If you put $3,000 into bitcoin in early 2009 (EDIT: Actually, mid-2011), you'd have around $1M today.
There's not much sense losing sleep over that statistic though. Most of us had $3k and didn't do that. All you can do is keep your eyes open for the next opportunity, which may never come.
Sorry for being dumb. If someone wants to encash it to USD. Who's going to pay them? My knowledge in this subject is very minimal hence it sounds like the scene of Housing crisis.
There are many Bitcoin exchanges and "banks" where you can buy USD for Bitcoin from someone looking to buy Bitcoin. Currently, about $70 million per day - $billions per month - is exchanged for Bitcoin, so it's easy to get in or out of it.
> hence it sounds like the scene of Housing crisis.
If everyone wanted to sell BTC and no-one wanted to buy, it would crash just like anything else.
People hoping for the next 10x increase, people who want a tax-proof and mobile value store, people who need it for a transaction involving something illegal (e.g. paying off a ransomware operator), people who want it for a regular payment or money transfer.
It's up for anyone's guess how big each of those groups is relative to the others. Believers tend to assume that the last one is big, e.g. the "send money back to the home country" use case.
I also want to point out that even if you did put $3000 in, most people don't have the guts to hold that much for that long. I've heard countless stories of people selling when Bitcoin was only worth hundreds because they panicked.
I didn't panic, but I thought it was worthwhile to exit when BTC was at about $12. It paid for the down payment on my car. I kept some (and I'm still holding a fairly substantial amount) because I do believe that it will revolutionize a lot of things and will be worth a lot more in the long-term. It wasn't about "having the guts" or "panicking" as much as it was about "I have an opportunity here".
Sure. I even thought to myself for quite a long time how it would have been nice to hold onto it until it was worth $1100-1200 a few years ago. But then I would have started wishing I'd held out for the $3k price. And surely, I would have wished that I'd held out for the $5k, $10k, $50k, or more. And truly, that's why I'm still holding a fairly substantial amount. But the most important thing is that I am not frustrated or disappointed in how I've handled this frankly unexpected and astonishing source of wealth ("wealth" perhaps is a strong word here). Because of other circumstances in my life, I feel lucky to be alive. I do not have any regrets about exiting most of my Bitcoin position when it was worth $12. It helped me to provide for my wife and myself, and that's more than some people get in life, so I'm really happy with how it worked out.
I understand that part. I just don't see how they could sell any coins because the urge will always be, "It's still going up! I can't sell now." So it seems to me the wealth is more "on paper" than on selling and spending the proceeds. Like the bubble in the late-90s?
(Not that I'm arguing or worrying. I was just curious.)
Holding millions of dollars worth of coins yourself, rather than in a bank can become quite nerve wracking. Open your wallet on the wrong computer, or let someone untrustworthy to see where/how you hide your key, or how much you own, and you can wake up one day with all your funds gone.
I know there is the other side of that, that the government can seize your funds in a bank account, but realistically they won't target you out of millions of people who have millions in their name.
That's what hardware wallets, paper wallets, and safe deposit boxes are for. It doesn't take that much effort or technical skill to keep coins very secure, and the information on doing it well is readily available.
At some point you have enough money that it doesn't really matter. If you had $20k in Bitcoin you may be tempted just to keep holding. If you had $3mm, who really cares? Sell half or two thirds to diversify if you still believe it has room to grow or just drop it all into more traditional investments and take your interest and dividends for the rest of your life.
Looking at the activity on Bitstamp right now, I don't think selling a few thousand BTC even affects the price noticably. Someone just sold almost 30,000 BTC for within half a percent of the previous trade - which is basically just the bid/ask spread these days.
It's more insane than that: $1 invested in April 2010 would be worth $1 million today. 1000000x ROI. (First exchange was BitcoinMarket.com and opened then at $0.003/BTC).
There's not much sense losing sleep over that statistic though. Most of us had $3k and didn't do that. All you can do is keep your eyes open for the next opportunity, which may never come.