Since its launch in 2009 Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) has quickly become one of the best performing investments of all time. Even small initial investments have turned into millions of dollars. But what if you had bought just $20 worth of Bitcoin 15 years ago? Would that have been enough to make you a millionaire today? The answer may surprise you.
About 15 years ago, Bitcoin first began trading in hands, mostly through manual trades via online forums. At the time, a single Bitcoin was valued at just $0.00099! Online exchanges were not launched until 2010, when the lowest price was recorded at $0.04865 on July 14, 2010.
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If you had bought $20 worth of Bitcoins on an online forum in 2009, you could have potentially bought more than 20,000 Bitcoins. Considering a single Bitcoin is worth around $70,000 today, your $20 purchase would have turned into an astonishing $1.4 billion!
But let’s say you waited another year for Bitcoins to start trading on exchanges, making it easier for you to acquire your stake. Buying $20 worth of Bitcoins at around $0.05 per coin would have resulted in a stake of around 400 Bitcoins. In this case, your $20 purchase would now be worth about $28 million – still an incredible return, but not nearly enough to make you a billionaire.
While these incredible returns are likely a thing of the past, there are still plenty of reasons to invest in Bitcoin today. Bitcoin’s market cap of $1.5 trillion still pales in comparison to gold’s market cap of nearly $19 trillion. Furthermore, huge sums of money are being poured into the cryptocurrency space to build out new infrastructure, networks and services – similar to the early days of the internet.
Where the price of Bitcoin will end up in the long term remains anyone’s guess. But there is no doubt that the original cryptocurrency has been incredibly profitable for long-term investors with a very patient mindset.
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