Bitcoin’s incredible success story over the past decade has made several early investors, who sold their bitcoins then, regret their decisions terribly.
HODLing Bitcoin is one of the most difficult investment decisions to make and perhaps it will be easier for bitcoin holders to put their emotions in cold storage to avoid regrets.
A freelance journalist, Timothy Lee, has recently recounted his experience of selling 56 BTC earlier in 2013 for the paltry sum of $112 each just to keep his job at the Washington Post.
At bitcoin’s current price of above $37,000, according to live data from CoinMarketCap, those 56 BTC would have been worth more than $2 million today.
The Full Story
In February 2012, when bitcoin was still a relatively new concept, Lee had purchased a total of 108 BTC for $700 at an average price of around $6.50.
Since cryptocurrency exchanges were not in existence then, buying the bitcoins and keeping them safe was a very big challenge to Lee.
He transferred the BTC to paper wallets, which consisted of eight bitcoins per page in addition to the wallets’ private key to enable him to access the coins.
In April 2013, bitcoin’s price rose to over $200 and subsequently crashed. During that time, Lee said that he sold 53 bitcoins in his portfolio for $4,700.
Lee decided to hold onto the remaining 56 coins with the belief that Bitcoin will recover from the crash. However, he got bittersweet news in May.
He was offered a job by the Washington Post to write about bitcoin. Before working for the Washington Post, Lee had worked with Forbes and few other news agencies that allowed him to keep his bitcoins under the condition that he would let his readers know about it.
However, that was not the case with the Washington Post. The media outlet had strict work ethics that required him to liquidate his BTC holdings to avoid a conflict of interests.
Therefore, he sold the remaining 56 bitcoins for a meager sum of $112. Although Lee admitted that he might not have held the entire bitcoins up to this day, he said he would have had a fair amount of it.
In conclusion, Lee reiterated that he has no intentions of buying bitcoin as it conflicts with his work ethics, adding that bitcoin is no longer that big of a deal as it was earlier in its history.
“I’m not planning to buy more bitcoins. It’s ethically dicey, but also it doesn’t seem like a great deal anymore. Bitcoin’s price might go up more, but I don’t think there’s room for the big gains we saw over the last decade.”
HODL Bitcoin? Why Not!
While Lee failed to keep his bitcoin holdings, another early bitcoin investor took HODLing to the next level, perhaps taking the advice to lock up emotions in cold storage too seriously.
Just a few days ago, a bitcoin address with $1,894 worth of BTC that has been dormant for over 9 years awoke to a huge balance of over $11 million.
