I kind of lived the same thing, back on very early days of bitcoin I apparently had an account at blockchain.com (formerly blockchain.info) and I have gathered as much as 6 bitcoins there, today that would have been life changing amount of money, maybe not retirement money yet, but half of it, but you know what I did? Years later in 2013 I came back and I saw that my coins worth nearly 700 dollars and I have cashed most of it out and gambled with two of them, lost that all as well.

Basically I did make free 500 bucks from bitcoin that way, and I assumed that I was one of the luckiest people in the world, how would I know that just 8 years later that would have been 350k+ dollars? That seems unreal, something that I assumed would be small and tiny became huge and moved from under 1k total to over 350k total, that seems as unlikely as it gets for me.