I'm not sure if I told this story about Bitcoin before but I'll do it again as it's crazy.

First off James our programmer told me about Bitcoin I think it was back in 2014 or even 2013, suggested we look into it, mine it.  We actually talked about it at the time, Bitcoin was less than $100, kicking myself for not doing it. At the time I seriously looked at spending 10K on a killer computer to mine Bitcoins.  As you know Bitcoin can be mined by solving the algorithm. Every time you solve the algorithm you get a fraction of Bitcoin, however each time you solve the equation the algorithm gets exponentially more difficult to solve - which is what limits how many can be mined.  Back then anyone could build a gaming computer with high end graphics cards to mine the Bitcoins as the algorithm was still able to be solved at a rate that made it economically viable (as a side note GPU's work better for solving the algorithm an do CPU's, which is also true that GPU's are faster at running backtests for trading strategies rather than high end CPU's).  Today the algorithm is too complicated and not cost effective to min by traditional means.  

Anyway at the time Jame's roommate (let's call him Allen) built a gaming PC to mine Bitcoin and placed it in their basement, turned it on and left it run.  He actually forgot about it and checked on it a few years later, early this year he checked the computer and found that he had 50 Bitcoins!  That gaming PC had mined 50 Bitcoins.  Bitcoin at the time was trading for $5000, so he basically mined that out of thin air so to speak. 

The story even gets nuttier, he had the Bitcoins stored on a hard drive that he was using in another computer.  Of course he didn't sell any, I find that non-trader types will tend to hold forever - which can be good because us traders will sell things too early and rarely if ever catch 10 fold or 50 fold runs - we double or triple our money and we are happy - but the stock goes up 20 fold from there LOL.  It's good and bad because these non-trader folks who never sell are lucky enough to catch a huge parabolic move that a trader would miss - however if the bubble bursts they also end up riding it all the way down.

anyway back to the story of him storing the Bitcoins on a hard drive that he was using in a computer.  Bitcoin is digital and thus can be backed up and stored on multiple places such as other hard drives, USB Drives, etc.  Think about it, if any of you guys had 50 Bitcoins worth $250,000, you would have made backups and them stored on multiple places right?  He didn't...anyway the computer hard drive he had these stored on, he fried that drive one day when he was adding a new power supply!  He had no backup, his Bitcoin was gone!!!  

Well...the story has a Disney fairytale happy ending - he sent the hard drive into one of the best recovery services, and that company was able to salvage the bitcoins recover the data from the drive.  So Allen dodged a bullet.  Anyway I suggested that he sell at least 1/2 of them to lock in some gains - if he wanted to keep some fine but sell something!  He did sell some, LOL but then Bitcoin went to $6000 and he was bitching about it, could have sold higher. It's like dude - you are already crazy lucky mining the bitcoins from your basement with no effort, and catching the bubble etc, and you got lucky enough that the data recovery place was able to recover those off your deleted hard drive - be friggin happy!! stop bitching, count your blessings LOL.

anyway - crazy story