• doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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    3 hours ago

    It’s like giving away some scratchers as a consolation prize but the guy in 5th hits a million dollar jackpot

  • OR3X@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    I remember someone on Reddit gifting me 0.25BTC and I never redeemed it once I saw I had to create an account and a wallet. Just couldn’t be bothered. That would be enough to pay off my house today.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Someone tipped me a tiny amount of some crypto coin on there, too. I did set up a wallet but then kinda forgot about it. Maybe I can pay off my place. Lol I remember it being one of the dumb ones, but tbh I thought they were all dumb. Still do, even if I did accidentally get rich lol.

      Oh wow, just checked it. It was about 0.15 BCH and yeah, it has gone up considerably since I got it. It was worth maybe a buck or two, apparently it’s worth almost $80 USD today! That’s like a downpayment on a stick of RAM!

  • AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    21 hours ago

    Super early on I mined probably 500+ bitcoin.

    And later in life sold them all at various points for maybe a total sum of $8k.

    So, yeah.

    • Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk
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      4 hours ago

      I mined a couple of bitcoin on my mobile phone right at the very beginning.

      Scratched my head, couldn’t see the point of it, especially as it made my phone hot.

      So I deleted the app and the coins.

      Sigh.

    • oneser@lemmy.zip
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      17 hours ago

      This is what investing is though. No sane person would have bought Microsoft for peanuts in the early days and waited until today to have sold their first share. That’s when people get greedy and lose everything.

      Bitcoin is very high risk, so your probably $7.8k profit should be seen as a huge win, regardless of what could have been.

      • Azrael@reddthat.com
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        6 hours ago

        Bitcoin isn’t an investment though. Or at least, it wasn’t supposed to be.

        People treat it like an investment because they don’t understand how it actually works. Then Altcoins became a thing, which are essentially just Bitcoin clones but with extra steps.

        • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          People treat it like an investment because they don’t understand how it actually works.

          People treat it as an investment because it has historically grown in value at a rapid pace. It literally couldn’t matter less “how it actually works.” What matters is the likelihood that its value will increase.

          • Azrael@reddthat.com
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            3 hours ago

            Exactly my point. People treat it like an investment for precisely that reason. But that wasn’t why it was created in the first place. Appreciating in value is a side-effect, not the main feature.

    • BanMe@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I’ve only had a few go through my hands but I definitely bought drugs with them.

      … No regrets that was some fantastic ketamine.

  • MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    So, related story…

    Back in 2011ish, I discovered SilkRoad. I’d heard about people ordering weed on the internet, and it sounded really convenient. I downloaded Tor, I trawled forums and #chans for onion links, and eventually, I found it. Aside from all of the sketchy shit (hard drugs, stolen credit card info, home vasectomy kits), it almost seemed too good to be true - I could order a whole pound for what I was paying for a couple of ounces.

    There was one problem, though: payment. You couldn’t use your debit card (obviously), and you couldn’t just buy a prepaid visa and use that. No, they handled all payments in this weird new thing that I’d never heard of… Bitcoin. I did a bit of research, and it seemed like it would be kind of a hassle to set up a wallet and find an exchange and actually buy any Bitcoins, and even more of a hassle to sell any extra Bitcoins that I had left over. On top of that, the price kept bouncing around, so enough Bitcoin to buy a fat sack of weed today might buy a much smaller sack tomorrow.

    So what did I do?

    I gave up and kept buying weed from a dude. If I’d sucked it up and dealt with the hassle to buy weed by the quarter pound instead of the quarter ounce, the crumbs left in my Bitcoin wallet could have bought me a house.

    • nexguy@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think a lot of people think that yet the people who did have bitcoin when they were a few bucks each sold it at $70, or $300, or $900, or $1700… very few people have held on all this time.

    • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      Nah. Similar story:

      I did the part that you didn’t. Left the excess in the silkroad account, the FBI bought the house.

      That, and you would have sold it a year later, or a year later, or a year later.

      Don’t kick yourself too hard. I’d be in the 10 digit range if I could see the future and just didn’t spend a couple hundred on the site for one of the orders.

    • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      No, you would have sold it for a hundred bucks. And if you didn’t then you would have sold for two hundred. Or for three hundred…

      Not having bought it that day is just one step of the ladder you didn’t climb. You would still need to not sell it every day since.

    • AxExRx@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      A friend of mine got addicted to heroin in highschool. He bought 200 btc when it crashed down to $2 in 2012, and shortly after, his parents sent him to rehab for a month, and hid his computer somewhere on the farm, never to be seen again.

      When it was worth around $10m we searched the entire premises, with no luck.

    • hayvan@piefed.world
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      16 hours ago

      Back in 2009, I was there, saw the release of Bitcoing on Slashdot news. I had a computer on 24/7 because I was working on my thesis. Minin on CPU was feasible. I thought it could be a cool experiment to have a bit, just for fun. I never bothered with the hassle of actually running the miner on those very first days with the CPU and electricity I had from my uni for free.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Why do you need a home kit for a vasectomy? It just takes a scalpel, superglue, suturing kits, and some balls. /s though now I am remembering an infamous post of someone describing how she did her own orchiectomy (nsfl it was a horrible read)

  • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    In 2012, one of my friends in Colorado had a Bitcoin mining rig that was making $200 worth of Bitcoin a month. But he was moving to California where energy prices were higher, so he offered to sell me the whole thing. He wanted just over $1,000 for it, which was too rich for my blood. At the time I thought “it might break even in 5 months, or it could start losing money if prices go down or if Bitcoin gets harder to mine. Too risky.”

    I think Bitcoin was around $5 a piece at the time, so it would have been putting out 40 coins a month. Now logically I know that had I bought that mining rig from him, I certainly wouldn’t have held everything it made and waited to sell until Bitcoin peaked. But every once in a while, like right now, I do the math and realize that thing was pumping out $13,731,278 a month at today’s prices and just fucking hate my life.

    • hovercat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 hours ago

      Having also been in Colorado and being big into mining at the time, I can tell you that you would have sold when it hit the ATH of $1000, or definitely when MtGox happened and it halved almost overnight. I worked at Microcenter at the time and remember all the people returning GPUs after that crash. Everyone likes to think they would have held this whole time, but you’d have been a fucking greedy idiot if you had seen something so volatile, made 1000x returns and still said “Nah, I’m gonna hold”

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        21 hours ago

        Yeah my biggest regret is that I know my personality of hardly ever completely cashing out of anything. If I ever trade stock options and have a call up big, I’ll usually sell part of it and hold the rest till expiration.

    • Hapankaali@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      The thought “I shouldn’t mine Bitcoin because it is an immoral activity that destroys the environment and facilitates crime while not producing anything of value” never crossed your mind?

  • ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Everything more powerful in hindsight. No one could have predicted the current pumping and dumping, which is the only thing inflating that.