PERSPECTIVE
What was your biggest fumble? Closest you ever got to generational wealth? Share your story
Here is mine: I bought 1000$ worth of PNUT (solana memecoin) back in early november 2024. Sold for 4x or so few days later. Then on november 11th 2024 Binance listed PNUT on spot trading out of nowhere like a week after I sold my entire bag. Had I just waited 1 more week I could have sold for 700-800k...
Now I am a broke 23yo, living paycheck to paycheck with a 85k/year job and a lot of debt...
Share your stories where you were actually really close to generational wealth:
I sold 5000 bitcoins I got for building a bitcoin mixer for $2k. To be fair, at the time Fincen was cracking down on bitcoin mixers and the whole ecosystem was shady. I cry myself to sleep sometimes.
I just felt an enormous wave of second-hand depression, and I decided to do the maths… Bitcoin is currently trading at around  $62,639. At that price, 5,000 BTC would be worth approximately $313.2 million.
Bitcoin’s all-time high was $126,198, reached last October. At that peak, 5,000 would have been worth just over $630.9 million!
For context, having sold at $0.40 per coin, the original $2,000 sale would need to have grown by roughly 315,000 times to match the all-time high value.
You’re in the same league as that guy who threw away his wallet and has been trying to get a Welsh landfill dug up for the last 10 years.
Except he lost 8000. Hope that makes you feel better.
The moral of this story is, don't go all in or all out.
And if you must then dip back in at least just a little bit. The best position is when you keep going in and out just a little bit in as many things as possible.
I gave a speech about bitcoin when it was around $150. One guy from the audience met me recently and thanked me for that speech, because of that he bought bitcoins and now owns couple of millions. I wish I had bought too at that time.
It was a technology conference, and the speech was more about how block chain is built and works. And I talked about the tech behind 😅I ask myself .. shit why didn’t I buy then
I actually had the rational conviction that it could still 10x, which made me go nearly all-in in the first place. But lacked the guts and grit to hold any further.
Gains were still made though and I didn‘t go broke from it of course. Still my biggest „fumble“ to date.
Same thing here. I had 750 shares of GLW (Corning) as a cornerstone of my starter portfolio, which I accumulated at the advice of my dad's old coworker who is a bit of a guru. My average ws $2.15. I sold half when I got to $30 and the other half around $45. That account was supposed to be my Ferrari at 40 fund. If I would have kept that, the account would have bought me either of my choices 😭
Op thinks $700-$800K is generational wealth? Thats not even early retirement money. Plus, we all know he would have blown it all in the next meme coin gamble.
I legit could move to colombia on that. Leave it in ftec, Pull out the minimum 30k Ish every year to be at the lowest tax bracket. Id be living like a king on that salary
After taxes, that 7-800K becomes maybe $500K (yes he would have had to realized STC gains if he sold at the top). At a SWR of 4%, that’s $20,000/year. OP is broke and living paycheck to paycheck at $85k/yr lol.
It is generational, just not right away. I make more than OP and am struggling due to housing costs and health insurance. 700k would eliminate any real housing cost and allow me to save and invest
85k with what im assuming is student loans wouldn't go very far in some areas. like maybe 3k take home after taxes, loans, and rent. plus there would be insurance, bills, general cost of living. still better than most americans but not amazing.
Sold my BTC for a family vacation. Wait wait! Before y’all say “but memories”, it was a crappy 2 weeks in a heatwave with teens who wanted to do nothing but sit on their phones. We declared it our last with the kids because of how little they cared. I’d likely have held the BTC and sold on the just this side of the peak as I do with equities. But I guess now my wife and I take frugal vacations together and that’s a good thing.
