i find it hard to believe that you don't feel bad about losing 300,000$.
Would you feel bad about using toilet paper to wipe your ass if it was deemed a rare commodity 20 years later due to all the forests being cut down?
That's how I feel because there's no way to get it back.
Besides, that long ago people were using thousands of BTC for fun on bitcoin blackjack sites, or even that famous 10k pizza. It was more like a fun game and less of an actual currency.
Indeed.
I had 3 computers at home and was mining with the least powerful one, an Intel Atom I have as home server, and at reduced speed because I did not want it to consume too much energy and slow other server tasks. I was doing it just to collaborate with the project. And when the "GPU revolution" arrived I just stopped mining because the Intel Atom grahpic card did not had opencl and I did not want to keep the other computers on. If only I had known...
I actually gave a friend 50 bitcoins when they where like $2 each, and now its a $1000. I have been giving bitcoins away to get people onboard all the time. It was different back then.