Bitcoin Forum

I am an early adopter and I only have a few Bitcoins.

In early 2011 I mined ~1,000 Bitcoins. Before we had paper wallets and encryption I had my wallet on a Bitlocked harddrive. Well that harddrive completely crashed.

My Ghost backup sadly turned out to have backed up corrupted data due to Bitlocker. New Bitlocker technology and old Ghost did not work well together I learned. At that point it also wasn't easy to export private keys and I didn't know that much yet.

There went around 1,000 BTC.

I came back and mined more with GPUs this time. I have an illness and even though I'm a brilliant PHP programmer, holding a steady job is hard. So the Bitcoins I mined had to pay for the GPUs and electricity as I mined them. I wasn't left with much even though I was a diehard believer and wish I could have held them.

Part of what I had left, 100 BTC was spent on Butterfly Labs. This was right after their good FPGA delivery. I donated what I had left to the newly launched Sean's Outpost, donated to projects, faucets and purchased from all the Bitcoin merchants I could to support the economy. I bought Alpaca socks for 30 BTC! When I didn't have BTC I bought them to buy what I needed if there was a merchant who took BTC. I thought I'd make it all back. Well their ASICs were years late and I only made a couple of BTC.

I am very glad I was part of the early people to prove Bitcoins were great for commerce and to show new merchants there was a market. I am proud to be part of the early Bitcoin economy.

This year I got a loan and bought 2 KNCs. Delivered perfectly. However, I again had to sell BTC to pay for electricity. I had to pay back the loan and sold one KNC on this forum for 17 BTC.

So with the couple thousand BTC I could have right now, I only have a few. It's sad because I was there, at the right time, in the right place and a total believer. But oh well.

What makes me mad though is Butterfly Labs turned out to be scum bags and now have even more Bitcoins they took from us. I wish I was able to generate that many early on legitimately.

Lessons learned: It is still the early period! If you are here right now, you ARE an early adopter. I should have bought the BTCs I could have but then again I had to take care of my family and don't have a steady income stream. The few Bitcoins I have I will hold on to as much as I can as long as my family is ok.

$700 is nothing. Buy 1 Bitcoin and sleep on it. Come back in a few years and you will be well off. Some early adopters are in my boat so don't fret. You are still here at the right time, in the right place. Help the economy! Find a merchant that accepts what you want and buy and send the BTC instead of money. Or buy gift cards on Gyft for almost anywhere.

PS. I love you guys and I love this board. I've never actively been involved in a forum before or after this forum. Sometimes I know I may be abrasive but I try to be helpful and I'm always honest. Can't wait for the years ahead!

My goal is to set you at ease. Otherwise people look at all the early members and assume thousands of btc which I wish was true. But those early adopter conspiracy theories aren't true. There's very few of us that still have many of the original bitcoins. Those that have the most just bought them. Not many early adopters went out and bought 50 Xeons to mine. There's no pyramid scheme.

Tldr; Hodl. Do not mine, trade, altcoin, invest, gamble, etc.

brohug

Looking back, I made some pretty foolish decisions with the BTC I've possessed since discovery too. (Looks like I reg'd here just a few weeks before you did)

Knowing what I know now I certainly would have done things different, but had we all known where we would be today then maybe we all would have held, and the first bubble would have been too big, and crashed so hard it never got back off the ground?

Meh, can't fret over crap we didn't know about at the time.. Hopefully you still came out ahead to some degree. The learning experiences along the way has been priceless in any case.

Very true. It's like past relationships, you had to break up to learn those lessons and we are finally ready to be in a committed relationship. There is no going back because we needed those lessons.

Yup exactly.

Tell me about your hard drive crash. I may be able to offer my services.

Head crash. I've already tried a service. Disk is long gone now.

Thanks for your post. New to the forum myself and relatively new to BTC. I appreciate hearing your experiences.

EDIT: And I just looked at your profile page, saw your BTC address, and already feel like I must be doing something wrong. :-)

not to worry mate these ALT coins will make up for that BTC  :P

Oh well, good luck with the mining and stick to SSDs & backups in future.

Sorry about that... that really sucks!

Glad you are still part of the community!

