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Everybody is aware of quite how much Bitcoin is worth today, but nothing quite shows how much it's grown in value over the past decade than looking at what 50 Cent's meagre $455,000 investment in 2014 would be valued at if he sold it right now.
Bitcoin hasn't always been the ultra valuable digital property that we know it as in 2025, and for years it was considered an oddity only the tech and finance obsessed would truly believe in.
You'd often hear stories about how people had thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency tokens locked away in a wallet they couldn't access, but one famous figure managed to make a fortune from Bitcoin simply by forgetting it existed.
Following the announcement of his 2014 album 'Animal Ambition', famous rapper 50 Cent made the bizarre choice to let people purchase the LP using Bitcoin.
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Worth around $650 at the time, Bitcoin remained still on the fringes of society and very few people would have the digital coin lying around, let along willing to use it to order the upcoming 50 Cent album.
It proved to be a surprisingly popular promotion though, if not only because those holding Bitcoin finally had a use for it outside of the trading process, and the rapper managed to earn himself 700 Bitcoin, which was worth roughly $455,000 at the time, as per GQ.
Fortunately he actually forgot all about the Bitcoin he'd earned until four years later in 2018 when it cropped back up again. At that time the cryptocurrency was worth around $10,000 per coin, turning the comparatively tiny $455,000 into a staggering $7,000,000 fortune.
It's unclear whether 50 Cent sold off all his Bitcoin when he found it again back in 2018, but if he was smart enough to hold on to it despite all of the financial incentives not to do so, he would be even richer today.
With a current value of $107,810.84 at the time of writing, if you were to sell all 700 Bitcoin at the same time you'd manage to earn yourself $75,467,588, which is certainly a tidy some compared to the pitiful $455,000 it would have been worth over a decade ago.
For comparison, Animal Ambition sold just 124,000 copies by December 2014, making roughly $1,240,000 if you assumed that every album purchase was $10.
In making the bold decision to shop the record with Bitcoin, 50 Cent increased his earnings by nearly seven times when the crypto funds were rediscovered in 2018, and would have made over 60 times that amount if it was sold today.
