Couple invests in bitcoin in 2013, donates hundreds of thousands in gains to cancer center

In 2012, Halle Tecco, an adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, and Jeff Hammerbacher, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, stepped out on a whim and “made a crazy bet” on a little-known thing called bitcoin, Ms. Tecco wrote in a LinkedIn post last week.

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At that time, the cryptocurrency was going for around $800, she told CNBC. She and Mr. Hammerbacher, who is also her husband, had their sights set on Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust, a fund for accredited investors to funnel money into cryptocurrency.

Since then, “It’s (bitcoin) done extraordinarily well,” Ms. Tecco wrote. In fact, today the cryptocurrency is worth more than $17,000. The couple has decided to donate their undisclosed gains — which Ms. Tecco suggested to be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars — to the MUSC Hollings Cancer Center in Charleston, S.C.

“The investor community that as benefited from the bitcoin craze should use this foresight (and luck!) to help others,” she told CNBC in a text message. “We hope we are just the first.”

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