Has anyone gotten rich mining bitcoins? A number of questions on this site ask whether it's possible to make money mining bitcoins and the expected profits.  However, I'd like to know if there are real-life stories of people becoming wealthy solely from mining bitcoins. 

It seems like mining bitcoins is, at best, a hobby that cannot make someone wealthy.
I suspect that it is hard to find real life stories because the miners would like to remain anonymous. If you had a few million dollars in largely untraceable BTC, would you want to publicize your story and make it easy for the government to tax you?

But there's some very strong evidence to indicate that "getting rich" was very possible. One story that comes to mind is "allinvain" who posted a reasonable amount of evidence that 25,000 BTC that he had mined was stolen from him. So, even though allinvain didn't "get rich" in this story, it certainly showed that a solo miner in 2011 could be making tens of thousands of BTC, easily worth millions of USD in 2013.

If you look at the blockchain it is easy to find addresses used by miners in 2010 that have thousands of bitcoins in them. Just find a block reward and trace where it went to. Here is one: 1AvLeBnWbiBeCNHwLGtWEK9GSVug3RWWxt It appears to be an address where the miner collected his block rewards over six weeks or so. (I'll substitute a blockchain.info link when it is back up.) Perhaps this private key was lost, so we can't say for sure. But it's reasonably to think that this one account (worth about $400,000) represents only a few weeks of work for this miner. If he kept all of the BTC he mined in 2010, he is likely a millionaire. At least on paper.

In short, since mining was much less difficult several years ago, and the exchange rate has gone up so much in that same time period, it seems very reasonable to assume at least some of the serious miners from those early days have made a considerable amount of profit.