Featured Image Credit: NRK
The real skill of investing isn't just knowing when and what to buy but most importantly when to sell, and there have been plenty of people over the years who have dipped earlier than they should, missing out on a fortune as a consequence.
Bitcoin and other similar forms of cryptocurrency have been at the heart of many of these stories, as while there are plenty of people who were bold enough to pick up the experimental new currency close to its launch, they unfortunately sold it far earlier than they probably should have.
It's easy to wince these days at stories of people using several Bitcoin to pay for a pizza, or websites giving away Bitcoin for free, but there was a long period where the crypto coin was effectively worthless and little more than a joke for many.
That seems like a distant memory these days, however, as although the price has nearly halved in recent months, it still commands a value in the tens of thousands of dollars making any early investments profitable beyond what you could possibly imagine.
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That's exactly what happened to Norwegian student Kristoffer Koch, as he managed to turn his $27 Bitcoin investment into a staggering $886,000 sale ten years ago after simply forgetting that he'd bought it, but looking back that seems like pennies compared to what he would have today.
Koch was one of Bitcoin's earliest investors, picking up around 150 kroner (roughly $26.60) of the coin back in 2009 when it was really in its infancy.
According to the man himself, he only remembered about the money he'd poured into the crypto coin after it began to receive news coverage in 2013, and he even encountered a potentially major hurdle after realizing that he'd forgotten the password to his encrypted wallet where the coins were stored.
Upon remembering it, however, he discovered that he was the owner of 5,000 Bitcoin and turned that into an unexpected fortune just under $1 million, of which he used to buy himself a flat in Oslo.
Usually this would be considered a major success story with many admiring Koch's early courage in buying Bitcoin, but ten years on he's likely to wince any time he looks at the current Bitcoin price.
At the current market price of around $71,600, Koch's 5,000 Bitcoin would be worth a jaw-dropping $358 million, and that could have been as much as $623.7 million when the coin reached its peak back in July 2025.
Comparing the amount that he earned selling it back in 2015 to its value today, Koch missed out on a 40,306 percent increase, and that jumps up to around 70,238 percent at the coin's apex.
Of course, that would have meant that he passed up potentially life-changing wealth for over a decade, avoiding the temptation of the peaks and devastation of the troughs along the way, and who's to say that there won't be an even bigger jump in the next few years that would have left him with even more regret?
Ultimately, Koch made a significant profit on what was enough of a throwaway investment that he forgot he even made it, so you can't really fault that at all.
