I am sure you've heard the stories before about people that had Bitcoins when they were worth only a few cents and either sold them for a pizza or lost their USB drive which had their wallet file!
Many people have a story about what could have been. I thought i'd share mine....
The year was 2009 and I was in my mid-twenties and working in IT. I'd started my IT career around the year 2000 and after moving across various fields I ended up in a Desktop and Server Support role in a educational college. I had several classrooms worth of PCs that I looked after as well as an office full of various PCs and servers running work related apps but some personal stuff too. I had a couple of side projects which I worked on at the time and my job, being a Government job and fairly cruisey I could really do as I pleased.
I always had an interest in distributed computing like Seti@Home and at times, run multiple PCs to increase my score and work my way up the world rankings. I think i was ranked in the top 100 for Australia at one point which I thought was pretty good!
Anyway, half of my day was spent surfing the web and one of my standard 'go-to' forums is the Whirlpool Forums which is an Australian computers and technology style forum. Many hours were spent discussing various topics back in the day, from gaming, to PC hardware to the climate change debate. This was when many people were still debating whether climate change was real! A bit like Trump and the Republicans in the US where many are still denying it!
One thread I noticed many times was a topic that read something like this "New PayPal replacement called Bitcoin"...I cant remember the exact topic title but it was similar to that.
I looked the title most days as it seemed to be a topic with people commenting however it didn't really interest me as I wasn't a big fan of PayPal and figured if another PayPal service came along it was be much the same. So I ignored it for a few weeks.
It kept popping up regularly so I thought i'd click on it and check it out, after skimming through a few pages of banter between nerds the thread didn't really make much sense to me. I never recall seeing words like "mining" or "only 21,000,000" etc. It was mostly just nerds talking nerdy stuff and that was it.
Had I read just a few more pages or even Googled "bitcoin" this is what I would have discovered. That Bitcoins were 'mined' using a PC and that there was only a certain amount of Bitcoins ever to be produced. I would have also discovered that although they were pretty much worthless back then, they did hold some value for trading if you had enough of them.
Being the Seti@Home sort of person I was, and being one to always be on the lookout of ways to earn free money I have no doubt in my mind that I would have started to get the 3 or 4 PCs and servers running in my office chugging away 24x7 mining Bitcoin. I would have also got to work setting up entire classrooms doing the same thing which is exactly what I used to do in the summer holidays when things were quiet at the college. I'd configure 20 or 30 PCs to Seti for a couple of months straight.
I can only imagine how many thousands of Bitcoins I would have earnt back when almost nobody knew about it and the mining difficulty was so low you could run a old Intel Celeron CPU on it!
Coulda - shoulda - woulda...nothing I can do about it now. Atleast I've learnt my lesson with some of the other alt coins which i've held onto when they were worth only a % of what they are today. I'm no millionaire but if crypto doubles or triples again i'll be getting close!