I am interested in the miner you have for sale...

@Bitpop You are just the man because everyday we can feel your love and that's great ! really don't change anything mate ;D

Lol thats an easteregg ::)

Pm me

I'm a lover not a fighter

Great story. It's not worth to look back at decisions in the past as the situation was different then and you could not know what was to come. Just try to learn what you can from it and concentrate on the future

Thank you sir for the sharing your story.  I am not an early adopter but I did know about bitcoin since 2011 but I cant call myself a skeptic. Considering where I am from and the income I was getting prevented me from even considering joining "mining".  To be honest the first PC I bought for myself was in 2012 and I got it from Ebay bidding warz.

I get what you mean. Its never to late.  Bitcoin's future is not fixed but the way things are going it just might make it to the moon.

Man your post makes me feel so good to read, I hope that doesn't mean I'm a bad person haha.  While not actively using bitcoins that early, I had dabbled into mining a couple of times around 1.5 years ago and thought about seriously investing around a year ago, then had major life situations come up and distract me and put it on the back burner to be forgotten about. 

I hope you're right about if you're seriously investing now you'll still be considered an early adopter, I agree with you on this and hope we're right so I can get that feeling out of the pit of my stomach if nothing else.  Like how could I not have invested last year, I knew about this and was a believer and KNEW it was very time sensitive.  I wish so much I would have desposited enough BTC on sealswithclubs to play some low stakes holdem, which I almost did but didn't.  That situation really makes me laugh/vomit, the total hilarity of putting like 1K to play some low/mid stakes poker for fun, only to have that money sitting in that form in my poker account not only make me so much more then anyone could feasibly ever make at those stakes but enough to make me comfortable financially for life.

I feel like for every bitcoin horror story there's a bitcoin miracle story though.  I decided a few days ago that I am investing every spare cent I have in bitcoin, possibly going to a few extremes to be able to invest more I'm not sure yet.  I honestly thought about selling my car, taking out large loans, etc.  Those seem like bad ideas but only kind of.  Either way I feel your pain man, best of luck to you!

Hey it took this far to get you interested and you're still early. Things are looking good to be extreme but always be prepared to lose it all.

Ps the goal was to make you feel good. Otherwise people look at all the early members and assume thousands btc which I wish was true ::)

There are those with many more missed opportunity than you.
Keep up the good work, it is rewarding. :)

keep on believing!

more and more people are getting involved everyday.

companies are investing in new hardware, software and more merchants are accepting it.

It is already a much bigger ecosystem than what it was just a couple of years ago so imagine what another 10 years could bring. By then all 20 million bitcoins would be issued with no more supplies. Surely the number of people who will be using it, trading it will be a lot higher, not to mention inflation will mean the depreciation of fiat money against the value of BTC so surely it will be worth a lot more.

I remember reading about the story of the shop that sold alpaca socks for BTC, it was a family business, where the son convinced his parents to accept BTC as payment. They must be laughing now, assuming they didn't sell all their BTCs too soon :)

Haha that's a millionaire farm now if they kept the btc. Nice socks!

http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffer.html

Yah with 20/20 hindsight, I could have been a multimillionaire this year starting with a a few hundred bucks.... making every move with perfect timing.



Backups yes, SSDs are inherently less reliable than regular HDDs unless you like to slam your laptop around or something, given reasonable care HDDs last decades...

How many years before it isn't too soon?

It is sort of the point though.  We all have less btc than we did, this is how distribution occurs.] and each become more valuable.
Prisoner's dilemma write global.  With no trade there is no value and no bitcoin.

...the past is a lesson.  The future, a promise.  In fact, we only have today to understand that the only time anything happens at all--is now.  

Understanding this either inspires you to take action when previously  you have regret, or allows you to be at peace with your choice when you made it, with all you could know, you did your best.  And that is peace of mind.  It also helps you build trust with yourself that you can make executive decisions....leading to a higher quality of life.

@BitPop I have sent u a PM. Please reply if possible.

thanks for the story.... i still kick myself for not hopping on years ago when i first came across bitcoin... hindsight... but what can you do? now my goal is to just get anything into my wallet and let it slowly build. ive put a couple hundred into it so far and its slowly building but patiently waiting for the day i can look and see 1 single solid bitcoin hahaha. i love the bitcoin community..it really is amazing how people of all walks can just find such a strong common bond with something as simple as data. i really hope a long life to btc..an eternal one!