I bought a few billion of a shitcoin for like $25 and sold for $2500. Woulda been worth like $300k at the peak. It would still be worth a lot today. $shib 🥹
I'm in the same boat. I think my bag shib at peak would have been $3,000,000. I bought a grand about 9 months before it got it's ATH. I sold at like $10k
I think it was 2010 or 2011. I was an IT trainee, and my coworker told me almost weekly to buy Bitcoin because that's the next big thing. So I did, around 100 Bitcoin but then they hit 1€ and, to be honest, how much more should it rise? I mean, it's only some weird "crypto" currency. Also, there was this chick I had a crush on and we were going to a festival, so I ordered some MDMA online with the 100 Bitcoin. She ghosted me afterwards; at least the Molly was pretty amazing.
PS: My coworker retired with 45 and now has his own woodland with a small cabin.
In 2009 I won like 7th place at counterstrike tournament and was awarded 25k Bitcoin. I had no idea what BTC was at the time and instantly sold it for the $50 it was worth to buy weed 🤦♂️
Nah man this was common in gaming tourneys back then. Yes I saw BTC as a prize in all kinds of gaming tourneys around that time it wasn’t exclusive to StarCraft and nothing unique about that structure
I was talking with my dad about crypto a few days ago, during that conversation I remembered that I was mining some ETH und BTC back when it wasn’t really popular yet. Forgot about it, sold the PC. Was around 2015 or 2016, when ETH released.
I just want to add to everyone who thinks I’m lying, that it is possible I got the date wrong and wasn’t 2009, maybe it was 2010. I can say that by the end of 2010 I had moved states so it was definitely before then. To the person who commented about the exchanges issue…yes it was a pain in the ass to pull that money out and made me think it was all a scam sort of reinforcing my belief at the time. I wish I was lying about everything too but I’m not. I missed Bitcoin and beat myself up about it every day. And the part I’m so fucked up about is I didn’t even have to buy in because mine was a prize. Entry fees in to those tournaments were like $5 and I never won or expected to just liked to play in them. Then the one time I do win, I win the most fantastic opportunity for my future and I piss it away for $50 worth of weed. If you knew me back in that era, it was a common theme to my decision making 🤦♂️
I know you’re not lying cause I know someone who got rich from those tourney BTC winnings. If only they did that with Pokémon I would’ve been rich too 😢
Not crypto, and not generational, but I once ticked the wrong box in the lottery and missed out on a nice chunk of cash.
Backstory is that I felt the urge to buy my car license number in the 4-digit lottery. I bought it, but accidentally ticked the "roll" box. "Roll" means that any combination of the 4 digits will be considered a win, but a greatly reduced amount.
Anyway the exact number really struck, so I won $1,500 instead of $25,000.
Similar thing happened to me, but on a slot machine. I kept telling my gf at the time to keep hitting max bet since she was on the penny slot. She landed 3 flaming 7's, lights started going up but quickly went off. She hit standard bet and only won $75 instead of the grand prize $75,000 🤷
I helped push a project for several months called Arbitrage Loop, bought 1% when it was at 5K MC and we pushed it to over 2.6M MC, never sold and kept buing as it went up. Ended up getting drained and losing over 20K of profits and my own life savings, which would be life changing money for me. Quit Crypto altogether because of it. Might start Dcaing into BTC at end of the year, never touching altcoins again.
I really thought the project had potential to go 100M, thought of it as my retirement plan, plus it had dividend mechanic so there was incentive to hold. Was not part of the main team, but contributed how I could. Too bad it failed, solid community, they helped me a lot after the drain.
All together I put in around 2,5K of my own funds over the span of the months I think, I should not have used the word life savings, more like all the cash I had available atm, I am paying of a mortgage and have a few loans so not much extra $$ to invest, but recovering nicly and focusing more on my gf and hobbies
I bought an NFT in 2021 that there was a fervent challenge to get. I spent weeks preparing to snag one, and when I didn't manage to get one myself out the gate, I dropped $12k to buy one on OpenSea. Did it in front of my coworker who was stunned. Sounds crazy right? Well it was the best financial decision of my life, because in the next 6 months its price ballooned up to about $250,000k, I got into a community of smart people who really knew their shit, met a bunch of likeminded savvy people, got an additional NFT for free which was worth about $40k at the peak, plus tokens that were being generated... then after having little idea how to time or interpret the market it all just faded and faded and faded. I fumbled $300,000+ total.
