Bitcoin Forum

I'd love to hear your stories.

We all must have some interesting stories about how we came to find Bitcoin.

Please share!

from my younger brother, that he heard from my another younger brother, and that he heard from rtnews in youtube(provably)

Heard about it in 2010, probably on Twitter. I got fascinated by the ideas and read up on it some more. I finally bought £25 worth in late 2010.

I've never considered mining because electricity costs are quite high in UK and dealing with buying ASICs just seemed like too much risk (high cost items in a new market) for me. Also the care and feeding of that hardware just seemed like an extra job I didn't want.

Since then I've bought and sold a few items/services for bitcoins. Late last year I added a bitcoin payment feature to my dayjob's web site. I've sold the majority of my initial bitcoin purchase in the various highs, so have made a nice profit out of it, but I feel the need to keep some in order to keep an interest in what goes on with Bitcoin.

New to BTC, only 3 months ago

Two Libertarian techie buds early 2013 told me about mining and this thing called bitcoin and I shrugged it off then.  One buddy sent me .125 bitcoin and he said "just watch it grow".  Early this year I heard about Gox and watched closely how bitcoin refused to die and was garnering more media attention when I realized that this is a train that has just left the station, I jumped on...  BTC

I first heard about about Bitcoin back in late 2011 / early 2012. As a gamer, I happened to have a GPU that was good for mining (6950) and mined a few coins (now lost) back then just out of curiosity. I came back to it around September 2013 with real interest as I learned it had gone over $80 / Bitcoin (and I remembered when it was $10 / coin!). That's when I traded my first fiat for BTC.

Before Bitcoin reached $150 / coin, 90% of my net worth was divested from fiat. I have never looked back.

A friend told me in 2011.

I was fairly involved in Libertarian circles. A friend brought bitcoin to my attention in 2010. And I have to admit I didn't play too close attention nor invest that much time in research but I liked the general gist that I got. With the same friend's help I bought $25 worth of bitcoin at just over 15 cents each. I was thinking of it more as supporting an idea more than anything else. I didn't think much about it after that.

Many computers and hard drives later those keys are long lost. Yeah, I feel pretty stupid.

My best friend did an art gallery on the darkweb back in 2010 and he mentioned Bitcoin.  I looked all through the dark web, which, back then was like falling down the rabbit's hole.    Unfortunately, I didn't see the potential or try to figure out how to mine.

I first heard about it right about the time people were starting to mine with gpus, so late 2009 early 2010.  I'm sure it was on a forum, but I don't remember where.  I downloaded a wallet, but couldn't figure out how to mine and gave up.  Probably the worst financial mistake of my life.

You probably mean late 2010, early 2011.  Late 2009, early 2010 was when this forum was established and bitcoin 0.2 came out (TOR support).  I don't recall seeing anyone toy with the idea of using GPUs for block generation until April of 2010.

I didn't get involved until the release of bitcoin 0.3, in mid 2010.  I was pleased to get some bitcoins below 1 cent per coin (barely, the price was about 0.0086 USD/BTC when I started and, little did I know, was about to rise very quickly); I guess I should have kept more.

You are correct, it was fall of 2010.  Sorry about that.

I was looking for ways to sell Realm of the Mad God items, so I looked through the local forum and I saw someone selling items for... what's this, "bitcoin" you speak of?
I looked into it. March 31, 2013 early early morning near midnight. I figured it was some central server trying to avoid the governments, got a couple faucet dispensals, then forgot about it. (I did check the exchange rate, saw it was $96, said damn that's high.)
Later on May 28 a friend showed me BitVegas, then a very popular enterprise. Oh yeah, bitcoin! I saw that the price was now around $140 and showed a friend, and we discovered that bitcoins were decentralized, that they had to be mined.... Oh, how we tried to mine them! We spent about 24 hours with our laptops collecting satoshis before throwing in the towel on that one. Then came the bit mines... Made a lot of friends and money there.
(Maybe someone from the bit mines is reading this. My ign is cossacksson)
I'm happy to have found bitcoin when I did. I wouldn't have chosen a different time, for I probably wouldn't have met all these people :)

Found out about it in 2011-2012 because of SR news, unfortunately I didn't invest some time/money at that time. Bought some since 1 month ago after the decline since the ATH and hoping we've bottomed out now, to the moon :D

No problem; I'm glad I didn't offend you.