Yeah, I don't have much to complain about compared to you, but I lost my wallet for around 100BTC that I GPU mined when that was still a thing. Since there is no way I can afford an ASIC I am just mining on Scrypt coins and being a lot more careful with my wallets.

were the KNC miners not profitable?

They were but I had to sell when it was much less to pay for electricity and loan.

Your story shows you care about the coin and not the latest trend.

Your "never give up" attitude will help you get back in the game just keep your head up!

 ;)

Yeah I'm still satisfied Bitcoin itself is extremely successful

I love this post. Thanks for writing it. I've really enjoyed my adventures in bitcoin, but every now and then when I'm in a dark mood I think about the handful of decisions I could have made differently and would be so, so much better off now.

But somehow I can't be all that bitter about it; if I'd just bought and held and never done anything, I'd have missed so much -- I love watching the new hardware be developed, and it's great to be a part of the community as it figures out how to make things work, and then work better. I love this community when it's at its best, solving problems and building things and exploring new ideas and sharing the results, and always so freakin' fast!

While I could have ended up in a different place if I'd made different choices, it wouldn't have been nearly as good a journey.

Yup and you are still here at the right time, never think it's too late.

Wait so you are jealous cause someone came up with a good idea and sold it for a profit? LMAO glad you don't control many bitcoins cause jealousy is a horrible trait to have. Also Satoshidice has brought much press in the early days. Plus Erik is an amazing entrepreneur, he has a couple great ideas. Coinapult and feedzebirds are doing great things in the bitcoin community.

i recall back in the day, like 2008/09 when bitcoin was new. i had no idea how to mine and i wasnt sure if i could do it. due to school and other stuff i never really got into it, plus not being a regular on /g/. it's hard to sometimes look back in the past and wish you could've done things differently, like actually looked into mining and trying it out.

now i'm very into mining and i'm trying my best with what i have. I hope these forums can help me solidify what to focus on and i hope to contribute some insight into what i see happening.

What is truly sad is that if there wasn't people like you supporting community Bitcoin would not be what it it today. People seem to forget that.

Respect Bitpop didn't get in too early either but decided to invest with what I have now and try to grow that amount
Alpaca Socks last for a lifetime but the Pizza did not  ;)

Dude... that is a horrible story. I feel really bad for your loss. But never give up.... start collecting Bitcoins once again... You may not reach the 1,000 mark, but you will definitely reach the 100 mark.

Hey dude,
your story is very touchfull.

Some people would have reacted differently but you know that what matters is familly.

If i were a early adopter i would help you as i help people in real life.

I also think it is not to late to get into the bitcoin or other coin.

I am here to learn and your post is inspiring.

i think some alternative money might rise up i will try to get a few of each

keep up :)

Perhaps you can show off those socks, saying today they would cost about twenty two thousand dollars ? Ahahahah

Joke aside, while this kind of loss would be maddening, I believe it's good that you're still here talking about it. Things could always be worse than they are, people should be more light hearted. It's a good life lesson.

While you lost 1000 BTC, I lost about 2850, to a cop that broke into my apartment and stole them (he was looking for kiddie porn).  While I will technically get them back after they find out I don't actually have that shit, it will be rough ride looking at all the money I could have made by holding onto my 100 cat coins that I stupidly sold at 0.087

Crazy

+1

They are less reliable for sure, back-ups are the answer.

My mom sent me my 3 USB sticks in the mail because I told her I needed something to transfer MP3's to my work computer, but it turned out I found a hard drive to use instead.  So I didn't even open the package.  To be honest, I forgot I had any back then.  Then several months later after they took the stuff I remembered the 50 I mined, 300 I got for coding assistance, and 2500 that were flat out given to me in #bitcoin-otc..  stored on guess what.  in 3 separate wallets on each of those USB sticks....

but guess what I had passwords on all of them.  so good luck copper ;D

Honestly I'd rather wait.  I'm one of those types of people that believes everything happens for a reason.  And the reason is.  If I had the coins now I'd be more nervous because I don't know when to sell.  But if it takes 5 years to return them, the price of Bitcoins might be up to $25000+

lol

What was he looking for kiddie porn  ::) seems like a tall tale

It's not a tall tale.  And if I get the stuff back, I might even put 12 BTC in a small faucet that gives out a random amount per person, in the same vein that they were given to me..

