Topic: "Why haven't the earliest participants sold their Bitcoin, and some haven't even - page 3. (Read 659 times)

There could be a few reasons, and usually they are not good reasons: maybe they lost their private keys, maybe they simply forgot the bitcoins they mined/purchased a long time ago in an old hard disk that they thrown away. It's not nice to say because probably we're talking about relatively young people but they could have died. I find difficult to believe that otherwise someone wouldn't touch his bitcoins for such a long time, not even to moving them to a new wallet or address?

Because not everyone realized the true potential of Bitcoin and the upcoming era of cryptocurrencies in financial world. Many people thought that bitcoin was a temporary thing, like they were thinking about computer in 90s and 2000s. Those, who saw that bitcoin went from some cents to ten dollars, thought it was the best time to make money from nothing and sold them immediately but there were people who knew that it was just the beginning and bitcoin would capture financial world. Yes, some waited and made millions of dollars from it, retired earlier but we can't deny that there are some people who wrote history by selling bitcoin for a few bucks and one of them is a man who bought pizza in exchange of 10000 bitcoins.

I think everyone had their reasons. Remembering myself in 2009 or 2010, I was also offered to pay for my work in Bitcoin, but I refused. I think it’s because I didn’t know the full value of Bitcoin, which could turn into large sums in the future. What would I do if I had no choice and had to get paid in Bitcoin? I would certainly exchange it for another currency, since the parts that make up Bitcoin scare me. But someone could probably receive the payment and simply forget about it. We often see stories where people start bringing up old documents in search of seed phrases that were created a long time ago. There were probably people who saw much further than us ordinary people, and it is they who are now skimming the cream off their early investments, which turned out to be very successful.

It's never too late to invest in bitcoin, man. Everything is still very early and there are still many opportunities for us. Furthermore, the financial market has many ways to make money, not everyone who invests early will definitely get rich. Many people who invested early still lost money and only a few became rich. What matters in this market is your knowledge, your knowledge and experience will determine the amount of money you will earn. It doesn't matter how early or late you get in, what matters is how long you stay in the market because the reward usually goes to the last person to stay.

You are right, when we look at those who still hold large amounts of Bitcoin and don't sell it I think they have lost access to their wallet and don't have a way to fix it and maybe there are some who have a lot of assets so they don't sell the assets they have and that's for sure we don't know for sure why someone does what they want.

When someone believes they can get real profits from holding Bitcoin, of course they will not easily sell it, even though they have a very urgent need, of course they will look for other ways to solve it and still keep their Bitcoin.

It's like a kind of Bitcoin graveyard on an address that can't be accessed anymore.
The Bitcoin is motionless and cannot be opened by anyone.
The initial holder must have sold his holdings and if any of them are able to withstand until now, of course he is very great and not tempted by the millions of dollars he can make.

Like Davinci Jeremie, a software developer from Chile who was an early Bitcoin holder who bought Bitcoin in 2011-2013 and still cost $1 at that time.
He can make $10m in just 10 years holding Bitcoin.
But some people also can't hold back too long and sell it at a very cheap price.

Absolutely, that's their business. But I think today's generation should also give props to those who supported and owned BTC from the start when it was dirt cheap. Because anything is possible from anywhere, and what I'm thinking is that the current status of Bitcoin owes a lot to those who still embraced it when it wasn't known by many. It's a level where someone supported it without necessarily expecting huge profits from Bitcoin, quite different from our mindset nowadays.

Interestingly, when those old wallets wake up, the market gets a bit shaken. No one knows about those old wallets, whether they can still be accessed or if they've lost their owners.

It is because many people in the past believed in the potential of the bitcoin and many predictions scattered around at that time, so maybe many investors or holders decided to believe in bitcoin, and if it is, then they are not wrong, but why still many hold their bitcoin and remain? Maybe because some of that bitcoin is locked, meaning its owner forgot their access in the wallet and never retrieved their bitcoin, like, for example, those quite known people who lost their bitcoins, like the one that lost its hard drive, and many more cases, so maybe that's why.

But one thing is sure: many people believe in bitcoin and believe that it could go higher. Even if the amount they hold is tempting, with self-discipline and a futuristic mindset, they will choose to hold their bitcoin. Of course, it is impossible for some people to sell some of their bitcoin as they have their own needs.

Aside from reason given in top comment, I'd say due to price increase, if you are into BTC since it was few cents, then $1 price is lot, if you somehow kept holding till then, then you will surely sell it for $10, if not at that then for sure at $100 — you could go on like that.

Our minds are conditioned, and even few x is huge return if you were to compare it to traditional stock market or bank returns back then and still is to people who are not into crypto.  

Even if we do not consider it as a lost coin, these coins are not in circulation. There are other possibilities too. He might let it remain in his wallet because he is a wealthy guy and does not need to spend his coins. Instead, he lets its users see how valuable it is today. Since people believe he has 1M Bitcoin, if they start to move, people will understand that Satoshi has almost 5% of the total supply.

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't have spent the ETH that I received a couple of years ago as salary from a crypto project. I was getting 1 ETH every two weeks and I spent them instantly. It was around $125 back then.

Op might wonder why there are too many untouched Bitcoins on different old addresses, it's given an earlier post answer, it could be the real owner can't access it or is stuck there because they are dead.  I don't think there's a real long-term holder now, it might be a few of them, but the majority will sell Bitcoin in a short period of time when they see a small profit.

