Since we're doing "if he held a bit" : 16.85 BTC could have been 20k usd, had the bit be long enough.

The children of today, all ages : too stupid to have the mental structures ready that'd allow them a time horizon wider than two weeks. Consequently incapable to plan, and then to execute.

Take this amazing project, for instance: https://bitcoinstarter.com/projects/104

He raised 16.58 BTC (~$1500 at the time, $7500 if he held for a bit) to develop an Android Electrum client. He even had TIMELINES:

2013-08-11 - full schedule ready (including stretch goals)
2013-08-18 - UI sketches complete
2013-08-25 - System design ready
2013-09-01 - Backend supporting Java library ready (full SPV may not be available yet)
2013-09-15 - Alpha client
2013-10-20 - Beta client
2013-11-17 - Release candidate client

And yet here we are on 2014-05-02 with nothing of any worth from him (and in the meantime the Android client using Kivy is nearly ready for launch: https://github.com/akshayaurora/electrum/tree/kivy - and they didn't look for funds). But don't worry...he has a blog post where he apologises "for the absurdly long delay in updating everyone on what is going on" and apologises for his "disappearance with no response". Awesome stuff: http://e4a-ne.blogspot.com