
I Threw Away $4.8M in Bitcoin - ca98am79
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/i-threw-away-4-8-million-in-bitcoin/
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noonespecial
These stories always make a big assumption: That if he had not trashed it, he
would have held onto it until it was actually worth $4.8M.

The reality is that he (and everyone else) very likely would have sold out
around $5k and proceeded to tell everyone who would listen how they made a
killing with bitcoin.

Its a "stock exchange" story that usually just factors down to "if only I'd
done a rare and risky thing that no one else in their right mind would
normally do (that only occurred to me because of an accident and with the
benefit of hindsight), why, I'd be a millionaire now!"

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johnwheeler
I threw away the opportunity to buy BRK.A in 1985 when it was worth ~$2,000.
If I would have ponied up $8,000, which I had at the time, those shares would
be worth over $1M now.

Not that bad when you consider my grandfather throwing away opportunities to
assassinate Adolf Hitler _and_ Lee Harvey Oswald. Who knows how different
things would be if only he had the foresight.

If only we had the foresight...

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dtparr
I mean, while I feel his pain and understand the compulsion to look at it like
he threw away $4.8M, at the point he realized what he'd done, it was worth
about $4k. He could have bought them back for $4k at that point, and the lost
$4k would be a rounding error. He even mentions he might have sold it at that
point because he could have used the extra $4k.

It's really no different than any other situation where you had a potential
gain you passed on. If I'd put all my savings into TSLA @ ~ $25 in '11, I'd
have an 1100% return. But I didn't.

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abandonliberty
>no different than any other situation where you had a potential gain you
passed on >1100% return.

The difference is orders of magnitude in the return. Returns of 400,000% are
pretty rare.

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Cshelton
You actually only lost out on $4k worth of BitCoin. As you stated yourself, a
few months later when you remembered that you threw the drive away with the
current value at $4k, you said you could have used the money then. It's safe
to assume that if you still had the bitcoin then, you would have attempted to
sell at that price.

Also, regarding the proof of ownership for the drive, if found, do you still
have the receipt or conversation about purchasing the bitcoin in the first
place? Tax wise, you should always keep that when purchasing collectibles to
have proof of your cost basis, in the U.S. at least. Not sure about other
countries regarding capital gains like taxes. But if you had proof of
purchase, I'd say that would hold up strong if the drive was found, at least
for the value derived that text file. Your account holding the value is not in
your harddrive, it is on the bitcoin blockchain, you just lost your key to get
the bitcoins stored in it. But at the same time, once you throw something
away, it is assumed you have given up all rights to it, thus the person who
finds it now has all rights to any information on the drive, including your
private key.

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giomasce
By the same logic, every one in the world who could have bought one kBTC when
it was cheap but did not (i.e., more or less every single human in the world)
has thrown away $4.8M. Even the OP wasted much more than $4.8M, because they
might have bought more than 25$ worth of BTC. There is no difference between a
lost investment or an investment that never happened, when the return is so
ridiculously high.

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victorantos
You actually threw away $25 worth of bitcoin

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rhino369
He arguably threw away 4k worth of bitcoin, the price when he chucked the HDD.

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angryasian
I think everyone that jumped into bitcoin early on has a similar story. I had
a few hundred bitcoin and when shops started integrating with bitcoin I bought
stupid things off of sites like Overstock. Now I have worthless things and
those bitcoin would be worth so much more.

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jbob2000
Bitcoins or not, who the hell throws out a working hard drive?

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BrandoElFollito
You do it when it is logistically (takes more space / GB), perf (slow) or
noise (hdd vs ssd) inferior. I have maybe 5 drives of ~100 GB size which I
replaced with a better 1 TB one.

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codewritinfool
Easy to think about this now, but the truth is that at some point along the
line he would have sold it much less money.

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vidanay
This story has reached almost mythological status. Every time Bitcoin is at a
local maximum, it makes the rounds.

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zantana
So is the total number of bitcoins 1400 smaller now that the cold storage
wallet doesn't exist?

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kleer001
"Don't beat yourself up for not acting irrationally." ~Anonymous

