. At the time Bitcoin has just created hodlers don't bother to keep and watch onto their Bitcoin assets because it almost worth nothing. They did not even expect Bitcoin to be as the most expensive digital asset nowadays that is why they are just taking chances. I can read regrets every single year on their lost Bitcoins but that's life you will really forget something you don't value the most just like Bitcoin because they did not expect it to grow that much.

Indeed buying bitcoin a decade ago would have made a huge and unbelievable impact on someone's life right now. If only we were able to foresee the future, we're all billionaires by now already. It's a shame we never saw this coming, even during its first massive pump, we still lost hope as it ended up dumping real hard. I hope we can learn our lesson now and start putting up our faith on bitcoin more than we ever had before. There's not much to lose if we'll believe but there is so much to gain if we keep our hopes high on bitcoin.

It was an unexpected turn of event that bitcoin that they seem not to value and just held it without anything to hope for, got buffed up and increased in value. Well, I might be the same as them and if I'm holding it back then, I've probably sold it before it goes to $100 or probably even $50 if I've made money easily by just having it. Too bad for them but let's all learn from those mistakes and experiences that we should take care of our wallets, private keys, and stuff related to it. We'll never know in the future how high bitcoin will be.

Correct. The value of bitcoin before has a lot of impacts on how holders and people in general look at it. I think that we could all agree that there are times that we tend to take for granted the things that we do not deem as valuable. And maybe that is what drove these people to just not mind the wallets, keys and storages they used to have back then. Indeed, we all had our lessons learnt.

I remember way back in 2013, I had a friend of mine who mentioned about online currency in which he mines for it everyday. Fast forward to this year, when I asked about this 'online currency' which turned out to be bitcoin, he mentioned that he stopped mining due to the complexity and technicalities of technology for his PC. He was able to mine around 10 BTCs but he subsequently lost his hardware containing those bitcoins.

Imagine if you can just find that hard drive of his, you'll be an instant millionaire. Like compared before, the value of BTCs were so little that people would trade thousands of btcs just for something that is convenient/useful.

Such stories may well be, since people may have previously mined bitcoins and then switched to other activities. Life is very difficult and in it you often have to do not what you want, but what regularly brings food for the family. Now, when the news media talk about the cosmic prices that bitcoin has reached, many are beginning to remember the bitcoins they have held for a long time. Therefore, such stories are quite logical.

It is really regretful if you buy in the wrong time especially that the bitcoin's price is playing in the price of $47k to $50k this month.

I know the struggle of having a bad decision and bad timing in a bitcoin investment so that should serve as a lesson for you so that next time you buy, you are in the proper timing.

It is really hard to focus when you know that you made a bad decision, it is hard to cope up and correct the mistakes.

So instead of regretting it, be grateful that you have the opportunity to change your mistakes so that you can make your investment grow the next time you invest on it.

I guess some of the early Bitcoin investors had lost access to their old wallets. Some were not expecting BTC to be this massive that they ignored their BTC since it was less than a dollar decades ago which is now worth millions if you had a decent amount of BTC.

I guess this will be the greatest regret one will have, missing a chance of becoming when you had a chance to. People who had their BTC early on must not be too careful storing their BTC since security is not that much of a priority before and everyone else is just coping up on how to secure BTC and that it is a hidden gem.

you buy a large quantity and expect the next 3 years? do you mean crypto bitcoin?
Bitcoin increase cycle is actually 3 years but that's not a guarantee.
For me, whenever bitcoin gets a profit you can sell it and you can make it an option to get a profit faster than having to wait 3 years.
I hope good news for you

Maybe they also didn't need the money yet that is why they had ignored it yet up until they heard it once again and then remember that he needs the money and his wallet.  Maybe they are too busy as well. I have some wallets that I forgot myself that I see contain a fraction of ETH like 0.24 that I now wanting to use, this amount is just ignored a few years ago but now it's necessary to use them for fees.

I guess it is a good thing that the early adopters didn't accumulated too many coins. That would have skewed the wealth distribution of Bitcoin and left too many coins at the hands of a few. Most of these coins were lost, either due to hacks or careless handling. And this in turn helped to spike the exchange rates. Imagine what would have happened to the exchange rates, if the 4 million or so "lost" coins were not lost.

There's a lot of stories like that here in the forum but what I thinking about is that if it is a real stories or just a fake ones, if this might be a real story then the thing may be true because a decades ago there's a faucet in which you can earn bitcoin and satoshi everyday but people doesn't care about it because that time the bitcoin doesn't have any value or it may have but didn't as high as what it is today so that's the reason why people doesn't care about it.