Brisbane Man’s Crypto Bet Enabled Him to Buy a Home Mortgage-Free

In less than a decade, Brisbane IT specialist Joe Bridge turned a small-time household crypto mining hobby into an A$1.2 million profit that enabled him to buy a house outright along with two motorcycles and a pair of boats.

Bridge, now 38, was a law student living at home in 2013 when he installed mining software on three computers and used 10 graphics cards to generate Litecoin and Dogecoin.

Traded $LTC and $DOGE for ‘More Than a Dozen’ BTC

Although the power bills at his parents’ house in Paddington, in Brisbane’s inner west, ramped up to over A$600 per month, Bridge mined enough $LTC and $DOGE to trade it for “more than a dozen” bitcoins. He held on to the BTC until 2017 when the price began to spike, then invested some of his stash on motorbikes and boats.

By the time bitcoin hit its all-time high in November 2021, Bridge was able to cash out A$880,000 for a house at seaside Clontarf in Brisbane’s northeast, and still had enough left over to pay a $290,000 capital gains tax bill.

Cautionary Advice for Would-Be Investors

No longer active as a crypto investor, Bridge has cautionary advice for anyone thinking of buying the current dip in bitcoin’s price. “I think it’s a dangerous time to be getting into it,” he told ABC News last week. “I would imagine it’s possible [to still make money], though. [But] would I recommend it? No. I’m not currently participating.”

I do think there will be a shake-out and the speculative bubble that surrounds [cryptocurrency] will disappear. Perhaps from the ashes of that, something with real utility to humanity may arise, but there’s a lot of debate about what product that is. I don’t think it’s bitcoin.

Joe Bridge, IT consultant in financial software, former crypto investor

More than a million Australians now own some form of cryptocurrency, according to a Roy Morgan survey conducted in February this year. However, chances are that none of them will ever get as lucky as Australian NFT collector Steve Morlando, who in May was able to turn US$300 into a whopping US$5 million when he bought a rare Bored Ape for what amounted to 0.01 percent of its then-current value.

Like Joe Bridge, Morlando plans to hang on to his investment “for a minimum of 10 years”.