It is impossible to tell the future or if right now is considered early or the peak because of the hype. BTC could be 10000usd or like 10usd in a few years or months.
Or you might look up old threads on reddit in a few years with people tipping each other 10000 doge when it's worth thousands of usd.

Now you cant even buy high end amd graphics cards because of all the hype in most countries. Where I live average salary is like 300eur and people are just willing to pay anything for a card. Because of that it seems like hype levels are very high.

bitpop, your story makes me cringe. You should be a millionaire several times over by now.

Have a tip, you wretched thing. Hopefully it's worth $10k someday.

https://i.imgur.com/dYAtKh0.png

WOW THANK YOU!!

That's a lot!

^ woah. nice dude.

I also wish I would've hopped on back in 2011. I had 3 BTC at one point, bought something for 30$ or close to it. Oh well. I also should've bought big once the Silk Road collapse happened. I was one of the people who thought it was over after that. Quite the opposite, and I can clearly see why now.

I have exactly 0.000000000000 bitcoins. It's all good.

Very true, it was scary back then. This is the first time where the momentum is so strong its very hard to fail and the price reflects that, the beginning. It will only go up from here.

My .08 = $10k 2015!

Best of luck with Windows. You deserved it. It had to happen.

You haven't still learn't have you?

I almost started buying bitcoins a year or two ago when I heard they had jumped up to $100, then back down to $2.50 again. I am still kiking myself now for not buying. However, I had so many commitments that I had no spare time to learn how the system worked.

I heard of many stories of very early adopters selling loads of bitcoins for a few hundred dollars profit, then finding those coins are now worth thousands of dollars. It's easy to look back and criticise oneself, but who would have believed a bitcoin would be worth $1000 dollars when it all started off.

Great story, makes me not feel so bad about my small stumbles as I learn all the ins and outs of bitcoin and the alt coins.

Great post!

I think I started at a point where there's enough knowledge to know that a hobbyist miner like me would be lucky to simply break even. I could have just as effectively bought the coins but the work is part of the fun, and I see some devices that aren't worth a dime of salt selling on ebay for original retail or more.

I've made a ton of mistakes with USD, from investing in baubles to resell, to selling several lots of pricey collectibles & commodities to pay bills or for frivolous entertainment. With all those mistakes and a sum total of zero to show for it, I'm still considering what mining supplies to buy next... so stubborn...

Thanks for sharing.  Being new, there are lot's of people who seem to look down on us.  They say buy, don't waste money or time with mining.

If mining strictly for profit, yeah, there might be better ways to spend your $$$ - but if considered a hobby, mining could be considered a much better addiction than most. I have lots of fun tweaking card settings and figuring out how to best use my hash.

Windows? No :/ backups yes ::)

I mean it just wasn't that important back then. Or I would have made more backups. But what? We had no paper wallets. Should I have just aes zipped the wallet file? Probably. But then again I probably would have gotten bit by the 100 keypool. Even Linux wouldn't protect that.

Linux dd, encfs? Same thing. It still isn't common knowledge to refresh your wallet.dat.

I'm probably one of the people that told you to just buy.

thanks for sharing Bitpop, it was a good read! 

I guess there are many thousands of people that have lived this.

I have not mined, but owned a couple more bitcoins than I have now. Overall I also believed in bitcoins, but it must have been the fear that it would be banned by all central banks (even if it would not completely stop bitcoin, it would hinder its possible bigger success).

Now I have still have a very little bit, and believing even more in it, seeing that the USA, Germany, ... are quite open to the idea of such an invention, so NOT GOING to sell them for USD or EURO, I am going to keep for sure now.

