Domain names back in the mid 90s.
The domains I could have registered back then would have easily sold for $100k+ now. Many would have sold for well over 1million. I'm sure if I fired up my P133 I'd still have a file with te list of domains I wanted to register. Most were generic products or domain names named after cities, states, or very short abbreviations.
I really wanted px.com because of a BBS I ran back then. It was available until sometime in 1995.
If I had spent my savings as a teenager/young adult back then on domain names which I knew were going to be a big thing (but didn't know it'd be THAT big) I would have made killing. Hell, they were free at one point in the early 90s. But even when they were around $100 per domain through NetSol I could have grabbed a few with my savings from mowing lawns, donations to my BBS, and stuff like that.
Instead I saved my money and didn't pay the "ridiculous" registration fees. God dammit...
Cars.com was registered in 1995. I'm not even sure I can put a value on that domain now. Toys 'R' Us bought Toys.com for 5.1mil in 2009. I've sold shitty domains I grabbed back in 2013 for $5000+. Can you imagine grabbing domains like toys.com, cars.com, a state.com or majorcity.com domain, or any of the 2 letter or 1 letter .com domains back then?
FFS... tp.com sold for $929,000 back in January of 2016. WTF... TP.com? Was it bought by Charmin? I'm not sure...but damn... if tp.com sold for 929K can you imagine what a 1 letter or 1 number domain would sell for now? BTW... X.com was an online bank started by Elon Musk (1999) that became Paypal eventually...
For the past 20 years I"ve been kicking myself in the ass for not taking the slight risks I could have taken back in the mid 90s when the internet was REALLY blowing up. Instead I played it safe....
:(