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How 50 Cent accidentally made millions through bitcoin

He made *how* much?

How 50 Cent accidentally made millions through bitcoin
Tom Victor
24 January 2018

If we’ve learned anything about the cryptocurrency boom, it’s that you don’t necessarily have to understand what you’re doing to make money.

Jordan Belfort might have claimed bitcoin is a ‘massive scam’, but one of our team made real money trading cryptocurrency, so who knows what the truth is?

One man who does know is 50 Cent, a man whose name might be fiat currency but whose riches also stem from the world of bitcoin. Confused? So are we.

Our point, however… well we forget our point, but 50 Cent has got really rich via bitcoin while you’ve been sat their twiddling your thumbs.

The face of a very rich man

You’re probably sat there, scratching your head with one hand and googling ‘new bitcoin’ with the other, but we’re here to tell you how this preposterous scenario has arisen.

Back in 2014, Fiddy released his fifth studio album, Animal Ambition. It didn’t match the chart success of his first two releases, peaking at number 21 in the UK charts, so normally it wouldn’t be that much of a deal.

However, according to TMZ, the rapper let people use bitcoin to buy the release.

The cryptocurrency was on the way up at the time, but still wasn’t nearly as huge as it is today, so he was a trendsetter of sorts. Still, we didn’t know at the time just how much he would benefit.

He’s worth a whole lot more than his moniker suggests

One bitcoin was worth around $662 at the time, while now – even after a recent drop – it is worth more than $10,000.

That means the roughly $400,000 in bitcoin sales 50 Cent made at the time, according to TMZ, would now be worth more than $7 million. And it sounds like he hasn’t cashed in just yet.

It’s at this stage that you’d expect us to convert $0.50 into bitcoin to make a funny joke, but (a) we’re not that good at maths and (b) the value would have changed about 100 times by the time we’d figured it out. So, sorry about that.

Anyway, Fiddy, real name Curtis Jackson, shared his success while also taking the opportunity to plug his new film Den of Thieves. All in all it’s not been a bad week for him.

So there you have it. All you need to do is go back in time, record a couple of best-selling albums, decide to take a chance on an emerging cryptocurrency on a later release, wait several years, and hey presto! you’re rich.

Sounds easy enough, right?

(Images: Pixabay/Rex)