Sounds great, but I wanted to know how many times you transferred your Bitcoin to a different address.

Simple , they have nothing to lose as they have broken even and gotten some profits from their investments!!!

Why would someone that bought Bitcoin @$10 or $500 really be pressured into selling when the investment has over a 100% ROI

Besides I think the earliest hodlers understood bitcoin better and their beliefs in BTC is out of this world! ** mic drop**

most "death" talk is just price mania.. not fundamental technology failure.. if im not wanting to sell i have no need to care about the price whims of that period. price becomes meaningless to me.. its like people dont worry about tidal waves or tsunami's if they are not going near a beach

i do sell small % to cover my yearly costs. and although i do plan and am frugal. i do travel and enjoy life so its not like im torturing myself to "live within my means"

early years for me 2012-2014 i was a day trader.. not looking to exit for fiat profit, but instead to accumulate coin. i did not see the price as a $ figure
i seen it as a % ↑ ↓ of last trade i measured it in +/- sats.
i didnt care what the price was. it was just a mindset of: 'is order B a better accumulation than order A exposure'

if the price was $6-$12 in 2012  or was $250-$500 another year i just seen it as 2x on both occasions. the monetary amount didnt bother me. it was about % and multipliers and sat amounts

then i took a back seat away from day trading thus didnt need to look at price drama on a daily rate

i do however notice the cycle events of ATH-> corrections...
so i do put some to sell on the high. and buy more on the correction
and when i do have spare fiat i do accumulate more on the correction.

Not all of them are still holding it because they're holding. Like what has been said that it's likely that most of those are lost forever and the owners of it have lost access on it because it seems unimportant on the early days until they realize that the value has moved up tremendously that they are no longer confident of just allowing it to be forgotten. Remember the guy that has lost his hard drive on a landfill and trying to recover it and as well as the guy that has forgotten his password and has a few attempts left? See. It's because that doesn't look important before but this day, it seems that there's a need for them to see the whole point of holding it.

And out of good luck and faith, the value of Bitcoin have eventually went up that they can no longer to resist it. If I am one of the early adopters like I've bought it on $50, I'd definitely sell them for $100 - $200. And that's the situation of the most of them on the early days and those that has diamond hands are the real OGs that have managed to sold some and hold most still to this date.

There cannot be anyone who is able to provide logical reasons for this and all we can do is speculate on what the reasons might be. Given the large number of Bitcoins that remain stagnant in old addresses, the two most logical reasons are:
- The owner of the address no longer has access to the private keys for that address, and this is a very likely hypothesis. That is, the person lost those keys or he died before using that Bitcoin and no one was able to do so after him.
- Unpredictable personal reasons. The most important of which is that the person has enough savings and does not need to exchange that old Bitcoin.

Those are the real long term hodlers who have a clear plan in place about when they would like to cash out because it's not easy to hodl Bitcoin for such a long term as a human being we would be tempted to sell of when it hits peak and starts to drop. Either they had even more Bitcoin and they would have segregated certain amount of Bitcoin which they would be hodling for long term and used some for current expenditure or any other needs.

Some would have purchased at really cheap price and would be hodling a portion of it so there are many reasons but most accurate would be that they are more smarter than is and more successful than us.

+1

I'm not an OG by any means, but I was up over x60k on my investment in the 2021 bull market and barely sold anything, so I can understand why someone who was up even more decided not to do it.
I know OP might be more interested about people who held bitcoin when it was worth $1, but I know that if we went to $100k somewhere next year, I'd still hold bitcoin.

OP probably comes from a family where owning $100k is a big thing, but not all of us do. Many people live in houses worth 10 or more bitcoin (at current price) and drive cars worth a few coins as well.
The safety that owning an independent asset like bitcoin gives you might be more important to them than some more fiat money in the bank.  

but the point is of the first 100,000 blocks with 5 million coins in them over 500,000 coins have moved.

So most of the guys alive  in years 1 and 2 of mining moved what they needed to move.

One day maybe in 2059 old unmoved addresses will be forfeiting the coins unless they move them.

Much Like a bank declares bank accounts to be abandoned.

I wonder if the USA or a few big ass countries will start to do that. Force the stale addresses to show they are not lost or abandoned.

I wish I was only 30 and not 66 as I likely won't live till 2059 to see what they do.

We can speculate about their reasons for not doing so, but their reasons do not really concerns us and are theirs alone, however if you want to speculate why this happens we could imagine many reasons about why this is the case, like their coins being lost or not remembering they have those coins at all, after all would you remember where you placed a dollar more than a decade ago? Also it is possible their holdings are so valuable they have in fact sold a fraction of them while the rest appear to not move, but the owners of those coins are just waiting for the right moment to sell some of it again.

There are several factors that make Bitcoin holders at the beginning not sell the Bitcoin they have until now, such as they already have a lot of money or they forgot the password and key phrase from the personal Bitcoin wallet they have. just look at how Michael Saylor and several people who are famous for their abundant wealth have not yet sold the bitcoins they own, they know that the price of bitcoin in the future will be higher than the current price, in fact bitcoin is really profited by people who don't sell bitcoin what they have, it keeps the price of bitcoin stuck at a certain level.