In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.

I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.

I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.

But I “could have” if it wasn’t so hot out. ;)

In 2009 I had 13k AMD shares at an average cost basis of $2.12.

I sold them in 2011 for ~$8/share.

Those shares are worth around $1.5M today.

Nearly 30 years ago ago, I worked for a tiny li’l anti-virus software company that got acquired by one of the big boys, and everyone’s performance-based options they were holding were suddenly worth a lot. Being hungry for career growth at the time, I’d left the company and forfeited those options. Less than 6 months later, they announced the sale of the company.

My options woulda been worth a few million at the time, maybe double that in today’s money. Importantly, it would’ve set me up with a nice house, car, etc, without any debt, in my early 20s.

Not rich, but certainly comfortable.

deleted by creator

Had the ability to buy in on Google right after they went public - passed on it

Had the ability to buy in on Apple in the mid 1990s -passed

Had the ability to buy bitcoin at $5 a coin, could have put in $5k at the time -passed

Had the ability to buy in on Amazon shortly after they went public -passed

Ebay -passed

Starting to see a trend?

I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00’s. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea… but my boss thought I was nuts.

I’m not sure how much money I would have made, but it’s got to be better than this!

I sold about $200 in Bitcoin I mined back in the early days, like 2009 and 10. Missed out on over $80 million.

Not super rich, but we’d be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.

The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.

A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! “Holy shit,” I said, “I made money on penny stocks!” I promptly sold all of it.

Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.

Decided to OpenSource instead of Software Patent (as my employer was urging me). Nowadays, that technique is used in every decent Image CDN + compression tool. Still proud to see it everywhere. Maybe it wouldn’t have made it if had been patented.

I was ready to drop $2,000 on AMD stock when it was $3 a share. Someone talked me out of it.

While it wouldn’t have made me “rich”, I’d be much better off than I am now.

I once got a reddit DM from a guy offering to be my sugar daddy. All I had to do was give up family, friends, hobbies, career, move in with him and have his babies. He assured me I would want for nothing. I turned him down, but I was just a simple “yes” away from being so wealthy and happy. He was also highly complimentary of my looks, despite never seeing even a photo of me, so I know he wasn’t shallow.

Edit: ok, that’s all a lie. I got like 6 DMs like this. And that’s when I turned direct messaging off for my reddit account.

Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.

The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.

I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.

I mined one Bitcoin back in college with my home computer. Now, I did sell it for a lot of money and I’m not complaining, don’t misunderstand, but hoo boy. If I mined more? Goodness.

It took like a week or more to get. I was living in a bonus room with basically no air conditioning at the time, just an okay at best window unit. This was during the summer. My room got miserable lmao. And I couldn’t use my computer for anything, especially not gaming. So when I finally got my payout and went to see how much it was worth it felt stupid to keep going. It was worth like 10 bucks at the time. Pretty much nowhere took them either. I think one of the few things you could buy was alpaca wool socks or something.

As an aside, I think the only thing I ever directly bought with them was a Windows 10 key from r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap that stopped working. I believe because the user sold it again to someone else. I think I got that for $20 which was a better bargain but long term that would’ve been like $200 at least because of how much more Bitcoin is worth. The insane volatility of it is stressful and I’m happy to not have any crypto “investments” today.

I don’t know about rich, but my household would be much more well off had my biological mother not been a mentally unstable gold-digging asshole.

One parent had a growing business when I was super young, they brought home well into the 6 figures. However two things happened 1: the internet started getting bigger so that started to hurt their business and 2: the 2008 housing crash happened and for a business that worked with banks on mortgages (I was too young to fully understand what the business did) it was fatal. Then we were dirt poor! The family never really recovered but after many years we did manage to get on our feet, then a parent died and shit went down hill again lmao.

I could’ve grown up a rich kid, instead I grew up with a family oats pot for meals. Though I’m probably a healthier grounded human for it.