The time-travel millionaire fantasy
It’s virtually 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 hundreds of thousands sitting in your account.
In March 2010, the primary recorded Bitcoin change worth was about $0.003 per Bitcoin (BTC), and costs by no means rose above $0.40 that 12 months. Immediately, BTC trades effectively into the six-figure vary.
The reality is, turning into a Bitcoin millionaire requires far more than shopping for early.
You’ll have wanted to construct a big BTC place after which maintain it by means of a number of 80% to 90% worth crashes, change failures like Mt. Gox, shifting laws, the danger of shedding your personal keys and years of temptation to take “life-changing income.”
This text appears at Bitcoin’s unstable worth historical past, the headline-driven shocks, the behavioral traps that journey up even seasoned buyers and the maths that makes this fantasy so unlikely.
Surviving Bitcoin’s worth rollercoaster
Bitcoin’s journey from obscurity to six-figure valuations was a collection of sharp surges adopted by brutal crashes, a lot of which might have led a sane particular person to money out.
- 2010-2011: In January 2010, $1 might purchase about 333 BTC at roughly $0.003 every. By June 2011, when Bitcoin peaked at $30, that very same stash was value virtually $10,000. Quickly after, the value collapsed, and the online 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 value to round $150 and your stack to virtually $50,000
- 2017-2018: At round $20,000, your preliminary $1 funding hit $6.66 million. However 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 worth 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 12 months 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 means, unrealized beneficial properties in Bitcoin are like quantum superposition — they solely “collapse” into actuality while you promote. Till that second, your hundreds of thousands exist solely as numbers on a display, nonetheless hostage to Bitcoin’s subsequent transfer.
Do you know? Andrew Tate has famously remarked that after about $20 million, extra money gained’t change your each day life (until you’re aiming for luxuries like a personal jet or a yacht).
Headlines that might shake any Bitcoin believer
Not all promoting stress got here from worth drops. A few of Bitcoin’s greatest checks got here from information occasions that challenged even probably the most dedicated hodlers. For instance:
- Change disasters: In 2014, Mt. Gox (then dealing with over 70% of world Bitcoin buying and selling) revealed it had misplaced greater than 650,000 BTC. Chapter worn out 1000’s of early buyers. Furthermore, in 2016, the Bitfinex hack noticed greater than 119,000 BTC stolen, and it understandably sparked fears of extra change failures. There are a lot extra of such examples.
- Crime and stigma: The FBI’s 2013 takedown of Silk Street 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.
- Coverage shocks: China repeatedly disrupted markets — from its 2013 banking ban to 2017 change closures to the 2021 announcement making all crypto transactions unlawful. Every occasion sparked fears of wider crypto regulation crackdowns.
- Forks: The 2017 blocksize debate, the Bitcoin Money fork and the abrupt SegWit2x cancellation divided the group and raised questions on Bitcoin’s scalability.
- Business 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.
Every of those moments compelled buyers to rethink: Is holding well worth the threat?
Even in case you had the foresight to purchase Bitcoin early and the self-discipline to carry by means of each market crash, scandal and coverage shift, there’s an actual chance you wouldn’t nonetheless have your cash at present.
You might need misplaced entry to it, too
Bitcoin possession is binary (you both management the personal keys otherwise you don’t), and as soon as they’re misplaced, your fortune is gone.
Misplaced cash are a significant component. 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 the crucial well-known examples is James Howells, an engineer from Newport, Wales who unintentionally threw away a tough drive containing about 8,000 BTC (now value lots of of hundreds of thousands) and has spent years in search of permission to dig by means of a landfill to get well it.
Even diligent holders weren’t immune. Cash saved on exchanges that later failed (resembling Mt. Gox or QuadrigaCX) might disappear in a single day, leaving “holding” out of the proprietor’s management. In Bitcoin’s historical past, the larger hazard typically wasn’t promoting too quickly however shedding entry utterly.
Do you know? In 2014, the Mt. Gox collapse froze over 650,000 BTC, leaving 1000’s of holders unable to entry their cash. For a lot of, “hodling” wasn’t a selection; their Bitcoin was merely gone.
The fact for individuals who did maintain on
Historical past exhibits there are virtually no documented circumstances of the $1-to-Bitcoin-millionaire story by 2025. As an alternative, the next examples mirror the situations that occurred much more typically.
- Kristoffer Koch purchased round 5,000 BTC in 2009 for $26.60 and offered 1,000 BTC to purchase an condominium, years earlier than Bitcoin’s greatest rallies.
- Stefan Thomas misplaced entry to over 7,000 BTC ($400 million at present) on account of a forgotten password.
- The Winklevoss twins turned 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 gathered over 100,000 BTC by making massive purchases in 2011, not with spare change.
To chop a protracted story quick, Bitcoin fortunes weren’t made by an off-the-cuff buy-and-forget technique with mere pocket cash.
They got here from massive early stakes, strict safety practices, distinctive self-discipline and the uncommon potential to endure each parabolic rises and extreme crashes with out panic promoting.
That’s why the “time-travel millionaire” thought stays extra fantasy than actuality and why the quantity of people that have lived by means of Bitcoin’s full worth historical past whereas nonetheless holding their authentic stack is vanishingly small.