I don't see anything wrong in what Lucius said. The donators do deserve thanks, but I wouldn't take the respect away, regardless of the value of the donated coins at the time. There are no problems with the rest of his post. Bitcoin was cheap at that time compared to today's standards. It was minable with A CPU and later with GPU. And finally, the mining reward was 50 BTC per block. I don't think anyone could anticipate that the price would explode and rise so drastically a decade ago.

And regarding the 'not mining yourself' part, he probably didn't know about BTC at the time, didn't care about it, or didn't think that an experimental digital coin could get so far. He wouldn't be the first to think that way. I laughed at the idea of accepting bitcoin the first time someone suggested it to me for some online work I completed. And that was a very long time ago. If I had, and I hodled those coins until they went up to tens of thousands of dollars, my biggest concern would be whether to take my lambo or helicopter.