The time-travel millionaire fable
It’s nearly an irresistible daydream: step right into a time machine, purchase a pile of Bitcoin for pennies in 2010 and return to the current to seek out thousands and thousands sitting in your account.
In March 2010, the primary recorded Bitcoin change value was about $0.003 per Bitcoin (BTC), and costs by no means rose above $0.40 that yr. Today, BTC trades effectively into the six-figure vary.
The reality is, changing into a Bitcoin millionaire requires far more than shopping for early.
You would have wanted to construct a big BTC place after which maintain it via a number of 80% to 90% value crashes, change failures like Mt. Gox, shifting laws, the chance of shedding your non-public keys and years of temptation to take “life-changing earnings.”
This article appears to be like at Bitcoin’s unstable value historical past, the headline-driven shocks, the behavioral traps that journey up even seasoned traders and the mathematics that makes this fantasy so unlikely.
Surviving Bitcoin’s value rollercoaster
Bitcoin’s journey from obscurity to six-figure valuations was a collection of sharp surges adopted by brutal crashes, lots of which might have led a sane particular person to money out.
- 2010-2011: In January 2010, $1 may purchase about 333 BTC at roughly $0.003 every. By June 2011, when Bitcoin peaked at $30, that very same stash was value nearly $10,000. Soon after, the worth collapsed, and the web worth of these 333 BTC fell to about $666.
- 2013: The identical stack soared to roughly $88,000 on the $266 April excessive, then plunged to over $16,500 by summer season. By November’s $1,000 peak, you’d be taking a look at $333,000 (that’s brand-new Lambo cash).
- 2014-2015: The Mt. Gox collapse gutted market confidence, sending the worth to round $150 and your stack to nearly $50,000
- 2017-2018: At round $20,000, your preliminary $1 funding hit $6.66 million. But by the 2018 low, it fell to about $1.13 million (nonetheless substantial, however a steep drop).
- 2020-2022: COVID-19’s “Black Thursday” halved Bitcoin’s value in two days. The November 2021 all-time excessive of $69,000 pushed your stack to $22.98 million, solely to slip to $5.29 million a yr later.
- 2024-2025: In March 2024, Bitcoin reached a brand new all-time excessive above $73,000, making your authentic greenback value greater than $24 million.
After surviving all that — the euphoria, the crashes, the scandals — there’s one final query: Why would you promote now?
In a approach, unrealized positive factors in Bitcoin are like quantum superposition — they solely “collapse” into actuality whenever you promote. Until that second, your thousands and thousands exist solely as numbers on a display, nonetheless hostage to Bitcoin’s subsequent transfer.
Did you recognize? Andrew Tate has famously remarked that after about $20 million, more cash received’t change your day by day life (except you’re aiming for luxuries like a non-public jet or a yacht).
Headlines that would shake any Bitcoin believer
Not all promoting strain got here from value drops. Some of Bitcoin’s greatest exams got here from information occasions that challenged even essentially the most dedicated hodlers. For instance:
- Exchange disasters: In 2014, Mt. Gox (then dealing with over 70% of worldwide Bitcoin buying and selling) revealed it had misplaced greater than 650,000 BTC. Bankruptcy worn out hundreds of early traders. Moreover, in 2016, the Bitfinex hack noticed greater than 119,000 BTC stolen, and it understandably sparked fears of extra change failures. There are lots extra of such examples.
- Crime and stigma: The FBI’s 2013 takedown of Silk Road linked Bitcoin to unlawful commerce within the public thoughts. Multimillion-dollar pockets seizures resurfaced for years, fueling debate over whether or not Bitcoin was inherently tied to crime.
- Policy shocks: China repeatedly disrupted markets — from its 2013 banking ban to 2017 change closures to the 2021 announcement making all crypto transactions unlawful. Each occasion sparked fears of wider crypto regulation crackdowns.
- Forks: The 2017 blocksize debate, the Bitcoin Cash fork and the abrupt SegWit2x cancellation divided the group and raised questions on Bitcoin’s scalability.
- Industry implosions: The 2022 FTX collapse (on the time the second-largest crypto change) triggered a liquidity disaster and “crypto is useless” headlines throughout mainstream media.
Each of those moments compelled traders to rethink: Is holding well worth the danger?
Even should you had the foresight to purchase Bitcoin early and the self-discipline to carry via each market crash, scandal and coverage shift, there’s an actual chance you wouldn’t nonetheless have your cash in the present day.
You might need misplaced entry to it, too
Bitcoin possession is binary (you both management the non-public keys otherwise you don’t), and as soon as they’re misplaced, your fortune is gone.
Lost cash are a significant factor. Chainalysis estimates that 2.3 million-3.7 million BTC is completely out of circulation, locked in wallets with keys that had been misplaced, destroyed or in any other case inaccessible. Many of those belonged to early adopters who handled Bitcoin as a curiosity, storing it on laptops or exterior drives that had been later wiped, recycled or discarded.
One of essentially the most well-known examples is James Howells, an engineer from Newport, Wales who by accident threw away a tough drive containing about 8,000 BTC (now value a whole lot of thousands and thousands) and has spent years in search of permission to dig via a landfill to recuperate it.
Even diligent holders weren’t immune. Coins saved on exchanges that later failed (corresponding to Mt. Gox or QuadrigaCX) may disappear in a single day, leaving “holding” out of the proprietor’s management. In Bitcoin’s historical past, the larger hazard usually wasn’t promoting too quickly however shedding entry fully.
Did you recognize? In 2014, the Mt. Gox collapse froze over 650,000 BTC, leaving hundreds of holders unable to entry their cash. For many, “hodling” wasn’t a selection; their Bitcoin was merely gone.
The actuality for individuals who did maintain on
History reveals there are nearly no documented circumstances of the $1-to-Bitcoin-millionaire story by 2025. Instead, the next examples replicate the eventualities that occurred much more usually.
- Kristoffer Koch purchased round 5,000 BTC in 2009 for $26.60 and offered 1,000 BTC to purchase an condo, years earlier than Bitcoin’s greatest rallies.
- Stefan Thomas misplaced entry to over 7,000 BTC ($400 million in the present day) as a consequence of a forgotten password.
- The Winklevoss twins grew to become Bitcoin billionaires after shopping for round 70,000 BTC with an $11 million lump sum in 2013, lengthy after Bitcoin’s sub-$1 days.
- Li Xiaolai amassed over 100,000 BTC by making massive purchases in 2011, not with spare change.
To reduce a protracted story brief, Bitcoin fortunes weren’t made by an informal buy-and-forget technique with mere pocket cash.
They got here from massive early stakes, strict safety practices, distinctive self-discipline and the uncommon skill to endure each parabolic rises and extreme crashes with out panic promoting.
That’s why the “time-travel millionaire” thought stays extra fable than actuality and why the quantity of people that have lived via Bitcoin’s full value historical past whereas nonetheless holding their authentic stack is vanishingly small.
