Bitcoin Forum

1. Mtgox and its huge volume, and api.

2. Regularly seeing 5K-30K coin walls pop up in the course of normal trading (it wasn't 'bearwhale' or 'bullwhale', just normal).

3. The lack of dark orders.

4. Clark Moody (for some reason, it just released more dopamine than the other charting sites hands down).

5. Animations from the admin on Bitcoinity to celebrate or joke about key price levels.

6. Rippling effects after each price movement that would give you ample chances to get in or simply profit off the ripples.

7. The ability to make a trade on btce immediately after seeing it on gox and 'cheat'.

8. Taking advantage of trading bots that had gone haywire.

9. Being able to take advantage of technical glitches on exchanges to make easy trades.

10. In general, being able to trade without knowing any kind of TA.

11. Arbitrage and inter-exchange fiat channels.

12. Massive crazy alt coin pumps on btce led by fontas.

13. Altcoin IPOs on btce.

14. The gox litecoin ipo.

15. Huge altcoin arbitrade opportunities on the emerging high volume altcoin exchanges.

16. The lack of huge fake confusing CNY volume.

17. My trading competition being high on drugs from silk road.

18. The weird glitchy liquidity link between bitfinex and bitstamp.

19. Gpu mining and having weeks to profitably mine a new altcoin.

20. Being ahead of the awareness curve. My grandfather wasn't telling me about bitcoin yet.

21. The lack of reporters using big jazzy wall street terminology. The focus on the application and organic user economy rather than 'getting the big money in and the next big name company in'.

welcome back.

clarkmoody chart was pretty nice, indeed, still have it bookmarked

Oh man, that was a great time. I was running clarkmoody for 24 hours a day. They should bring it back but then give us the option to choose from several exchanges.

Regarding OP; MtGox was the king of walls. Nowadays you rarily see walls of at least 1000. And once you do see them, they get pulled once the price is near that wall. MtGox walls weren't moving at all  :D

Back then when I used to do altcoins trading, it was the Litecoin MtGox IPO that so many people were waiting for. I kept fooling myself; 'The price will shoot up to insane price levels if MtGox starts to trade Litecoin on their exchange'  :D

huge opportunity to make more bitcoin via some major altcoin that are now perfectly death or near it, like aurora blakccoin and darkcoin

with aurora for example there was the possibility to do x100

Screw all that.  The fact that Bitcoin was being praised on the cover of The Economist, the official economics magazine of the New World Order, means you no longer need to trade.  Just HODL and wait for such profits.

You are right, most of this stuff was just showing how Bitcoin was immature and all of this needed to stay behind us in order for us to be taken serious!

But I still do miss some of these days! I mean I have gotten once in one week 1btc worth of community coin and 0.5 BTC worth of coffee coin that I just dumped right away on the exchange! :)

Heh this brings back lot of good memories, very good and well thought list. Can agree to most of those!

Well hello there, another year is closing and a new one is coming up. This was all in the past, yes there were some good times. But I believe many more good times are yet to come.

Yeah that is true, that is why a lot of people is hoping that 2016 will be a good year of bitcoin like in year 2013.
We will see what well happend I think it will be almost similar like 2013.

the nostalgia eh...  :'( :'(

i miss the GPU mining .. making pool and mining new alt coins at launch and storing it ..

This is boring. In 2013-2014 I increased my bitcoin count by a factor of 100x, in addition to the usd value increase (which is only 3x since my first purchase). With simply holding, I might get another 20x usd value increase (and no btc increase) in a matter of several years or more if everything goes perfectly and bitcoin reaches maturity. That's much much slower. No more glorious days where my net worth suddenly doubles or triples in one sitting of trading. I'm exposed to much more time risk (more time for black swan events and things not going perfectly). I hate really long term investing in general.  Nothing can compare to the glorious days in 2013 where anyone with a little intelligence and a set of balls can go suddenly go from being nothing to being something with no capital.

i want the same. shit, 10folding would be enough. even doubling.

will watch your posts very closely now... ;)

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/PvtHNUFI7GQ/maxresdefault.jpg

 :'(

 :'(

I'm hoping alt pumps will return, those certainly were the days.

well i think it's just luck, if he is really skilled he should have no problem in repeating it more times

but it happened only one time, so i guess it could be pure luck

Well to be honest,  my btc-denominated gains were not really due to solid predictions about btc/usd decreases but wereally more due to glitches, intraday waves, technicalities,  altcoins, arbitrage, and all that other stuff I mentioned that doesn't really happen anymore.  I was actually notoriously bad at predicting btc/usd in 2013 until I finally gave in and bought/leveraged the November bubble.  Come to think of it,  most of my best trading was litecoin.