But I still want the Eco-System around bitcoin to florish, so I will spend bitcoins, but buy as many bitcoin BEFORE I want to spend them, for example:

Let's say I know I want to spend about 50 USD worth of bitcoin in the next 10 days  (3 beers, 1 dinner), so I buy 50 USD worth of bitcoin NOW. Like that I will never (for the next few years) go below treshold I have fixed, and everything will end fine.

Good that you understood, that you and we all are still early adopters!

Yeah it was frightening when mt gox had their usa bank seized.

But now we have o.co accepting btc. Insane.

Brohug, I know this feels. In early 2009, I solo mined for a while. Got about 300 coins before I realzied I was spending more on electricity... I forgot about BTC until mid 2012 and it was too late by then :( thankfully, I still had my wallet info!

I'm also sorry for your loss. One thing that is still a bit unclear is the "Ghost backup", you said it backed up corrupted data.
What is this corrupted data exactly? If it's raw encrypted data of the files, I guess you should be able to decrypt it by studying the
data format of bitlocker. If you don't have the encryption keys it might be hard, but maybe in the future by bruteforce key search?

It wouldn't decrypt or mount. I did have the key. Not anymore though.

What I think happened was it it tried to store only used blocks when it needed all them. Size was smaller. Bitlocker isn't compressible.

I am a new miner to BTC. I am trying to take advantage of the alt coins to slowly build up my BTC collection.. I didnt want to invest in a ASIC miner largely due to paranoia. I dont like paying for stuff without using a card incase I could get screwed over.

So I am mining away on DOGE, Holding ,and hoping it hits the moon and can convert to doge!

That's too bad.  But I also believe tha there is huge oopportunity ahead of us with the alt coins and btc too!   Good on Ya for holding out

A 1000 btc lost, must have been hard, i hope to buy my first BTC today.

You don't need encfs. We use dm-crypt; it makes a virtual block device which you can use as a normal 'drive' on an underlying real partition. So even the FS (which may not support encryption) is encrypted. All backup utilities and normal FS tools will work on it.

Also there's smartd for automatic HDD monitoring. So as to warn you before it crashes.

Great post bitpop.

I think it's all too easy for people to say 'I missed out'.
What they forget is that just like a lot of other people, they would have either:

a) lost interest at some point during Jan 09 - Jun 10 (it wasn't exactly super fascinating times)
b) sold a good chunk early on after gox reached $0.50
c) if not sold early, then panic sold during the many swings that followed
d) .. or lost access to their wallet due to whatever (count me in that category).

There's no shame in any of this - no one can predict the future :)

I'm not sure if there are any 'hard numbers' out there, but I'd be curious to find out how many early adopters did indeed keep significant balances to this date. Not many IMHO.

This is my first post, And I'd like to say , Sorry you lost so much and good luck in the future, One thing that niggles me is, Why on earth would you get rid of a hard drive with a thousand coins on it ? Even if it was broken it could be recovered by the right team for that amount of money believe me.

Yes I could easily have mined 1000, then got overexcited and sold them at $5, even $2 a piece.... (I seem to recall they were something like 41 cents a piece when I first heard of bitcoin and the CPU I calculated hashrate for was gonna take 180 days to solo a block... somehow didn't come across pools or realise GPU mining possible, could have just been prior to general introduction.)

When Bitcoin first came out, I tried to figure out how to mine, got a wallet, could never get the client to work for mining, got sucked into playing WOW instead...ouch, time sink, made no bitcoins, still poor :)  Now I'm mining litecoins to trade for BTC, why not.  Sorry for the original poster not being able to save, but mad props (dating myself) to him for doing it!

Thanks guys. The moral of the story is that most early people don't have a lot and that's a good thing. If we all had tons, Bitcoin just can't grow. I'm glad a lot were lost and it's more of a level playing field.

To me, the only thing that could destroy Bitcoin is if satoshi came back and still had all his, the media would destroy us. I believe satoshi is here but made the right decision.

I didn't try very hard to get mine back. 1 because it wasn't too worth it back then and 2 if every early adopter had 10,000 there's no way newbies would gain the confidence. Subconsciously I wanted to start over. Financially, well you know ::)

It is believed that Satoshi mined to a new wallet every time he got a block, there are dozens, if not 100s of early wallets containing 50 coins. Thus hard to say how much in total of those actually belong to Satoshi. It is believed that he has substantial holdings in total.