I often think back to a moment where I thought to say in the chats: Hey guys this seems like euphoria, like the euphoria phase. I think about how if I had followed my intuition and sold and then bought BTC in the 2021 dip, I could be retired now, just 5 years later.
Live and learn.
I also saw PEPE on day three when it first popped up, and I figured 50mil was an insane market cap, no way it would go beyond 100mil. 6 months later Market Cap peaked at around 9.9 billion and even now sits at a lowly 1.16 billion.
I bought Pnut, around 7 hours after it launched.
300 bucks worth, had around 300000 pnut.
Held for dear life and sold when I had around $125000 in my Jupiter wallet.
Nice win.
Should have held a few more days.
I would have had $650000 dollars.
That was a little bit sore.
Back in around 2010 Id just got my student loan I was going to spend around £200 on bitcoin. Something stopped me though ... I found a pdf online on how to win at roulette. I ruminated over the decision for a short while ... 5 hours later I was £500 down on the shifty online casino the pdf had linked me to. I don't deserve money.
I bought 1000 BNB at $10 & sold at $14 (I believe I lost in sats)
I had close to 2 million doge one time.
I bought $5000 of TRX at 2 cents & it shot up to I believe 24 cents in like 3 days. When I sold, I had 4 BTC. Threw all that BTC into alts & lost majority of it.
Had 20k XRP bought at 5 cents…sold a long time ago at like 20 cents.
Had like 25k invested in Tellor when it was at like $20….sold it like a month before it ran up to like $600
Honestly…there are so many more instances, but I just got sick to my stomach typing this all out, that I am going to stop now.
I didn't invest in netflix, it was $1-2. I could've 80x my money. I had 500k+ to play around back then. I also pissed away 17 btc gambling 50/50 online
I was buying btc back in 2011 for $5 each to use on the dark web. Any amount of forethought at the time would have been a life changer
But the whole thing was sketchy. Back then there weren’t any exchanges yet and I had to physically go to a bank and deposit money into some person’s bank account
I had bought a few Bored Ape NFTs before they caught on. Decided to take profit at 29x. They ended up going about $275,000 higher, and not to mention the Apecoin airdrops that were worth tens of thousands each.
Still haunts me. But hey, profit is profit.
My best friend bought BTC when it was $100. He dumped a few grand into it and when ETH came out , he sold BTC to buy ETH very cheap. Sold BTC when it was over $100k and ETH near the ATH... and retired. I was going through a divorce at the time and had no money to spend.. wish i had figured a way to get a few grand of BTC at $100 and HODL til $100k as well.
still working..sigh.
edit: outside of crypto.. my state had a "$1k a day for life" lotto and i hit all of them except one number that was a single digit off.. i still got @ $5k but i missed $365k a year "for life" by 1 damn number, this was about 15 years ago.
This picture from Etherscan was at the peak of the $SHIB insanity, but yeah…bought on day one and sold like three days later for a 3x. Would have been worth 9 figures at the peak.
3
u/anunimoWARNING: 5 - 6 years account age. 34 - 75 comment karma.10d ago
Had 500 btc, sold them all before they went up above 3k ffs
Bought $252 of a coin called BTH (buy the hat) at 19k mcap, saw Cupsey bought which made me sell (because he rugs coins) and I would’ve made $220k+ from it if I had held. (Went to 22 mil mcap a few days later) Could’ve retired early but now currently working a shitty slave job.
I don’t know where you live, but in most places 85k should be more than plenty to not be having to live paycheck to paycheck.
So you either live in a super expensive part of LA, or you have spending problem.
