We have all heard stories of bitcoin-laden hardware buried in landfill, bitcoin pizzas which would have been worth millions today and other missed opportunities.
Singer Lily Allen apparently missed out on one such opportunity a few years ago.
Allen told the Telegraph that she could have earned more than £6m had she accepted a live gig on Second Life five years ago. She was offered “hundreds of thousands” of bitcoins for the gig and she turned it down.
“As if, I said.”
In Allen’s defence, it’s hard to blame her for saying no. Most people are wary of bitcoin even today, when many mainstream businesses are starting to accept it.
Five years ago bitcoin was just a curiosity, relegated to experimental uses and payments for virtual goods in online games.
Missed opportunities
Allen is not alone. Last year it emerged that a 32-year-old New Yorker paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas from Papa John’s in 2010. Additionally, a British IT specialist accidentally binned a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, which are now resting in somewhere in a Newport landfill.
Both incidents garnered a lot of publicity, but we can safely say that many people away from the media have regrets of their own – they just prefer not to talk about them.
We are, of course, talking about people who frequented online drug bazaars like Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace. They probably thought there were getting a good deal at the time, but in retrospect they were actually exchanging thousands of bitcoins for a cheap high.
We can only wonder how many traffickers made a handsome profit, provided they held on to some of their bitcoins, or if they were unable to access them because they were behind bars.
Who knows. Maybe there are a few crypto-millionaires serving lengthy prison sentences and planning how they will spend their bitcoin fortune once they get out.
Image Credit: Music Like Dirt / Flickr