I didn't get involved in GPU mining until after the peak of the 2011 June bubble (I did a bit of CPU block generation when I first started, found 5 blocks with 140 khps :)).  It must have been fun mining through early 2011.

January 2011, I forgot exactly how but I stumbled upon bitcoin.org at like 2am one night and from the instant I read what it was all about I knew it was going to change the world.

It was all I talked about to my friends for about 2 weeks, most were extremely skeptical as I couldn't explain it to them as well as I can now.

I bought a couple hundred via paypal for 40 cents each and proceeded to gamble all but 20 away.

I then forgot about them for a few months and the next time I checked the price they were $8 and I was shocked and really mad at myself.

I found it cause I was looking for Prepaid debit cards for a stealth paypal account.  Also I was getting messages in my spam for BM CCs

A few years ago, one of my friends said he was "buying drugs with his graphics card" by running some open source software, I thought that was so utterly ridiculous I just had to check it out. Spent months reading up on all the finer aspects of Bitcoin and finally bought in. It's been a wild ride ever since!   

I was surfing the web in early 2013 and somehow stumbled onto something talking about bitcoins and once I bought my first coin, I didn't look back. It's been quite an adventure this far and it's not nearly ending yet!

Read about it in a tech article in 2010. Wish I actually bothered to buy some then, wasn't sure whether it would actually get anywhere. Clearly it has, so better late than never.

I think I might have heard of it before, but I pulled the repository for the first time in association with my desire to help support Wikileaks (and thus, my country (the U.S.))

Bitcoin did not have an auto-configuration system at the time (and indeed, lacked one until recently) and it would take some effort to get it to compile on my secure platform.  I got busy with other financial related issues and didn't get back to Bitcoin until after the 2011 spike.  Oh well...I did well anyway by buying down into the late 2011 bottom.

The first time I saw bitcoin when it was ~5 cents each (sometime in mid 2010?) and it had recently shot up 10x from ~0.005 (half a penny)
Since it was up 10x and I was short on liquid cash I didn't buy any.
Also, I wasn't aware of mining; This was just a little site with a crude price chart offering BTC for 5 cents each.
Oops....

Ripple user group mailing list, early 2009.  We were looking for a solution to a lot of problems in making a p2p money system...so our finding out about bitcoin was inevitable.   If I could shake the guy's hand who sent that email to the list, I would, as that one email changed my life dramatically.

In 2014 January only i come to know about Bitcoin through my friend.

Slashdot had an article on Bitcoin 0.3 (?) release in July 2010. The only miner was the client, there was no way to connect external miners, the getwork protocol only came up later that year with the idea of GPUs and pools. I mined 7 blocks on a Core 2 Duo and sold them for 24.50 EUR. Good times!

2012, ive been always reading about the non fiat movement, gold standards, and such, so the Bitcoin discussion came across.
I didnt understand the hell of it, and later on i finally bought half BTC at about 140€. When it skyrocketed to 600€ i bought some Magic the gathering cards with it and felt like the king of the jungle / God of the HackerZ interWebz Money :-))))
since then i learned a lot more and now i feel a part of it, rather than a mere speculator. Hell, i even mine some Spaincoin and DOGEs with my GPU at night xD

ummm yeah. remember it well

MAX KEISER ! funny how much mud is slung his way. but nevertheless, Thank You.

just how it is/was

Back when you only needed 87MH/s, guess the date and time

Date Registered:   August 11, 2011, 01:16:03 AM

This website, called compute4cash, where they ran their own version of polcbm pointed to their wallets discreetly, and then paid you USD for your work.

I think then I read more about it and someone said that referenced that it was just something about "bitcoin mining". So I did a little research, determined that that was literally what it was, and got into it that way.

I remember compute4cash shut down in the crash between $32 and $3. I always kind of wonder if they ever cashed out their coins at the low there or if they held on...

Cant remember exactly but heard about it a few times in 2012. Never really peaked my interest until a friend mentioned it again and once I had read the whitepaper and understood, that was it.

It was the best way to buy Alpaca Socks back in 2011.

An Ars Technica article back on Jan 18th 2013.

