Featured Image Credit: Dan Kitwood/Yaroslav Kushta/Getty Images
Bitcoin hit £60,000 for the first time in over two years.
'The price surge comes after a week of consolidation which may have to be down to a slow-down in the amount of bitcoin being bought by the spot ETFs versus prior weeks,' said Simon Peters, crypto analyst at financial services company eToro.
So, if you started investing in Bitcoin when it first emerged, how much would you have today?
Well, to start, Bitcoin was originally worth next to nothing.
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The transaction took place on PayPal, which is a far cry from today's method of buying and selling crypto exchanges.
The value of BTC started slow in its early years.
Bitcoin wasn’t even worth a dollar until February 2011, yet its pricing data on Google Finance only dates back to 2015, according to reports.
Alex Preda, a professor of professions, markets, and technology at King’s Business School in London, said: 'There was no action to speak of and no news cycle. Bitcoin was a fringe phenomenon confined to a subculture of software engineering and not a financial phenomenon.'
The first notable real-world transaction occurred in May 2010 on a Bitcoin platform when Florida native Laszlo Hanyecz asked whether someone would order him two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins. At the time, Bitcoin was valued at $41.
Today, those pizzas would be worth nearly $250 million - talk about expensive pizza!
If you had entered the cryptocurrency game when Bitcoin was just 10 cents in October 2010, investing $100 means you could have bought 1,000 bitcoins.
As of its record-high price market value, those 1,000 bitcoins would now be worth over $48 million, assuming you held onto them without trading or selling.
As of February 2024, BTC hit the level of $50,107 for the first time since December 2021 with a market capitalisation of $982.72 billion.
'It’s the best-performing asset of the last decade for sure,' added Daniel Polotsky, CEO of CoinFlip, one of the largest bitcoin ATM companies in the US.
The problem is that people who have held onto their Bitcoin currency for that long have also had their share of issues.
Some encountered technical issues logging into their accounts, while others forgot their passwords, which is more serious as you can be permanently locked out of your account.
Whereas, some individuals mistakenly discarded hardware that contained valuable Bitcoin holdings.
