Guy paid 10K in Bitcoins for Pizza back in 2010.
41 bucks back then, would be worth $7.23 million today.
2009 January 3
Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT January 9 Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the
cryptography mailing list January 12 First Bitcoin transaction,
in block 170 - from
Satoshi to Hal Finney
[2]. October 5
Exchange rates published by New Liberty Standard. $1 = 1,309.03 BTC (and theymos thought NLS was overcharging[3])
At it's peak, $1 invested at that time would be worth over $1.5M.
Also, there weren't too many people selling them at these rates. The early participants pretty much mined/horded about 4 million of these in the first year and there were virtually no transactions. Even when the pizza guy stuff was happening there really weren't all that many of them being traded. The slashdot mention that kicked them up to about .06 - .08 caused there to start to be some more, but even then you're talking a pretty low volume of these moving considering there were like 6 million "in circulation". The average transactions per block was still almost 0. Eventually someone started pumping up the value and they got a gigantic boost when the slashdot "bitcoin reaches parity with US dollar" article happened. Then the arms race kicked off. And everything was great until enough money got into them and there was incentive to launch attacks that the technology / economy weren't prepared to handle.
Then after the original bubble / pop there were people with some money that were actively working to keep this from sliding. I saw one thread in late November of 2011 on the forums there were someone had essentially set up a trade wall at $2.90, then when the price jumped a bit they moved their trade wall to $2.98 and on and on. So they just slowly waited to build back some confidence, make sure miners were profiting slightly off of them, now with a decent place to build a bubble for some real money off of. With a dedicated community crying about how undervalued the currency that would replace all currencies was at the time.
Really well done.
If it could grow slowly there's something here. But every time one of these bubbles happens there becomes big incentive for attacks both technologically and economically that the technology and market just aren't quite ready to handle.
Which is why the gains from this "currency" are distributed like this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51011.0
Yeah, you wonder why when you look at the sourceforge download history:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/timeline?dates=2008-12-12+to+2013-12-18
There were only 50 downloads a month happening in 2009, most of them probably from the guys developing the code. Those were the guys that got almost all of the coins. The 2010 slashdot mention got them a little bit, but the experienced professionals probably still got the bulk of the coins there.
I can't find it right now but the launch of this thing also included an "interesting thought exercise" which talked about the world wealth being 21 trillion. So if these replaced all currencies they could be worth 1 million since there's only 21 million of them. It was on Slashdot over the weekend somewhere, but now I can't find it. Now in their defense, they did release this open source so anyone could have gotten involved in the hording. But it's pretty clear what the intentions were here, it's not like they were sending out a bunch of press releases, there was just a small discussion on the cryptography mailing list.
They were also clear it was a beta in one of the mailings I found, and that everyone could have their currency wiped out and started over at some point. But of couse that never happened when real money got involved.