Would you play the lottery with the winning numbers, place a bet on a legendary sports upset, invest in companies like Apple before they took off or maybe do all three?
Well, one student unknowingly did something pretty close to that when he put just $27 into Bitcoin and forgot about it, only to discover years later that it had massively paid off.
Bitcoin has created a bunch of millionaires and billionaires by now. And while this particular student didn’t end up rolling in millions, the return on his tiny investment is still jaw-dropping.
Back in 2009, Kristoffer Koch put about 150 Norwegian kroner which was around $26.60 at the time into Bitcoin, long before most people had even heard of it.
Fast forward just four years, and Koch realized that tiny investment had ballooned into $886,000. He didn’t waste time and used the money to buy an apartment in Oslo. What’s even wilder is that he had forgotten the password to his digital wallet. When he finally remembered it and logged in, he was stunned by the number staring back at him.
Back in April 2013, Bitcoin hit a high of $266 before dropping all the way down to around $50. That huge drop came after authorities seized the Silk Road, an online black market. But Bitcoin being Bitcoin, it quickly rebounded, with prices spiking up by $30 in just one day.
People on Reddit were blown away when they came across his story. Plenty of folks were left wishing they had made the same move back when Bitcoin was still under the radar.
One Redditor put it perfectly: “5000 BTC Holy Moly for 27 Dollar It’s now a half billion this is mindblowing.”
And another user summed it up by saying: “Buying an apartment in Oslo in 2013 was probably not a bad investment either. Even if BTC far outperformed it.”
Bitcoin is still around, and lots of people are still getting into it. But with prices climbing so high, stories like Koch’s are becoming a lot harder to come by these days.