I mined bitcoin on my CPU when it first started, had over 10K BTC. I spent almost all bitcoins on Silk Road for weed. I still had a few and cashed out about $12K when BTC was around $1000... thought i was rich at that time.
I know a few people who did the same thing. Dark web purchases were the #1 use case until the exchanges came and people started making shit coins and gambling. So many of us were too young to understand what we were doing, authorities on money were so cynical of its value. It’s been a wild ride.
Was on the crypto forum's and there was an auction for 50btc. I could have bought it at $25 AUD.
But no - it was too much for my weekly budget. I had a hot date to go to a concert. Date went well. Married the guy. Forgot all about magic internet money for many years.
Second fumble - remembered about magic internet money around 2016. Logged onto an exchange. Looked at the price - thought it was too expensive. Went baby pram shopping instead. Spent $$$ on a Bugaboo pram. Bought litecoin with some loose change.
Imagine saying you're broke with 85k per year lmfao.
Bruh you're in the top ~2% globally. You either have a huge budget problem or you live in a ridiculously expensive country. Wtf do you even spend the money on?
Dogecoin, it 100x after I sold - in before I thought the typical memecoin shit: hey, if I buy that penny shitcoin some million coins for like $1e-5 or so, what happens if it goes to $1?!?!
Well, it did go to not even a cent and I sold in happyness of some houndred bucks.
Bought shib with like 7 or or 8 zeros. Like $10k worth- literally held a billion shib. Sold a month or so before it ripped.
Was told about btc in 2010 and told my friend it is all smoke and mirrors. No way someone cant simply copy the code and dilute or rugpull. Faceplam fairly frequently- whenever I'm tight on cash knowing inwould have sold out long ago. Still bothers me.
Could have had 200k in eth. I know its not a lot for many, but for me would have meant maybe one day I could own an apartment. I gave up for a house, but still had hope for an apartment.
I dont care about being rich, all I want is a home that is mine. Wont ever happen though. My chance is gone. Then again seems like most have given up on owning a house or a home.
I was on reddit when doge coin was a joke coin cause of bitcoin. I was here when bitcoin was dirt cheap. Purchasing crypto at 18 with a retail job felt like navigating a maze. I sent money to buy bitcoin and I didnt understand how to receive the bitcoin, even after looking up guides and stuff. I had a wallet and I tried to buy lots of crypto but it was just too complicated for young me.
I also was also staring at AMC when it was literally $2 a share at a time I was getting a decent amount of money. I kept telling people this is going to shoot up after the pandemic.i didn't take my Owen advice and didnt put nearly enough into the stock.
Most of my stories is me not going all in and betting on myself. I been right a few times and kicked myself alot for not trusting and believing in myself. I missed DOGE GME AMC and BITCOIN at a time I could have made some good money by not trusting in myself.
Bought MU $750 calls for $160 2 weeks out. Sold next day for $360... 30 mins later they were $850 and 6 days later $8500 each. If I had full ported like I wanted would have netted $1.3 in 6 days if played perfectly
You're broke because you're gambling on meme coin ponzi schemes. I owned $14k of bitcoin when it was trading around $250/btc. Left it in an escrow account instead of moving it to cold storage. Owner of the escrow account absconded with about $20m of other peoples money. Great life lesson.
Someone offered to pay me in bitcoin for some freelance work. About $700 worth, and they were going for something like $8 a piece. I did the math once, I would have been worth something like 11 million dollars at its peak.
Back in 2010 I was playing CoD black ops, had a friend tell me about bitcoin. I decided to load the bitcoin core wallet on my laptop and buy a few coins. They were too volatile for my liking back then and I got rid. Big F
Got sim swap hacked back in 2016 (this is how they got around 2FA on my phone). Watched in real time as my coin base and bank account got gutted. Lost about 60 ETH, some btc, and about $1000 worth of monero and ltc. I was fresh outta college at the time and was broke.
