Bitcoin Forum

Can you remember how you got your first Bitcoin?

I'd love to hear some nice stories - hopefully other than mining
or trading on MtGox, unless there's some unusual/interesting detail...

I, for one, reached my first BTC of wealth just last week, through a couple of kind donations! :)

I got my first 0.08 BTC from the faucet.  It was supposed to be 0.02 BTC, but there was a bug that made it send four times.  Once I got my mining rig set up, like a week or two later, I sent it all back.

Received my first Bitmill from the statues in Dragon's Tale.

I got mine from the BTC faucet!, I got a happy .05... Then those jerks started to attack the water supply and tried to drain it...

Ugh, I hated it at first.

For some reason, I guess I did not do enough research I went the Dwolla--MtGox Route

Time it took:
4 Days for Dwolla to verify my account
3 Days to transfer it to my account
6 hours to transfer it to mtgox

To be honest, I wanted to try out SR, but after researching the actual prices, it was cheaper to use Mr. Shadester who lives a few blocks away  ;D

sgornick gave me a free Bitcoin for the free Dwolla dollar I got when I signed up there I think. It was either him or someone else running another promotional gig. I then bought $20 worth of Bitcoin from either him or someone else via Paypal, and then by the end of February 2011 I owned over $500 worth through Keefe and some other IRC #bitcoin-otc regulars.

A friend, in a demonstration of how I could make use of it. Shortly after that I started doing business with it, then the bubble happened and I started speculating with some of my profits and spending more time on the board. 

First multiple 0.05 coins from abusing Faucet
First 1 BTC from MtGox
First 100 BTC from stealing wallet.dat files

Lost all my coins when purchased big order right after the price crash in June 2011

Karma.

It was june 2010,I was very excited by idea of decentralised p2p currency,I gave it a try and run the client on mining mode on my 1.66 Ghz CPU laptop.Just in one or two days I got earned 50 BTC.At that time in just few days I made 450 BTC but did not knew that in one year 1 BTC will be 30 $.I spent all at so cheap rates I dont even remember now.

A guy named Morpheus ran a PayPal for bitcoin business, until PayPal froze his account. I was lucky enough to get a handful for $1.80 right before they shut him down.

I put some dollar bills I had left from a vacation to Nepal (I'm german and don't usually own dollar bills) into an envelope and sent that to some obscure address in Canada.

I totally didn't expect anything to happen and wrote them off until after about 2-3 weeks (before I had mined a bitcoin with my on-board nvidia at 3 MHhash/s), suddendly something like 17 bitcoins popped up in my client. Nice!

Received our first Bitcoins January 2012 from Maged, the first person that bought our honey caramels on this forum.

 

Started mining with my 5770 back in April of 2010.  I believe it only took me a day to generate one Bitcoin with the 5770 at the time.

I think I mined my first BTC back in the day around April-March 20111 with my 6970 :D
//DeaDTerra

Wait...you mined at a pool? two years ago? with a 5770? At difficulty 4096? Were you on drugs?  :)

Sorry.... 2011!

stumbled on it on poker forum in spring 2011,
then went to wikipedia and read some more,
after that I bought wherever I could :)
(paypal, coinpal, through this forum, youtipit, mtgox)

In 2010 I sold an unused copy of Windows 7 Ultimate for 1400 BTC

It does take a bit to set up Dwolla, but honestly it's the only reliable 100% scam-free way to get bitcoins that I know of (I use bitfloor which works with Dwolla). Patience is a virtue... and then you can get stuff from SR with European prices... so much cheaper and safer than Mr. Shadester :)

I got my first coins from CoinPal back when the price was just under a dollar. I actually put a request into the faucet first, but because of reasons I can't quite remember anymore, faucet transactions were having a hard time getting relayed and added to blocks, delaying the transactions for about a day. If it wasn't for me being willing to try out buying bitcoins through CoinPal, I very likely would have given up on Bitcoin right there.

Heh, do you realize you can use my company Bitinstant.com to deposit cash at any bank in the US and fund any of 6 exchanges we support?

I think thats 100% scam free

 ;D

CPU mined 50 BTC back in mid to late late 2010 using the Bitcoin client's built-in miner. A few days later I think I mined another 50 BTC. Shortly thereafter I reformatted the computer (a Dell PowerEdge 2970 server) and lost the wallet.dat. I think it was around the time somebody paid 10,000 BTC for a pizza so I didn't think much of my 100 BTC then.

CPU mined a few hundred on my laptop July 2010 in a few days....I heard about bitcoin via slashdot....difficulty shot up real quick and I forgot about bitcoin for about a year.  Luckily I didn't loose them.

Thanks, I'll check you guys out.

Mined it. Block #38,754.

especially because I don't think there was a public opencl kernel at the time ;)

that's classic!

Mined in slush's pool a few days after it started (december 2010).

First got 0.05 from the Faucet to see how it worked. Then, right after that, I moved all my Second Life Lindens (which I didn't play anymore) via some nice person who was doing SLL to BTC conversions I think mainly as a hobby to spur interest. It was November 2010. Boy, do I wish I had the foresight to buy a bunch more at $0.25 and sell at $30. :)

:)

I heard about it right before the MyBTC scam/hack, I mean like days before it happened. I wasn't sure what I was doing, and cpu mined on Mybitcoinplus. My first coin was actually had from mining on a now deceased 5750. I now have about 12 coins, all of which are invested.

If there was an award, you just won it! Awesome

Sorry for being so unoriginal. The "world ugliest bitcoin minig rig" (pictured on the left) was solving a few blocks a day back then.

Do you have a larger picture of that somewhere?

http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/2814404597/worlds-ugliest-bitcoin-mining-rig
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf8gztgZYF1qfy0bho1_r1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1333301787&Signature=qPzPmEF8ujEaJ1wSWum8eGzVq1A%3D

it was taken using an iphone with less than perfect lighting I think on the above page it is as good as it gets. But let me know the reason you want better quality and I will scour my archives, maybe will find higher resolution for ya.

Except I kept the coins on MyBitcoin right before their vanishing act...

I can remember getting my first .1 BTC after a week of mining with my CPU before my first graphics card showed up, haha.

After that, I made about .2 BTC a day.

Now I'm hoping to get my BFL single unit in the next coming weeks!  Woot!