Bitcoin Forum

I'm interested in reading where you first heard of bitcoin? How did you get your first bitcoin and what was the price at that time ? And what's been your best experience dealing with this new experiment in currency?


Personally I heard about bitcoin only right after the huge price spike that caused bitcoin to shoot to fame last December. My first part of a bitcoin was obtained on an affiliate website for looking at advertisers and I've been hooked ever since. And my best experience thus far (less than a half a year ) was winning 20 ghs on a cloud hashing site the other day for Easter ! Look forward to hearing any stories of triumph or success ;) and my outlook on bitcoin is nothing but positive.I hope to start a charity one day funded by btc exclusively.

Ps. Am I the only one that looks at decimal points now and converts it to fiat in my head? Rofl.

I have a non-trivial story. One year ago I saw a sign "Bitcoin are accepted here" with BTC logo. I wondered what it is. Now I'm incredibly passionate about all of this.

Max Keiser mentioned it once and I had no clue what it was, so I investigated and here I am.

I read about it on another forum in 2011 I think. Didn't investigate it more back then, rediscovered it in 2012 and started following it, and well, here I am. Didn't sign up for this forum until 2013 though! :P

 I found btc around 2011/12 while looking for a way to spend my stuck STP, then it was at $5 a bitcoin. I now wish i bought back then

It was pretty simple. I was BTC being accepted on some website in '10. Three years later I randomly found a link to this forum and here I am.

Well, how i found about bitcoin? I just saw bitcoin name first time when a guy was buying bitcoins for my local currency then I googled It. It caught my eyed and i started research more information about It and now I'm here using Bitcoin and investing in them  :)

I don't like violence, coercion, and exploitation. Therefore I do not like nation-states (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCEXtpTNYU), and their clown-ass currencies.

I do like mathematics and tremendously elegant, simple solutions to problems. Thus, I like cryptocurrency; I like Bitcoin.

i saw this article about buying drugs online back in late 2011.  didn't check it out because i wasn't using drugs back then.  went there a year later and then discovered the whole bitcoin concept.  of course i had checked it back when Bitcoin first came out.  but didn't spend more than a day thinking about it.  and really forgot all about it until i checked Silk Road again

A friend was telling me that the success of the Silk Road was driven primarily by the perceived relative safety and trust of getting drugs from there instead of getting them in person.

It's funny, the war on drugs pushes people off the streets and onto the net (and into crypto), and then the FBI, via the war on drugs, shuts down the silk road and seizes millions of dollars in profits for themselves.

What a coincidence. One could even argue that the whole situation was rather convenient for the FBI. But hey, I'm no conspiracy theorist, I just call it like I see it.

I started mining with my GPU in late 2011, early 2012... Was making about .5 BTC a day, which wasnt worth much back then... Then got bored with it and still had the BTCs on my computer... Wiped the hard drive on my computer losing all the bitcoins... Then got back into bitcoins in late 2012 early 2013... been here through the mining craze and such.

Ouch. Haha /kickself. Who really knew though ? I'd love to hear from somebody who believed in it from day one and now has enough capital to start their own buisness / retire :D

I can't remember when I first heard about bitcoin, but I started paying attention ot it in August last year. I think it was because of Jeffrey Tucker's video. Bitcoin was $90 then but I didn't buy. I started buying in January this year when it was ~$800 :D I also started reading about the technical side of bitcoin and am still doing it. Best thing about bitcoin was discovering other people who are interested in it (I'm in SE Europe) and particpating in my first bitcoin meetup April 1st.

Had I not been a dumbass, I would have ~25 BTC right now... If I can pick one mistake where I could go back in time and correct it, I would choose not to have wiped my hard drive.

I bought my first Bitcoin in January 2013 for 14 euro after hearing about it somewhere. Then I forgot about it for a while. Come March we got the banking crisis in Cyprus and I got hooked on Bitcoin. I lost some Bitcoins through bad investments but the average price I bought them for is more than 4 times as high as the price Bitcoin recently "crashed" through following the Mt.Gox debacle and the China uncertainty. So I'm still ahead. :)

My friend told me about it, so I bought 10BTC (it was ~$100 at that time). I never really invested a lot in BTC, because I didn't have much fiat, but I enjoy reading about it and watching this amazing technology grow.

Began mining on 2010... wife said 'too much electricity' and i stopped mining.... made like 0.08 BTC in two days with two lousy PCs....  :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[

I heard about Bitcoin from a friend of mine Len Sassaman, a cryptographer. 
This was back in 2011, I believe.

After he passed away he was memorialized in the blockchain, you can check it out in this topic:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33618.msg420597#msg420597

Sorry about your loss but his knowledge he gave about cryptography and bitcoin you can hopefully help spread more good.

I use to hear about bitcoin thrown up on forums and just read comments about how great it is around 2011 but I didn't look into until my friend started buying some at around 12 bucks. But it wasn't for big investments or anything, so time went on and summer of 2013 a group of us friends decided it would be the right time to start mining but last minute we backed out and we seen the difficulty levels just start to rise and decided to just help other people get it by spreading ATM-like machines.

i started by mining in the gpu days till the end of 2012?  when spring came in 2013 it became unprofitable
i gambled  it all away a couple months ago
now im buying and holding long term as much as i can
im looking at least 5-10 year horizon and i will reconsider at that time.

Late last year a friend asked me if I "knew what bitcoin was"?. I thought it was video game money, I have a daughter who's 24 so you can imagine how much cash I used to spend for "video game money" in her teen years. Then he told me the price, asked me to look into it and now it has a big chunk of my attention.

My friend introduced about Bitcoin one year before. That time i don't had any interest in bitcoin. I thought it is a coins used in the games. When bitcoin reached at $1000 range that time only i got more interest.