The article was about the then new mega.co.nz service, it didn't mention bitcoin itself but it was mentioned in the comments. Here is the article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goes-hands-on-with-kim-dotcoms-cloud-storage-site/

Here is the comment:
https://i.imgur.com/nRXmHPV.png

I then spent some time researching 'bitcoin' just purely on interest. I bought in before the end of the month.

Thankyou "lucianarmasu".

I find myself so unlucky to first find Bitcoin first only last year

Do you remember is Grass Hill Alpacas the original?
http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffer.html
....or a copycat?

Heard about it somewhere in April '13 just around 75$. Had some discussion about BTC with my colleague and decided not to buy (it was just a bubble according to him). And then......


......bought in at December '13 ;)  :D He did too...Hahaha.

Our motto is therefore; Buy High, Sell Low.

Jajaj, Were they?

Best performing business of the decade. Selling anything for Bitcoin back in early 2011. Hahah.

big bro told me about it or was it the other way round?? cant remember..

a bit late..about in octomber 2013:(...from a news site

I first 'heard' about Bitcoin in early 2013 but brushed it off like any other news story or conversation that I didnt think have much meaning.  Late 2013 comes around and my friends brother-in-law got us involved and more interested.  I started off like most unknowing nubs and played around on faucet sites while browsing and posting on this forum.  Started buying some BTC and mining altcoins.  A handful of a coins later im hooked!

10 years from now, who knows, maybe we'll all be early adopters.
Don't think about what would have been, but what will be!

It's good to see there are still so many newcomers.

Some of them must be feeling rather worried if they bought in late 2013 at $1000+. Really hope it works out for you guys. I think it will, if you hold long enough, but it's easy to say when not in that position…

it doesn't matter when you found Bitcoin.  it's about the things you can buy with it, that you can't buy with regular money (like piece of mind)

I wouldn't go that far.  If the only people on this thread heard about bitcoin in 2010-2011 or something, we might have a problem.  Thankfully that is not the case.

If i found bitcoin earlier than when i found it, then i would have a lot more bitcoins, which would allow me to buy more things & services and/or more expensive things & services.  

If I had every BTC I sold too low I could....
Cannot change the past, but we can probably still change the future.  :)

You would think this would incentivize some hodling, but doesn't seem to...

Found it here: http://lifehacker.com/5821634/why-you-should-ditch-paypal-and-use-these-other-services-to-send-people-money?comment=40991793#comments

I first saw bitcoin in 2010 on 4chan I quickly dismissed.

Then I saw this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwNfBgwbqng and I start playing with it. (This is when I respected Admir and Gavin)

How they have changed...

Well I bought in at December....turned out to be rather expensive coins... :D

However, I still believe Bitcoin will continue to grow further. Expensive back in December, cheap in 2016. I will hold for the long run. 

Most of people voted 2013. I guess bitcoin really needed this bubble

Found Bitcoin through Bitcointalk, even though I' heard of it previously on TV etc :)

Started following it in 2012 through hearing about Silk Road, but didn't jump in until late 2013.

How I regret not jumping in earlier... :'(

I read a DIY blog in early 2010, it may have been: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=42 But I can't be sure.
I saw the $500 price tag for each 5970 and said there's no way I afford that! It wasn't until the Summer/Fall of 2011 that I actually did my research and saw that I could mine with less expensive cards.
I went on a CL hunt and found 2 5850's that I put into service.  ;D I mined 2 BTC in 2 weeks and my wife was asking why it was so hot and loud and on ALL the time. Price dipped and I shut it down for peace in the household. I understood how to mine for bitcoin, but I didn't delve deeper into the whole network and concept of bitcoin.
Fast forward to April 2013 when I decided to sell my 2 5850's and get a "new" card for gaming. My 5850's sold in less than a few hours and I wondered what the big deal was. Ever since then I have been using, mining, reading, learning about bitcoin; all the while trying to purge the myths of bitcoin.

I remember watching a documentary about Piratebay in 2012, and quickly mentioned the creators of Piratebay to be linked to/ or are Satoshi Nakamoto. Quickly googled bitcoin, but that was it... Didn't know where to get it at the time. Fast forward to 2013 and it hit $1200, then bought my first coin and miners early 2014.