I recall years ago looking up Max Keisers alleged networth, and many websites were saying $5 million blah blah.. Now he is a billionaire? Could be, since he could have had bought 10s of thousands of bitcoin and still only ended up with a few thousand and still end up being close to a billionaire... though even with today's prices, a person would still need to have around 9k bitcoin or more to be a billionaire.. I suppose it is possible.
One of the advantages of anyone getting bitcoin for under $1 would have had been the ability to accumulate a lot for very little and even if he shaved off profits along the way, he still might have had retained a lot of coins.
Even though I am going down such imaginary path, it is probably not too healthy to be doing so.. especially since it can be difficult to imagine.. yet there are surely some folks with those kinds of starting out paths, yet so many were not able to hang onto a whole hell of a lot of coins.. so even if we might imagine a person who might have had a million or maybe a few million of wealth, then it is not far fetched to consider that they might throw something like $100k into various investments.. Perhaps... so they could have had still sold quite a few coins along the way and still have a lot of coins many years later.
they way i look at it is as no one back then (2010? before me anyway) really had any idea as to what this was going to turn into. and when i started mining (mid 2011) btc was like 10 bucks and it was a pain to sell through gox/dwolla etc. so the number of btc was about as impressive as my folding@home stats in an abstract sort of way for a while. ie the number wasnt connected to actual
money, as it were. <--- lol
so considering how worthless most peps considered corn to be the fact that
anyone would be expected to preserve a wallet.dat back in the <$1 likely wasnt a priority.