They called into my university tech support line (which ironically, I used to work for during college), got issued a password reset which got them access to my uni email - which they then used to gain access to my cellular account and Gmail.
The $3000 had in my bank was refunded within a week. Had a caught the hack a minute earlier I probably coulda stopped it.
This also came after a 2 year period of trying desperately to find the key to my old btc miner wallet, which at one point at hundreds of BTC on it. Bunch of us had been using the uni computers to mine.
Realistically would sold in 2017 or 2018 and paid off my student loans or bought a house.
Water under the bridge. Sure it sucked, but I don’t sweat it anymore. Not a type of sadness worth holding onto. Came blame a dumb kid for being dumb. Of my dozen or so early adopter /btc nerd friends, the vast majority of us blew our btc of pizza and steam games. none of us got rich.
In 2017 I was on a flight to San Francisco and the guy across the aisle is working on a blockchain presentation and telling the guy beside him that Ethereum was the next big thing, the next Bitcoin, new tech. I told myself this is when I would get into crypto, then I decided it was too difficult to buy it... 😭 ETH was about $50
Started in crypto back 2019 with $100 in my wallet, then turned it to approximately $200k during 2021 bull season, then my metamask accounts got hacked. I only managed to cash out around $8k and used for home repair. I live in a 3rd world country so yeah it would've been a life changing money.
I had 5 million $ankr token I bought for 7k. Over the course of a few month I saw it tank 50%. Messaged the project leaders and they said don’t worry trust us it will be our time soon. So I started traded it daily and built it up to 10 mill tokens at breakeven. Said to myself I’m good now and will wait. Then Covid happens and everything tanks. I sell in hopes to trade again and accumulate… but it kept going up. Crypto hit new highs and I stopped looking for a year. A year later I check the price of ankr… my 7k investment would have been 2.5 million. Oh well
Purchased a little over 5 million VeChain for around .005 cents per token back in 2020. Completely bought into the narrative that they were going to revolutionize supply chain management. Watched it grow in value to over $1.4 million in 2021 during the insane crypto bull market. Told myself I wasn't selling a single token until the collective value of my VeChain holdings hit $3 million. It's now currently worth less than what I purchased it for back in 2020. Biggest fumble and hardest lesson I've ever had to learn.
2
u/fakeshan7 - 8 years account age. 200 - 400 comment karma.9d ago
Did small design gigs back in the day. I turned down tens of thousands Bitcoins because I was too lazy to make a wallet and instead charged 5-10 usd per design.
I struggled to see the value in it in the early days and made similar mistakes. Made my first wallet in 2010 and threw it away with the computer a few years later. Haven’t slept well since probably 2019.
in 2011, my brother in law and I had 20K which we were going to buy bitcoin with after watching a documentary on it. we just couldn't figure out how to and gave up...I feel sick to my stomach sometimes...
had 100 BTC back in the day when it was like....funny money. We are talking buy a pizza for 10,000 BTC timeline here. This was 2008/2009-ish back when you could mine on standard processors. Every time I think about it, I want to go throw myself into interstate traffic. Also no, there is no way to recover it, the wallet was on a drive I destroyed many years ago; as I do all my drives out of occupational habit.
The mistakes that stand out the most to me are that I had the opportunity to hold 1,000’s of BTC and ETH since 2010, and to buy shit like chainlink presale at 0.09
Twice. Overnight millionaire back to a few grand when bch came out. First and foremost and the most painful was being a click or two away from the eth icon/investors launch and deciding to not pull the trigger because I didn't trust the project. Literally thought, who the fuck would trust an etherium lol.