You should have kept everything. Many of us made this same mistake.

Joe rogan tweeted something about silk rd and bitcoin last march. Caught the crypto bug :D

Cool to hear some stories  ;D

I googled how to get free steam games or something and someone said look into bitcoin mining.

I learned about bitcoin in 2011 on another Internet forum. The price was skyrocketing so I bought 100 BTC at $20 each. The price promptly went down so I ended up selling at $8 each. Lesson learned I thought. I had been "tuliped" I thought.

Then I hear back in November 2013 that the price was climbing once again. Except this time I saw a chart that showed that the Chinese exchanges now were buying half the bitcoins after only approximately 1 month. I just received an $8500 signing bonus from work so it all went into bitcoin, starting at $301 each. Yes, I even bought a few at $1100 but most were bought in the $300-$500 range.

I've also been investing in altcoins. I took my bitcoin/altcoin profits and used them for a down payment on a house. I had the salary to buy a house, just never enough for the down payment until bitcoin.

. Wow, now that's inspiring. A down payment on a house with bitcoin! :) hope I can get that far.

I have BTCitcoin, therefore I'm rich!

I saw a piece on the new and contemplated taking up mining but didn't.  Looking back, I sure wish I would have started THEN!

i got into bitcoin from seals with clubs. i was a poker player before black friday in 2012 and i found seals. i played for awhile won and lost a lot and got out of it. bitcoin price skyrocketed and since ive came back

I read about Cryptsy by the end of November, 2013. I realised that I have been trading stocks which have incredible fees and low returns so I turned to BTC. The technology sucked me in completely.

Thanks. I hope the price of bitcoin goes up so much that you can afford a down payment on a house too. Then your investment on your house should get you even more money.

Bitcoin was mentioned in March 2012 by one of the Ron Paul talking heads on facebook. I checked it out, and wasn't immediately convinced. It did catch my attention enough that I didn't stop researching. Within a few weeks I was relatively convinced, and started mining about .4 per week (about $2 at the time). I had thousands of dollars I could have dropped on btc at the time... but didn't. I'd buy and use them, buy and use them. Finally in January 2013 I put about $1k in and got my last major chunk (btc wise) just before the run up to $266. After that I sat there looking at the $120 price, and couldn't stomach a purchase. I converted 1/3rd of my btc to silver at the time, figuring we'd see another prolonged downtrend. Then came China. Now I don't have the stomach to sell at any price. I don't care what the price is any more, I just buy. I've taken every spare penny for the last 4 months and put it in to btc. I've bought at anything between $850 and $350 recently... and as low as $4.50 historically.

I have bought some cool stuff with BTC. I bought a high end (hobbyist grade) 3D printer, and used my stash as collateral on cash loan for a down payment on my house. Bitcoin has opened me up to business internationally. I've done btc business with Spain, Italy, Venezuela, and Ireland. Like more countries, but the state no longer matters with btc.

Since learning about bitcoin I've moved politically from an ideologically inconsistent liberty Republican, to an ideologically consistent deontological and consequentialist anarcho-capitalist. It's not because of bitcoin, but bitcoin has provided an ongoing thought experiment. The implications are phenomenal.

Not much of a story I suppose for me. A good friend of mine made note of it to me (knowing my tech ninja status in my circles), though I did remember seeing something about Bitcoin a few years earlier on some tech website. Back then it was just a little known garage project. But, I was into Bitcoin hook line and sinker after that, forming Blockburner as a Bitcoin business in the realm of mining and infrastructure realizing quickly the potential of blockchain technology and it being the cutting edge kind of business I had been looking to start my entire life as a would-be entrepreneur of little success.

The end of the story is that Bitcoin did renew my overall purpose in life which had become lost to me sometime prior as a generic datacenter tech rotting away in a server filled corporate dungeon. So for that, my friend/partner has my eternal gratitude for getting me on an exciting new path.

very interesting! What type of buisness do you operate?

I have been following BTC on and off for a couple of years.  I remember when it was around $10.  It all seemed so obscure that I never thought it would go anywhere.  So i didn't bother investing.  Been kicking myself ever since. 

Got a cheap USB asic which might earn me .01 BTC in 6 months (as it only runs when the work laptop is on).  Might buy some coins when they get back down to $10 ;)

I just like the geekyness of saying im mining bitcoins.  Especially as it doesn't actually involve doing anything. 

Yay Venezuela! :) Nice to see someone spreading the BTC love!


I think this is the most important fact about bitcoin: showing the anarchism can be brought to real life with technology being the enabler. I too have moved from a semi-leftist position to a more anarchist ideology. No need to be constrained by complicated and bureaucratic schemes. Nice to see someone else had the same reaction to bitcoin.

I am very excited and believe wholeheartedly in this community!

My name is Ash and I am from Germany.
Started with bitcoin in 2013 using gox and was really happy when bitcoin was going up  :D
Less happy when gox fell before I could withdraw my funds.
I even tried to speak with my bank, Dresdner AG, but they said my transfers were processed...

Anwyay, started working with my own cold wallet now, I have fate in bitcoin and looking forward for future  :)

Found out about it late last year in a magazine. A friend and myself have been mining it since then and haven't looked back!

What magazine? I found it online here!

You discovered bitcoin here on bitcointalk?
Interesting, what makes you come here in the first place?  ;D

A colleague told me about the concept a few years ago, in 2011!!

Wut how is that possible?! Debora please explain. She probably means like online on the internet ???

I cant remember haha. But it was a tech magazine.

First heard/learned about Bitcoin back in mid 2011 on an online forum. Was mildly interested but ignored it for the most part. Became interested again at around late last year just after the November 2013 crash. Purchased my first ~0.2 BTC from localbitcoins.com early this year. Been addicted to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies ever since.