I often have flashbacks to that one tweet I saw many many years ago saying „Bitcoin reaches USD parity“. I was considering investing a thousand bucks at that time, just for fun.
I would be 37 million dollars rich today!
Who am I kidding.
What would have actually happened is I would have sold everything once my money doubled to 2 USD/BTC, and then panicked seeing it rise and rise, bought in again right before a crash and sold everything with a huge loss.
So realistically, you should take what the Bitcoins you lost were worth at that time, and multiply it 2-3 times if you‘re lucky, and that‘s it.
Most of the stories of people getting rich with bitcoin are:
- people invested in the ecosystem, eg creators of exchanges etc
- true believers (rare)
- celebrities like the Winklevosses who actively invested large amounts of money with some kind of plan
- people who forgot a harddrive from 2010 with 100 bitcoins and found it again in 2018. (or like MtGox, where they were stuck in liquidation for so long that the assets are worth billions now)
If you‘re not in one of those groups, I think you realistically do not need to worry about having lost anything more than a few single digit multiples of your Bitcoins worth in dollars back then.