I mined a little bit back in 2011 with my 5970 and then i gave up because i thought it was useless. No idea how much I had, but in 2012 i cleaned the harddrive and sold off the computer :/

this is one of the best posts I have read in awhile...

Thanks for sharing!

Sometimes losing what is valuable has a purification effect, as if learning to let go and build again is more valuable than the original loss. I've experienced similar situations, on multiple fronts, where years of work is lost, yet as a result I was reminded that my own ability to create is still very much intact.

Cheers everyone

 

very nice & motivating information. Thanks.

Is that you on your avatar? :)

Yes an older photo :)

Pretty sure that photo is older than the internet.

I've seen it too many times - calling BS on it being yours.

I never thought about it this way. Don't come back yet satoshi! ;)

Thank you for sharing your story bitpop, and I wish you all the best for the future.

It sounds like BFL screwed over many of the old timers.

I paid in dollars and have mined over 5 coins per $1299 single, so not feeling all that screwed.... though I did think it would be much more at time of order. Buying $30 coin would have won though.

I feels yours pains bro  :'(

Wow, very inspiring story.

I'm confident that we're still only at the beginning of crypto technology.

This is the sort of technological revolution that will be written about in history books.

Bitcoin is definitely just the beginning.  Still plenty of room for us to all become very rich.

Really inspiring story, it helps newbie get in without an "inferiority complex" about the early adopters.

BTW, as for the pic, http://badassdigest.com/2011/09/20/the-greatest-before-and-after-picture-ever/

I had to grow up :/

There is pyramid scheme, may be not you but many others do have so many btcs!

Thanks for sharing bro.

Live and learn... forever.



And it still wins with this new miners.

Buying and HODLing seems to be king ;)

I just spent half an hour trying to figure that out  :D

More mHash/s better than k/Hash.  Therefore 32 Tb/s > 550 kg/s 7950

My sense of wonder was driven by photos but science never hurt anyone ;)

Just wanted to say that i remember first learning about bitcoins in early 2011.. I seem to remember their price being around $11, i talked to my programmer friend and asked what he thought about it all.. he was highly skeptical about their security.. he was quick to point out to me when there was a security breach at mtgox and the price of bitcoin quickly plummeted back to pennies.. 

I have always had an interest in the decentralization and peer 2 peer aspect of the coins. I remember at the time "before" one of the first nosedives in price, i looked into to buying some but couldn't even figure out exactly the best way to do so at the time..lol, kept following the market though and checking back in from time to time.. it had been a little while since i had looked at the price until i heard about them reaching $1000+, I quickly sent an email back to my programmer friend and he was quite astonished.. he is still skeptical though..lol-- I truly think he is missing out on the opportunities in developing infrastructure in this arena.

There is nothing lost though in my belief so much.. correct me if im wrong but didn't bitcoin start the beginning of 2013 below $10? 

The price could very well drop back down below $500 or even $100 before we know it.. not that i am hoping this will happen, but if it does it would be a good buying opportunity again.

But what more important is (like you said) even at this point we are all still early adopters as these coins are still well beneath the radar of the mainstream. Just go and ask any random person you know if they have ever heard of a bitcoin or even know what one is.  Most still have no idea..

However there is still a great amount of opportunity in developing new infrastructures and position yourself in the middle of the currents early.. and capatilize on the great opportunities to come..

Look around now.. are we seeing any type of over saturation in any market or service?? I think not.

I guess newbs can now get into the altcoin game now...

Yeah there was a time when buying was very hard. After mtgox and dwolla stopped and before Coinbase, there was almost no way to buy them.

Many are in this boat. When I first used bitcoins they were $10 A piece. I even sold about 10-20 for a hundred.

Hey man, I sent you PM.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Makes me want to learn more about Bitcoins and keep mining, even if it is just a hobby.

Think I'll take your advice, buy a coin or 2, and just sit on them and see what happens.

Great time to buy right now or on 1-31

+1. It's never too late.

Oh shit, that sucks.

How many bitcoins were you mining per day back then?

