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IIRC, the total number of bitcoins able to be mined is limited to a fixed value?
I recall reading stuff about it some years ago, in the very early days it was very much a curiosity and people would do bitcoin mining on a normal home PC (Mining IIRC comprises of a computer solving a mathematical problem, the complexity of which has risen rapidly with each solved problem. Solve the problem, get a bitcoin for "Free". That of course being free minus the cost of solving the problem in terms of equipment to solve it and power to run it) even in the early days the cost to solve the problem was probably more than the resulting bitcoin was actually "worth" but both the worth of the coin and the cost of solving the problem to get it was low. Now it is the other way around, the cost to solve the problem is very high but so is the notional value of the resulting bitcoin.
Now, if you had mined a few bitcoins in the early days and then lost interest in the idea you could be sitting on a pretty tidy sum.
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