The only person I know who bought bitcoin at that price inherited a load of wealth and has no real concept of money. I even told them they shouldn't at the time.
I remember looking at the price of Bitcoin when it was $23, $250 and $400. I didn't have any money, so I couldn't buy, but still fun to think about 10x-ing my current bank account.
To be completely honest, even if I did have money, I wouldn't have bought. The price used to go up and down by 10% like daily. At that point it feels like gambling.
So what to you tell people that drank the kool-aid and bought heavily into bitcoin when it was around $1000/btc (to the moon!)? The devaluation they suffered in the period of a couple of months was much worse than what people have experienced with the USD over the last 20 years.
Wonder what happened to those that invested in Bitcoin as soon as it made front page here in Hacker news. At that time it was selling like 40 cents for 10,000 coins, if I remember correctly.
Or they immediately bough more bitcoin to replace the bitcoins they used. Or they had so many bitcoins that they're happy with the price rise and the purchases were insignificant.
Unless all of your wealth is already in Bitcoin then buying something with bitcoin isn't really any different than not buy butcoins with your other currency.
This is actually one of the strangest things about it tbh. How can there be over 1 million unsold early adopter bitcoins? They can't all be lost and the people who held on to them through the $250 peak have some serious self-restraint
I bought in at $3 USD / $4 CAD after trying to find someone to sell it to me while I watched it go from $1 to $4. I was broke at the time so I borrowed money off my credit card.
Sold almost all of it at $200 to $400. Felt like a complete baller. Who else has made 50x to 100x their money in a couple years? Who else takes a credit card cash advance and is right about it?
Sold some more at $6k CAD, overall I've cashed 250x my investment and still have some, but right now it's worth 2000x my original buy price and it's a bit batty to look at the current price. Could have bought a really, really nice house in Toronto if I'd just held on until today.
But you know, 2000x is, on a log graph, not that far from 250x. So unless bitcoin goes to $50k or $500k a coin I'm not going to be a touch sour.
Edit:
Also, this reminds me. I should go through my comment history and find people like tptacek that were very confident that bitcoin couldn't be securable:
It was a pain in the butt, but I secured bitcoin just fine. Bitcoin is one of those thing where you can go through what you said 10 years later and say "What did I say there? Yep that was right, nope that bit was a bit off, yep it wasn't banned by x, nope that person was wrong that it'd get shutdown within the year."
So much of what we arguable is unknowable, like generics in Go or whether mutable state is a good thing for certain programming applications. But the nice thing about investing is you get to find out how right you were.
And you're only really, truly right after the gains are realized.
I probably could have bought BTC at either $25 or $250 because I had a colleague who was really into it, but I shrugged because nobody can predict the future and it seemed dodgy as fuck. Eh, hindsight. In hindsight I should've bought google, apple, tesla etc as well.
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