Wow. What a great story and advice. As you can see, I am new here and only bough a couple of bitcoins few months back and I am now holding until I financially can. Like you, I have a medical condition in my cervical back that it is making impossible to keep a ok  and unfortunately I am not an expert on the computer area/programming. I am more and more fascinated by all this new technology and the idea behind. May I ask, where can I start to learn more technical stuff and what can I do to learn some programming without having to sit on a school (again, my cervical pain won't allow me to sit for long)!
Good luck to you my friend.

I was getting blocks of 50!

http://www.codecademy.com

its okay man im with you. :P

We'll if it was not for people like you utilizing the coin it wouldn't have picked up that much. So, no regrets OP!

Gone where? I am sure I don't need to tell ya: 1 kBTC might be worth trying to get it....

.

Fuuuuuuuuark damn.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16284

Always worth a shot at 1000 BTC
Although I would say its dead

Cryptocoins are unique phenomena - we are competitors and partners at one time. Competotors when mining same coin and partners, cause our efforts create coin value.

And I thought he had lost the wave of coins, but is just beginning, thank you for sharing your story, I guarantee you did a lot genrte feel better, just like me.

But do not worry it's not only you who lost money! (http://gizmodo.com/some-fool-threw-away-a-hard-drive-with-7-5-million-of-1472685803)

that story touches the heart shit i hate the thought of not having the knowledge to protect yoruself in the beggining

damn that sucks

how many btc u holding exactly now??
5-10?

You're a really good guy who cares. Hindsight is always 20-20. I've made a ton of mistakes also but that is how we grow and learn. Thank you for your story and God bless.

You just copied my post word for word!

I called myself an early adopter but I'm also an early seller.  >:( I sold most of my coins on 2012 and in march 2013 and didn't buy again.

Right now I started to buy small amounts, this time I will hold it for long.

I only discovered bitcoins in last month of 2013. Not a very bright time to hear about the coin if you look from the point of view of today. I don't stand on any stash either. It was a wild ride, had to pay off for things. Through time, didn't make much. But I am keeping whatever I can for a long term, I will be holding for  a long time now.

Btw I could fix any kind of bad hdd. Wish I knew back then.  Could fix yours easily. Plus I thought there would be a way to make the old ghost backup work. If I am not sure. You could have tried!?

Great story. Though most of the people think that early adopters sure have lots of btc, they're completely wrong. Looking back, it was great, but heck, regrets? :3 So newbies, don't feel bad. Most of the early adopters had lots of btc before it was cool. Not all early adopters are rich now because they have lots of btc; some have sold off their holdings when btc started to take the media's attention. :3

damn 1,000 bitcoins just gone...  :-\

It must suck to feel starting all over again..

One of the best post i have ever read on this forum.

+1

i know how you feel...
i lost much to bitconica, pirate and moonco.in - only some coins left. but luckily i still own more in fiat terms than i have invested in (at least as long bitcoin is above 100$).

btw i too think we are early adopters

i learned my lesson and i am HODLer now ;)

Yup. Powerful thread

this thread made me feel a bit better, since I lost 4 btc recently.

You lost 4 BTC? How?

The major lesson learnt here is that you really need to make sure your bitcoin is safe.
Not only you need to store it in a safe place (not on exchanges, not in your compromised computer, etc) and make backups, you also need to make sure the backups really work before a disaster strikes.

This. "Being your own bank" means that you need to be extremely careful when managing your wallet(s) but also acquire the necessary knowledge to do so.

Yeah you right, when i still newbie about bitcoin and don't know anything. i'm just doing faucet everyday and oneday i feel this is waste my time. everyone start from newbie, so don't worry for newbies :D

Honestly faucet is waste of time no matter what your rank is.  Only way it is not is the ones with big referral base... I don't have that or seek that on faucets as I don't want to send people out wasting time and me get a kickback from it.

I still say take time you would use on faucet and learn a sell-able skill.  Pick something you enjoy but a few hours a day add's up pretty quick. 

When early times We can Coreduo processor System itelf We can more 5 to 10 bitcoins.But present situation We are big miners with consumption of high electricity. I saw from 2 years there are big variations in price. People adapted and awareness increased gradually and many things happened in bitcoin. Just take all are good for bitcoin’ s future. This is my experience about BTC.:)

But in old days, the faucets paid out a lot. Today, faucets paid out micro bitcoins. Maybe the dollar value is still the same.