Ah yes, brings me back. What I find funny is how many people are confidently predicting what bitcoin's price will or will not do in the next few months. They clearly haven't been around for the old honey badger days :)

I wouldn't bet on it. Do you know actually how many people have lost money and left the crypto forever? I bet many!

For every Bitcoin I made out there on trading, etc, someone had to lose it. And I think all of this has made us more damage than good, even though some people have profited.

I certainly miss Mt.Gox. You could make money off arbitrage easy from Mt. Gox and BTC-e back then.

It will be proven again that the only losers are those who sell, or buy on margin and get REKT

Depends on the person honestly.  For example, if you have 100k in the bank and only 1k in Bitcoin, you don't really care and just sit on it.  If you have 100k in the bank and all of it's in Bitcoin, then you're gonna be swing trading out the wazoo solely with the goal of mitigating risk.

That would have been Loaded. One of the few whales with class in here. *adjusts monocle*

Beat me to it.  Loaded also lost a bunch to gox and put out some kind of bounty on them.

So... who in here will be the first to publish a semi-factual semi-fictitious "Those were the early days of trading the 'coin" book?

(EDIT) Style-wise, I'd vote for gentlemand, but he's such a noobcake still.

https://i.imgur.com/gIO5CkN.jpg

:'(   ;D

Wow, I'm honoured. But I wasn't around back then nor am I any good at trading. I do recall being made dimly aware of it in 2009 but it was quickly discarded.

Even if I had been, I seriously doubt I could've brought myself to use Gox beyond the pennies/paypal phase. One of my enduring fascinations with this space is the willingness of people to put up with the most mind boggling and screamingly obvious mediocrity.

When I did start paying attention in 2013 Gox was still the go to place. Within twenty minutes of googling - 'so, let's recap here. It's been hacked, trades have been rolled back, you can't take dollars out, passwords were showing in the browser, it's in Japan, there's no insurance, there's no regulation, who's is that nasal creep on the beach ball?'

Is this an extraordinarily elongated performance art piece?

Localbitcoins here I come.

The exchange risk is just seen as another calculated risk in the bitcoin vegas gambling game that otherwise has much better odds than a casino. There are no other options, if you want to trade in a high volume environment. Especially with bitcoin's questionable legal status in its early years, the use of a dodgy offshore exchange that could evade the law was seen as part of the game and even added a feeling of edgy badassness to it.

I miss those days too, but what makes you think those days are over? I still think there will be more pumps and other opportunites in bitcoin and the altcoin markets, once the bitcoin bear phase gets sorted out

Huh. Guess I have to take back the noobcake then. 3-4 years before I even heard of it.

Not at all. There's a world of difference between hearing a word and actually taking the plunge into it. It was more than a mention on the radio. I think it was an outline on some sort of anarchist forum.

I do recall saying to myself 'hmm, maybe I should get me a Bitcoin position'. Judging by my affluence today I guess I was distracted by a passing slice of cake and failed to heed my own advice until countless years later.

the only thing I miss is to get paid at that price. Unfortunately I couldn't hold many of my bitcoins. I wish I had the same bitcoins I had last March...

Most of those things are epic and will not ever come back. Take the altcoins f.e. their time has come. The volume however will grow and grow. I dont' expect we will go under it's level in the next few years.

So yes, most things happen for the best

Ya, the alt coin phase is probably over since so many got burned and learned their greed lessons the hard way. However, litecoin will probably go on another significant run-up in terms of its bitcoin price as the panic buying starts entering the bull market down the line as it matures beyond our community's borders. People will be seeing that crypto is going up and bitcoin's price will be out of reach for most and that's when litecoin will get its boost. Just like last time but on a larger scale.

There could potentially still be another alt coin if it was a significant enough fork and wasnt just another scrypt coin,  etc. People really have to believe that it is the next bitcoin, or the solution to bitcoin scalability issues,  or maybe something completely different (like ripple).

You must mean 2011. Bitcoin was not mentioned on the radio in 2009. :)

I was referring to folks today who hear it on the radio. I came across a bloke eulogising it on a forum. If I remember rightly because of the nature of the forum they were rather more receptive than your average internet psycho. I guess a few made bank had they listened.

Ahh, thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood.

Well, you guys might get a kick out of this email between a friend and I from early 2011. A bit off topic but something I miss.  8)

https://i.imgur.com/zxIDcVl.jpg