Apartment for 2900 BTC was sold for 7 BTC – a story that makes the crypto market uneasy

A story that perfectly shows that in crypto it is important not only “where the market is going”, but also in which unit you measure the result.

The co-founder of one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools F2Pool, Wang Chun, said that he sold his condominium in North Pattaya for only 7 BTC. At first glance it sounds like a normal real estate deal, but then the math begins, which makes any crypto investor’s eye twitch a little. The fact is that he bought this same property back in 2015 for 2900 BTC. That means that in Bitcoin terms the price fell by more than 400 times. Formally this looks like a catastrophe – as if a person bought an apartment for a truck of gold and sold it for a couple of ingots. But the market, as always, loves nuances.

In 2015, Bitcoin cost no more than 400-450 dollars, and the entire deal was then valued at about 1.2-1.3 million dollars. This was a perfectly reasonable market price for real estate in a popular resort region of Thailand. Today Bitcoin trades near 67,000 dollars, and 7 BTC is about 450-470 thousand dollars. If measured in a familiar currency, the drop is not hundreds of times, but roughly 2.5-3 times. Also unpleasant, but without dramatic headlines like “the worst deal of the century”.

And here the main lesson of this story appears: Bitcoin changes not only money, but also the very logic of asset valuation. In the fiat system you calculate profit or loss in dollars. In the crypto world, a second layer of reality appears – valuation in BTC. And sometimes these two pictures contradict each other so much that it is unclear where the truth actually is. In dollars you simply sold real estate poorly. In Bitcoin – you practically “burned wealth”.

Wang Chun himself treats this calmly, almost philosophically. He notes that this was his first home, where he lived for about two years. After that, a period of constant moving began: Bangkok, Seoul, then Europe. This is no longer a story about an investment, but about a stage of life that simply ended. At some point, an asset stops being an “entry price” and becomes part of a biography.

Interestingly, it was precisely the period of living in Pattaya that coincided with the early stage of the crypto industry. At that time it was not yet a market with institutional money and ETFs, but rather a club of enthusiasts where decisions were made faster than rules could appear. It was there that Wang Chun launched a mining pool for Zcash, effectively participating in shaping the infrastructure of a new digital economy. It was a time when mining still resembled gold prospecting – with risk, chaos, and the chance to hit a big reward.

At the same time, personal changes were also happening. During this period he obtained a US visa and a second passport of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which became the first serious step toward an international life. According to him, it was then that he first felt he could live and work outside one country, and thus think globally. For many entrepreneurs in the crypto sphere, this became a turning point: business stopped being local, and capital stopped being tied to a specific jurisdiction.

Against the backdrop of rapid crypto market growth among Chinese miners in those years, Wang Chun reconsidered not only investments, but also his approach to life. And this is perhaps much more important than the difference between 2900 and 7 BTC. Because crypto at that time provided not only returns, but also a new degree of freedom – geographical, financial, and even mental.

Also noteworthy is what he is doing now. Wang Chun has long moved beyond the purely cryptocurrency industry. At the beginning of 2025, he financed and led a unique crewed mission by SpaceX. The flight was named Fram2 – after a Norwegian polar ship of the 19th century, and its feature is that the orbit passes over both poles of the Earth for the first time. This is already a level where money stops being a goal and becomes a tool to realize ambitions of a completely different scale.

In the end, the story with the condominium in Pattaya is not about a “bad deal”, as it might seem at first glance. It is a clear example of how the perception of value changes in the era of cryptocurrencies. The same asset can simultaneously be a reasonable purchase, a bad investment, and an important life stage – everything depends on the system of coordinates in which you evaluate it.

And perhaps the main conclusion here sounds almost philosophical. In crypto, you can lose money. But much more often you lose the unit of measurement in which you are used to counting it.