Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to share with anyone starting on these forums that there is enough information here to make an average person rich.

I started out as a BTC newbie in 2013, when I started devouring the information presented in Bitcointalk.
It led to my first large purchase and subsequently a better understanding of the worlds financial systems and how they affect me.

In the process of reading information on the forums, I've also been burned; buying at tops, selling too early, losing money on fly by night exchanges & alts.
In my mind the benefits of all this is a way of not only educating myself but understanding my own psychology. Greed can sometimes make you do things that are irrational, no matter how astute or smart one may be.

I'm not going to name specific members who's posts I believe are "money", but as a starting point I'd start reading posts of active members registered in 2010 and 2011. There are certain thoughts shared by early adopters which brought them to this place, and those kind enough to share them could potentially bring us all a great deal of wealth.

Care to share any specifics?
I don't think this tread belongs in the speculation section btw, unless you are purely referring to the dollar value of a bitcoin.

So do you say you already made that fortune or do you think that will work?

So far i think enough ventures of early adopters went wrong. There is no reason they should have some inside knowledge over all others. Except some of them might have not lost all of their wealth through scams.

I imagine only a small number of early adopters manage to cash out when btc is up in the 1000+.

I'm speaking more towards psychology than inside knowledge of making money holding/trading BTC.
My personal finances as a result of BTC I cannot conclude yet. All I'm saying is that this forum has posts with knowledge that could make someone inclined enough wealthy over time. BTC brings together a special kind of crowd.

well you know if you bought at 10 cashing out at 240 instead of 1000 is still a life changing experience.
i feel a bit like op, the lecture i had here around 2010/2011 learned me a lot. I made my own experience, i felt greed, over excitation, despair, bored and so on...
I am not even speaking about how ignorant i was. Before reading here i simply never stopped to think "what is money?".

I'd guess that there are only a small proportion of early adopters who are

- still here and not totally disgusted with the state of the forums.

- actually made the money many think they did. The likelihood is that they sold early, lost the coins or were scammed to death.

- haven't gone mad because of the above.

Regardless of that they do have valuable perspective about how things were in the past.

Thats what i think/experience too. I know many who left because Bitcoin became uninteresting or they were disgusted by the fact that 99% of all projects go down by inept businessman or scammers. On the way only a handful managed to keep their wealth. Some kept their money because they started their own projects only, some simply had luck but most of them lost so much that they get to your point three.  ::)

Anyway... necrita is right... Bitcoin is somewhat of a very fast school. You can learn so much in a very short time. And hopefully enough to be prepared for the future. So you make better decisions from then on. Handling everything better, knowing that holding your wealth is mostly a better investment than investing with the promise of 50-100% annual return. Because first you lose all your coins until you maybe get them back.

Or that you really have to not have thinking blockades. You need to sell everything if it turns bad. Not holding and believing it will turn or holding it because it brought something first. You have to bring everything on the table. Thinking blockades are deadly.

Bitcoin and its community really has the potential to bring you sky high and really down. Its fast... but i like it.  ;D

Edit: necrita... what posts do you mean? Some examples?

I got involved with Bitcoin around April-May, 2011 (mining), so I guess I could be considered an early adopter. The one thing that united most of us was just the belief in bitcoin, and the inevitability of it's success. While the community is larger, more fragmented, etc., there's still a strong belief here though.

I would like to read those specific advices. There is an huge amount of early adopters that were simply crypto geeks who happened to be at the right place doing the right thing, not necessary investing gurus, otherwise we would have seen actual investors getting in BTC into the early days, but only tech heads where there.
My current advice to anyone here is buy Maidsafe, as much as possible, it is a fascinating project and in my opinion insanely underrated as we speak.

I registered in May 2013. It seems like a hundred years ago, not just two years. So many things have come and gone. Like everyone else I mined with graphics cards back then because that was about all you could get. We were amazed when Bitcoin was mentioned in any news media, it was very very rare. I witnessed the rise of the ASICs, security after security rise and fall, media hype, ATMs, Silk Road, Mt Gox, silicon valley investments, Overstock, and now the NASDAQ will use the blockchain. All in just a short two years.