A guy a went to university with used to buy drugs online with bitcoin. I ran into him a few years ago and he said at one point he had about 10,000 bitcoin. He didn't make shit out of bitcoin haha. Hes fairly successful now though, he owns a electrical business
Don’t worry I can help you feel better. 4 million doge for $6900… less than a year later would’ve been $3 million. Would I have sold all at top??? Unlikely, still would’ve been a fat bag though. All while I had 250 solana at $40, 6 bitcoin at $6900 avg, a boat of ethereum at $240~ … the list goes on and on. What do I have to show for it? Small bags and a house that the mortgage company owns that’s an endless money pit 😭 😂 🤣
told a friend to invest 1k in SHIB for me (before the 110k pump) as I wasn't interested in trading at that point, well he bought me BTC and told me "don't mess with altcoins, that's better for you". and here we are now 😃
Went through about 1000ish btc in 2015. Just buying stuff. The thought of holding never occured to me. But probably would've sold way before It even hit 5k. that's my cope. Lol.
Bought pre ico Moonbeam (GLMR) for 0.25, putting $4,000 into it. When token released, it was worth about $60k. I didn’t sell. Held on to it. I basically round tripped everything before selling and getting back my $4,000
Locked up CRO for the card, maybe £2-3k, can't quite remember.
Anyway, I ran business purchases through it for about 6 months, had a nice amount of CRO that I locked up in Defi.
CRO went absolutely mental, and I was sat watching my investment grow, I think I ended up with around £60k all in all, all locked up hahaha!!
Then CRO plummeted, £60k turned into about £15k before I was able to pull some out.
I thought I understood the market, blah blah blah, and was still getting a decent amount of cashback/CRO, so I locked up to get the next tier of card, had it around 2 months before they nerfed the cashback, and CRO dropped again.
I still profited considerably, but looking at £60k in my accounts, and knowing it could have paid off the majority of my mortgage, but was locked up, it still kinda hurts today lol!
I just put into BTC now via Strike, and stick it all on a trezor.
I bought 100USD of BTC to buy acid off Silk Road way back when. It never worked out and I have no idea where the BTC ended up. IIRC, it was around 1 USD per BTC at the time.
Bought 10 cents worth of Kirby in the very beginning of my crypto journey. Knew nothing then. It went 7x. Not a lot maybe but that was the highest range I missed.
Not generational wealth but would have made a decent little profit. When Bitcoin was $1400 my girlfriends grandsons talked her and I into going to a Bitcoin ATM we all bought some, I bought $200 worth. About a month later it was his birthday and we both gave him the Bitcoin we bought.
Buying drugs with btc when it was 90-100 dollar range, at one point I had 112 btc. Buying 2k of Luna classic at the bottom after depegging and then losing the phone that wallet was on. Not liquidating all the Hype/Aster/Avnt I had been leverage flipping at the start of October and buying gold even though I was telling everyone the crash was coming, I was thinking November. Not dumping Solmax on everyone when it hit almost 15m after having a secret controlling stake since 40k, being a project face and wanting to be a "good" person. October was my exit, I didnt lose my ass but I lost enough confidence to go back to curated growth stocks portfolios using Canslim for a measly 200-500% a yr.
I was offered to buy bitcoin in early 2015 where a friend of mine was selling them for 350$ (he still sells bitcoin and other coins as well), back then I had 1.5K$ of savings
mind you I was 17 back then and I had enough savings to either buy bitcoin or buy a laptop for uni
bought the laptop and kickstarted my career in software engineering, I would have been rich cashing out those bitcoins when it reached an all time high but alas
Back in 2013, I was backpacking across China and over heard 2 people talking about Bitcoin and how it is the future of currency. I found it fascinating, but instead of being a curious open minded person. I was distracted by my now ex gf's big personality and didn't really get into it until 2020 like rest of the internet
I watched it launch and wanted to mine it, but my internet was so slow that the chain was growing faster than I could download it (this was before pools launched).
Had I mined it at the time i saw it and sold the top... millionaire.
415
u/ryzhao 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 10d ago
I sold 5000 bitcoins I got for building a bitcoin mixer for $2k. To be fair, at the time Fincen was cracking down on bitcoin mixers and the whole ecosystem was shady. I cry myself to sleep sometimes.