Fascinated by cryptocurrencies? Wishing you’d got in on the ground floor for the Bitcoin boom of 2017?
Many people would answer “Yes” to both those questions – and with good reason.
After all, the dramatic roller coaster ride that the Bitcoin (BTC) price has been through from 2017 onwards is kind of unimportant to anyone who mined their own bitcoins in the early days.
Ten years ago, bitcoins were almost worthless, with one historical chart claiming that a user going by the name SmokeTooMuch tried to sell BTC 10,000 for just $50 back in 2010, but couldn’t find a buyer.
Only in 2011 did one bitcoin go above $1, so if you have even a tiny stash of BTC from before that date, the very worst value multiplier you would have seen in the past two years would still be more than 3,000-fold (that’s 300,000% if you prefer percentages).
In other words, the currency’s recent volatility in flapping between a nadir of just over $3,000 and a zenith of just under $20,000 since December 2017 simply doesn’t matter to anyone with BTC 10,000 from back in 2010.
That’s not the difference between rich and poor, it’s the difference between rich and Richie Rich rich.
Simply put, people who got into BTC at the very start and held onto their bitcoins are, in theory at least, extra-super wealthy now as a result.
(The publisher of the system that makes Bitcoin work, the still-anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, is claimed by one analyst to have mined about cryptocurrency scams avoid