God only knows where it will be in two more years. We are all early adopters still.

One of those right things were to be in a position to sell pre-orders with BFL lol.

I know for a fact people made a killing, charging 1000% off for the first asic 5 gh/s, when they were still a legit company back in the day. I made like $3,000 off them, plus mined for free so I`m sure theres more people who made way more.

One of my early mistakes though was buying stuff too early on gyft though when that whole mt.gox went to the moon.

I recommend anyone holding1 solid bitcoin before buying anything.

Agreed, you're sitting pretty well now considering you didn't get caught up in the ASIC crapshow of 2013. That pre-order round was a major learning exp but it did take a haircut off many of us back then. Yep, I fell for it too but have long recovered from the stupidity/learning curve.

I've paid quite a bit of money for some expensive lessons when speculating first in BTC and then graduating in the alt-market. Faith in humanity is broken beyond repair, illusions about non-profit coins are crushed and I've become quite good at spoting a potential pump and selling at the right time, then turn around and taunt the newbies who lost out.

In sum I've become a cynical leech, perhaps one should seek employment at Goldman Sachs? A big thanks to the Bitcointalk forum and all associated scammers for helping me acquire these skills.

I personally don't think we can learn anything from the very early adopters other than maybe being confident enough to invest in something we strongly believe in that maybe at the time is very risky.
Early adopters made a lot of money if they put a decent amount of capital into bitcoin purely because they got in early.
I doubt there's another stock/share/investment that you could buy for 5 USD and sell for over 1000 USD 4-5 years later.
I respect but am also envious of the 2009-10 early adopters.
The key to becoming rich on bitcoin was getting in very early and selling at huge profits.
We can only hope that bitcoin explodes into mainstream adoption and we get rich off it too.

Although, I personally believe that we're still early adopters, but yes making money off Bitcoin is definitely going to be a long term game now. It's gonna be a very bumpy road to mainstream adoption and depending on one's definition of richness, there will be several opportunities to exit.

But the opposite is also true. A lot of people lost a lot of money by investing a lot of their cash into bitcoin at its peak after listening to a lot of older members who told them to buy buy buy and they're still holding now waiting to cash out their money when it breaks even (which they could be waiting a long time to hit 1k again if ever). I think people should make their own mind up about what to believe or invest in as there's no guarantees with bitcoin so I definitely don't think it's an easy get rich quick scheme and posts from 'people with knowledge' doesn't mean they're going to become wealthy any time soon.

 
 
Without greed and fear, making money would be trivial in bitcoin.  It's the emotions that make it so challenging.  For example, right now, when everyone should be acquiring as much as they can, it seems risky.  And at the next peak, when euphoria hits maximum overload, it will be equally difficult to sell your tickets to the future.
 
Can someone please link to some of these "early gold" posts that OP is talking about?

Not early by OPs definition but gold certainly.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345065.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345065.0)

 
  
Wow, I saw similar posts in the penny stock scam world right before they collapsed...  Musings about what we would all do when we are rich, etc.  
  
Despite the quality of the advice (which basically boils down to buy BTC asap) it really was a sign of the times that everyone was riding on mega magic euphoria and the success of bitcoin was so obvious.  
  
I'll have to keep those same signs in mind for the next bubble peak.

Great sentiment  8)

If you read the stories, many early adopters lost a lot of coins due to investments in miners and startups. While they still made a nice buck, it's nowhere near the potential their coins had at the time.

Ironically, most of the people that made a killing in the early days are only those that literally forgot they even had Bitcoin. If they payed too much attention to the price, they all would have sold way too earlier. This teaches us a lesson: Buy Bitcoin and forget about the price, come back in 5 years and you'll not even need to cash out.

if you don't even need to cash out, then use it now to buy your stuff from shops that accept bitcoin, the only difference it that in the future 1 btc will buy you more things, aside from the fact that you are dumping or not

and if you think about it, we could be the next early adopter, it is only a thing of perspective, bitcoin has to reveal many trains yet

umm.. that's the only important poitn.. . no one cares about converting some numbers (of btc) to some other numbers (of USD/rmb etc) they only care about how many things that number can buy them.