Back when those faucets paid out they where worth nothing but then they went up on price,  same thing could happen to you. It's all relative.

Everyone who currently has bitcoin is an early adopter, because in 5-10 years bitcoin will skyrocket!

Only thing that I can do is to hug you. I'm serious, really. That's not easy to accept a lost of this type. But you have a great reason, we're here in the right place and in the right moment. So, HODL and sell when Bitcoin will reach a value of 20.000$ ! :D

Merry Christmas bitcoin brother 🎅

I don't know that now will be looked at as early adoption.  I think it's jumping in much later then early adopters.  Early adopters had no idea how much, if anything BTC would be worth.

I mean look at the first purchase of a pizza.... that is early adopter.  Now we know BTC has a value (a lot higher then back then), so we are still adopters but not early I don't think.

You never know $1 million in 10 years would make $400 look like free

BTW this was one of the very first threads I read when I joined the forum and BTC world. At that time I was afraid of investing in BTC (it was in January 2014, at $900) but I took inspiration from bitpop's quote "buy 1 bitcoin and sleep on it", which quickly became my mantra. I slowly reached that goal and kept this amount for months (now I have more though). Thanks Bit and Merry Christmas.

This is a great reason why people need to read these threads and make sure they know how they can protect themselves from letting something like this happen again.  Be safe and back up your system to a second backup and pretend there is a crash and make sure your backup is good.  I am so sorry to hear someone lost 1,000 BTC from 2011.  That is a house purchase at this price, and a million dollar payout when it goes back up to $1000.

Do you honestly believe 1 million in 10 years from 450?  I think that is pretty unrealistic myself... I expect it to go up but my speculation is much less than 1 million in 10 years... that just is not a value I think people will pay for 1 BTC in that time frame but I hope I'm wrong.

Yeah either hundreds of thousands or 0

What are you basing your speculation on?  I just have a hard time wrapping my head around BTC being hundred of thousands or million in 10 years which is not that long. 

I guess I think realistically that is a pretty big jump, and one we likely would need a lot more time I think to every hit.

well the last 6 years you see a x4000 increase, from $0.1 to current value which look stable to me, so we can consider it

do another x4000 in 10 years, which is even greater than 6 years, well i know that it do not work in this way but you get my point, it's possible thta it may happen in only 10 years

@OP,
Your story has touched our hearts and it shows that we need not to worry, as Bitcoins' value may go whether up or down, 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC, it's not the price of BTC that we are here for, we are here for its "VALUES" and "RESPECT"...

I am having less amount of BTC but hodling and can say that one day I will be a millionaire for sure... ;)

I am just sad I didn't know about the wallet dat in the appidata area to grab and save when I moved into a new computer and would have

had saved to CD rw if I knew anything about how big this had gotten. I believe I have over 1K btc at the time. That was way back in 2011.

If I had this cd rw and it broke out on the news last year, god knows I would be an overnight sensation in our town. I might even have to

disappear myself to another city to hide even!

That's the problem with adopting things early  :-[

Things aren't sophisticated enough, nor safe enough when it comes to technology and a new type of cybertech, to keep your "cybertech" safe. Sad.

as i can see you got the bad way of HD if it not crashed you had a hard drive valiuung like 1 million and that can be money for us newbies lol

Yes we all benefit from lost coins

bitpop since you are early adopter tell me, what was time when in your perception bitcoins were relatively the cheapest. I mean  4 years  ago they could be easily  perceived as much expensive as they are today, am I correct?

Yeah $17 was too much in my mind years ago. But this year $150 was too cheap. It's all subjective.

It all depends on if the bitcoin is still there in 10 years time. If there is active development, the price will rise a lot.

I know perfectly how do you feel. I'm not as an early adopter as you but a similar situation happened to me. Nevertheless, I'm here to fight to stay on top and continue to support bitcoin and digital currencies in general!

I am an early adopter compared to the people knowing about bitcoin 1 year later. I have some advantages now to buy the bitcoin cheap.