Imagine it is July 2010. You are scrolling through a tech forum called Slashdot or maybe stumbling across a weird corner of the internet known as Bitcointalk. You see a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto talking about "electronic cash" that doesn't need a bank. It sounds like nerd magic. You decide to throw some pocket change at it. Back then, Bitcoin wasn't even worth a nickel for most of the year. If you had decided if I bought 100 bitcoin in 2010, you would have spent roughly $5. Maybe $10 if you timed it poorly.
Today? That $10 is worth about $10.3 million.
It's a staggering number. It’s the kind of ROI that makes your stomach drop. But here’s the thing—almost nobody who bought back then actually held on. The "diamond hands" we talk about today didn't exist in 2010 because there was no guarantee Bitcoin was even going to survive the week. It was a hobbyist experiment. If you had 100 BTC on a hard drive in 2010, you weren't an investor. You were a tinkerer.
The actual price of Bitcoin in 2010
Most people look at a historical chart and see a flat line near zero. But that's not the whole story. At the start of 2010, Bitcoin had no exchange rate. It was literally worthless. You couldn't just open an app like Coinbase and swipe your credit card. You had to find someone on a forum, send them money via PayPal, and hope they sent you the private keys.
Everything changed in July 2010 when the Mt. Gox exchange launched. Suddenly, there was a price. On July 17, 2010, the price was $0.05 per coin. Later that summer, it jumped to $0.08. By the time November rolled around, it hit $0.20.
If you bought 100 Bitcoin at the July low of $0.05, your total investment was $5.00. That is less than a Starbucks latte costs in 2026.
Think about the psychology of that for a second. You spend $5. A few months later, Bitcoin hits $0.50. Your $5 is now $50. You’ve made a 10x return. Most sane humans would sell. "Hey, I turned five bucks into fifty! Dinner is on me!" Very few people have the mental fortitude to watch $50 turn into $1,000, then $10,000, and eventually millions without cashing out to pay a mortgage or buy a car.
Why you probably would have lost it anyway
The biggest hurdle wasn't the price. It was the tech.
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In 2010, there were no hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor. You kept your Bitcoin in a file called wallet.dat on your PC. If your hard drive crashed, the money was gone. If you threw your laptop away, the money was gone. This isn't a hypothetical. It happened to James Howells, a guy in the UK who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC. He's been trying to dig up a landfill for years.
Security was a nightmare. Exchanges were getting hacked constantly. Mt. Gox, which handled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions at its peak, eventually collapsed in a cloud of theft and mismanagement. If you kept your 100 Bitcoin on an exchange back then, there is a very high probability you would have lost every single Satoshi.
Then there’s the "pizza guy" factor. In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 BTC. At the time, that was about $40 worth of Bitcoin. Today, those pizzas are worth over a billion dollars. People laugh, but Laszlo was one of the few people actually using the currency. Without people like him, Bitcoin would have died in the cradle.
The math of the "What If"
Let's look at the numbers if you actually managed to hold that 100 BTC through the 2013 spike, the 2017 mania, the 2021 bull run, and the current 2026 market.
- Initial Investment (July 2010): $5.00
- Value in 2011 (The $30 Peak): $3,000
- Value in 2013 (The $1,100 Peak): $110,000
- Value in 2017 (The $20,000 Peak): $2,000,000
- Value in 2021 (The $69,000 Peak): $6,900,000
- Value Today (Approx. $103,000): $10,300,000
It’s a life-changing amount of money. But the tax implications alone would be a headache. If you’re in the US, you’d be looking at long-term capital gains tax. Depending on your state, you might lose 20% to 30% of that to the IRS. You’re still a multi-millionaire, but the government is definitely getting their cut of your 2010 foresight.
Misconceptions about buying early
People often think they missed the boat because they didn't buy at $0.05. That’s a survivor bias. For every Bitcoin that succeeded, there were hundreds of other digital "e-cash" projects that went to zero. In 2010, Bitcoin was just as likely to disappear as it was to become a global reserve asset.
There was also no "community" back then. It was just a few dozen cypherpunks. There were no YouTubers screaming about "to the moon" or TikTokers showing off Lamborghinis. It was lonely. It was weird. If you told your friends you bought "magic internet money," they would have staged an intervention.
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Honestly, the hardest part of if I bought 100 bitcoin in 2010 isn't the buying. It's the "not selling."
Imagine it’s 2017. Your $5 investment is now worth $2 million. Your house needs repairs. Your car is breaking down. Your kids need college tuition. Are you really going to let that $2 million sit in a digital wallet hoping it hits $10 million? Probably not. You’re going to sell. And you should! Taking profits is how you actually win the game.
The institutional shift since 2010
The Bitcoin of 2010 is not the Bitcoin of 2026. Back then, it was an anti-establishment tool. Now, it’s an institutional asset class. We have Spot Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity. We have nation-states like El Salvador holding it on their balance sheets.
If you bought 100 coins in 2010, you were a pioneer. If you buy it today, you're an investor. The volatility is still there, but the "zero risk"—the chance of it literally disappearing—is much lower now than it was during the Obama administration.
What we can learn from the 2010 "Lottery Winners"
We can’t go back to 2010. That window is shut, locked, and boarded up. But the mechanics of that wealth creation still offer some pretty heavy lessons for how to handle assets today.
First, asymmetric bets matter. A $5 bet that can turn into $10 million is the ultimate asymmetric trade. You can only lose $5, but the upside is functionally infinite. Most people spend $5 on things that have zero upside—soda, a cheap app, a scratch-off ticket. Finding "the next Bitcoin" is nearly impossible, but the principle of taking small, controlled risks on emerging tech is still valid.
Second, self-custody is a double-edged sword. Being your own bank means you can't call a help desk when you forget your password. In 2010, this was the only option. Today, we have better choices, but the core ethos remains: if you don't own your keys, you don't really own your coins.
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Actionable steps for the modern investor
If you are looking at the 2010 era with regret, stop. It’s a waste of energy. Instead, look at how the landscape has shifted and what you can actually do now.
Secure your legacy data. If you actually did play around with crypto years ago, check your old hard drives and email accounts for phrases like "wallet.dat," "private key," or "seed phrase." There are billions of dollars in lost Bitcoin sitting on old Dell Inspiron laptops in people's attics.
Understand the halving cycles. Bitcoin’s supply is programmed. Every four years, the reward for mining new blocks is cut in half. This "Halving" has historically been a catalyst for price action. Understanding this won't give you 2010 prices, but it helps you understand the supply-demand squeeze that drives the market.
Don't hunt for the "Next Bitcoin" blindly. Thousands of "altcoins" try to market themselves as the next big thing. Most are junk. Instead of looking for a $0.00001 coin to hit $1.00, focus on projects with actual utility, developers who show their faces, and a community that isn't just a pump-and-dump scheme.
Use cold storage. If you are holding a significant amount of any digital asset, get it off the exchange. Use a hardware wallet. The lessons of Mt. Gox in 2010 and FTX in 2022 are exactly the same: your money isn't safe if someone else holds the keys.
Think in decades, not days. The people who made millions from 2010 were either incredibly disciplined or—more likely—they forgot they owned it. Set a small, recurring buy (DCA) and stop checking the price every hour.
Bitcoin in 2010 was a ghost. Today, it’s a titan. The 100-coin dream is out of reach for most people now, as owning even one full Bitcoin puts you in an elite tier of global wealth. But the underlying tech—decentralized, peer-to-peer value transfer—is still just getting started in the grand scheme of human history. Focus on the tech, secure your assets, and stop kicking yourself for not being a time traveler.