On 30 March 2010 a user tried to auction 10,000 BTC for $50USD. Everyone thought that was asking a bit too much. They failed to sell.

On 30 March 2010 a Bitcointalk user by the name of SmokeTooMuch started an experiment. They had 10,000 Bitcoins to auction.

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About the user SmokeTooMuch

SmokeTooMuch was a veteran, having joined the forum on 10 December 2009.

They were one of the oldest members on there, having been part of the original crew conversing with Satoshi regarding the development of Bitcoin.

Their first post on the forum was asking a slew of questions about bitcoin. But my favourite is "How many coins are created by a machine in 24h in average?", to which Satoshi replied "Typically a few hundred right now". This was sure a different time for bitcoin!

They are believed to be the first Bitcoin user in Germany.

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The auction terms

The starting bid was $50USD.

Users just needed to reply to the post to bid, offering at least $1 higher than the previous bidder.

At the time the user valued these 10,000 coins at around $65USD.

The auction was to run for 1 week, until 6 April, where the winner would be announced.

Payment was to be made by Paypal. As trust was always going to be an issue, SmokeTooMuch would send 5000 BTC, then the winning bidder would make the payment, followed by the other 5000 BTC being sent.

It all sounds wild now.

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So how did the auction go?

• 12 hours after the post was created one brave user decided to ignore the starting bid price, and offered $20 instead.
• A user raised a concern about payment via PayPal.
• 3 days later there was another complaint about the $50 starting price, but they offered $25.
• On 7 April 2010 the auction closed, without any other bids.
• The next comment in the post was a year later, on 25 April 2011, when a user replied laughing about how nobody bid. The 10,000 BTC would have been valued at around $15,000 at the time of that post.

Those 10,000 BTC today have a market value of around $265 million.

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What else happened with SmokeTooMuch?

The same user also pledged to donate 1000 BTC in late 2010 (later reduced to 292 BTC as the price of coins moved significantly in the time since the pledge) for a BitDNS Bounty. At the time valued at around $3000, but today would be $7.7 million.

I think it's safe to say that if they had this many coins to give away, they're probably still doing OK today.

They were active on the sub right up until 11 December 2018, where Bitcoin was trading at $3500.