Asklemmy

In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.

I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.

I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.

But I “could have” if it wasn’t so hot out. ;)

I once got a reddit DM from a guy offering to be my sugar daddy. All I had to do was give up family, friends, hobbies, career, move in with him and have his babies. He assured me I would want for nothing. I turned him down, but I was just a simple "yes" away from being so wealthy and happy. He was also highly complimentary of my looks, despite never seeing even a photo of me, so I know he wasn't shallow.

Edit: ok, that's all a lie. I got like 6 DMs like this. And that's when I turned direct messaging off for my reddit account.

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked for a tiny li'l anti-virus software company that got acquired by one of the big boys, and everyone's performance-based options they were holding were suddenly worth a lot. Being hungry for career growth at the time, I'd left the company and forfeited those options. Less than 6 months later, they announced the sale of the company.

My options woulda been worth a few million at the time, maybe double that in today's money. Importantly, it would've set me up with a nice house, car, etc, without any debt, in my early 20s.

Not rich, but certainly comfortable.

I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00's. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea... but my boss thought I was nuts.

I'm not sure how much money I would have made, but it's got to be better than this!

Decided to OpenSource instead of Software Patent (as my employer was urging me). Nowadays, that technique is used in every decent Image CDN + compression tool. Still proud to see it everywhere. Maybe it wouldn't have made it if had been patented.

In 2009 I had 13k AMD shares at an average cost basis of $2.12.

I sold them in 2011 for ~$8/share.

Those shares are worth around $1.5M today.

I was ready to drop $2,000 on AMD stock when it was $3 a share. Someone talked me out of it.

While it wouldn't have made me "rich", I'd be much better off than I am now.

Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.

The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.

I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.

Not super rich, but we'd be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.

The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.

A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! "Holy shit," I said, "I made money on penny stocks!" I promptly sold all of it.

Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.

My parents are fairly rich but stingy and boomers. I recently stood up for my principles and my kids and I give myself 1:6 odds they’ll cut me from the will as the last surviving child.

I mined one Bitcoin back in college with my home computer. Now, I did sell it for a lot of money and I'm not complaining, don't misunderstand, but hoo boy. If I mined more? Goodness.

It took like a week or more to get. I was living in a bonus room with basically no air conditioning at the time, just an okay at best window unit. This was during the summer. My room got miserable lmao. And I couldn't use my computer for anything, especially not gaming. So when I finally got my payout and went to see how much it was worth it felt stupid to keep going. It was worth like 10 bucks at the time. Pretty much nowhere took them either. I think one of the few things you could buy was alpaca wool socks or something.

As an aside, I think the only thing I ever directly bought with them was a Windows 10 key from r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap that stopped working. I believe because the user sold it again to someone else. I think I got that for $20 which was a better bargain but long term that would've been like $200 at least because of how much more Bitcoin is worth. The insane volatility of it is stressful and I'm happy to not have any crypto "investments" today.

I don't know about rich, but my household would be much more well off had my biological mother not been a mentally unstable gold-digging asshole.

35 Bitcoins back when they were $3/coin.

I bought some camera equipment off of some short-lived Bitcoin eBay clone, and decided my credit card was easier.

Did a little bit of buying/selling since for a mild profit, before swearing off all Blockchain tech as useless.

I bought Bitcoin in highschool. Not much, though, because it was just a neat concept. There was no reason it would actually skyrocket in value (still isn't).

I had a teacher ask me for help investing in it, too. There was another guy in Canada at around the same time that turned that exact situation into a nice ponzi scheme.

My finger was hovering over the "buy" button for $10000 worth of Bitcoin when one Bitcoin cost $50.

I played the stock market game in grade school and noticed this one stock, BRKHA that was moving thousands of dollars daily (and was occasionally dipping into the hundreds). Considering the others would only move a fraction of a dollar daily it was a goal to get one share for the game. I did and ended up winning.

I should have tried to pressure my parents into at least one share. By the time I was 18 it would have been worth 70k, and these days it's up to.. Nearly 700k per share.

I would've likely sold it on my 18th birthday and been able to languish a bit longer than I did. All in all it wouldn't have been worth doing.

I bought 100 shares of Gamestop when it was $4 in November 2020 and sold at around $10

Not rich, but definitely more well off. As a one off thing, bought myself a scratch ticket and almost won somewhere around $20,000. Luck almost shined on me.