[ThrowBack] from $27 to $886,000

[Coding Enthusiast]

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

Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

The price chart of that time if anybody was interested

[20kevin20]

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.

[Coding Enthusiast]

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

[bitcapitalist]

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!

[CoinBreader]

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 !

[OmegaStarScream]

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 .

[sandaq]

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.

[Shiroslullaby]

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.

[Cuidler]

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 .

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.

[HatakeKakashi]

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

[chennan]

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.

[European Central Bank]

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.

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.

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.

[phpdev]

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

[MingLee]

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

Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

The price chart of that time if anybody was interested

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.

[European Central Bank]

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

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.

[snipie]

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

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?'

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

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.

Agree 

[European Central Bank]

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

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.

[shinratensei_]

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

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.

[Rodeo02]

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

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 .

[shamzblueworld]

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.