As a general rule of thumb, investing consistently in the stock market (in a diversified manner) has been the best way to create massive wealth. However, for a lucky (or very smart) few, an early investment in the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has seen them generate some serious returns.
The stories of people who’ve seen their net worth explode from an early Bitcoin (BTC) investment certainly aren’t hard to find – they’re plastered all over the internet: driving crypto-related FOMO to new all-time-highs.
In fact, Bitcoin is now officially the best-performing investment choice of the past decade, eclipsing all other high growth assets by a factor of well over 1000%.
So, how much money would you have today if you’d invested just $10 US Dollars ($14 AUD) in Bitcoin when it first hit the market?
Hint… it’s a lot.
Here’s how much $10 worth of day-one Bitcoin is worth now
Bitcoin first became available for public purchase in July 2010 at a price of $0.0008 USD ($0.0011 AUD) per Bitcoin. That’s right, you could pick up a whole Bitcoin for just less than one-tenth of a cent. Now, if we exclude any transaction fees, a measly $10 investment on its day one would have bagged you a grand total of 12,500 Bitcoin.
As of 3pm on Wednesday the 4th of May – the current time of writing – a single Bitcoin was trading for $38,276 USD ($53,792 AUD). That $10 investment held for roughly 11 years and 10 months has gained 4,784,500,000% and would now be worth $478,045,000 ($672,786,191 AUD).
That’s right, if you’d thrown just $10 into Bitcoin on day one (and you still somehow didn’t sell it) you’d be sitting on a nearly half-a-billion dollar fortune.
Now, if you were a real risk-taker and you’d decided to invest $1000 on day one – provided you had the hardest “diamond hands” of all time — you’d be the 26th richest person in the world, flexing a casual $47.8 billion ($67.3 billion AUD) net-worth, ranked just behind Chinese tech billionaire Zhang Yiming.
What’s even more incredible is, if you’d sold your initial $1000 worth of Bitcoin when it reached its all-time high of $69,044 ($97,114 AUD) on November 10 last year, you would have been worth $86.3 billion ($121.5 billion AUD) officially securing your place as the 11th richest person in the world.
$10 can go a long way (if you forget about it)
While it’s always nice to imagine ourselves – with the benefit of hindsight – as being just an unlucky potential billionaire, Bitcoin’s rise was not obvious. In fact, its meteoric growth was completely unpredictable, except to a very select few.
It’s also worth noting that there’s literally no way any regular person wouldn’t have sold their Bitcoin when it was up an already insane 100,000% in 2016. The only way most people would have seen those exponential returns is if they’d completely forgotten about it altogether, only to remember it years later.
With all of this in mind, it might not be the worst investment strategy to occasionally throw a casual 10 bucks at the next crazy new technology you hear about and then close your eyes and forget you ever did it.
There are bound to be assets similar to this that crop up in the future, so who knows where you might end up?
DISCLAIMER: The information in this article is intended to be general in nature and is not personal financial product advice. It does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs.
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