Bitcoin Forum

Looking at the member list, it seems that there are many people who registered in the early days of Bitcoin, made a few posts, then disappeared days, weeks, or months later without a trace. I wonder what happened to these people? Many of them would have been mining multiple bitcoins per day on CPUs and GPUs or they might have bought several bitcoins at less than a dollar a piece. Some even had conversations with the great Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

Surely they must have heard about how enormous Bitcoin has become, and yet... their accounts haven't been touched since they left the forum years ago.

For example, this user joined in late 2010 and left in mid-2011:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1668

Another one made a lot of posts and then disappeared in mid-2011 - only to resurface again, make a single post to get some free ripples, then leave without a trace:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2033

And another one:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=344

Take a look at some of the threads that Satoshi participated in or go to the member list and sort by date, and you will see many such accounts.

I wonder what happened to them? Does anyone know? Surely they must be whales now?

When you see a huge sell wall on an exchange, or someone making multiple 10+ BTC bets on a dice site, could it be them? When the world discovered Bitcoin and these early adopters suddenly found themselves sitting on something worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, why did so many of them decide to pack up and leave the community altogether?

Surely they must be whales now?


no because when you sell at 1,50 $ or just lost your wallet its over. i guess the majority of these people just left the bitcoin sphere because they dont saw the future of BTC .

(and some a millionaires of course)

Let's see
I bet they already have a lot of bitcoin because they are early adopter.

Maybe, they don't want anyone to discover them & steal their bitcoin

A lot of people weren't willing to drop real money into something that was not proven, they may have thought the idea was interesting but not worth the hassle (at the time) to convert their dollars to bitcoins, it was a much higher risk then than it is now. I dumped $10k into it because I believed in it and I was able to move the price fairly easily and would have been considered a "whale". But I got in at $17 before a 2 year downtrend...I only made it to just a few months before the uptrend.

I also signed up early on here after hearing about Bitcoin, had a few posts. Tried to mine on my laptop. The program crashed, I thought it was a nice concept but obviously had a ways to go so I left (that was when the price was under a dollar). I didn't come back until the $32 bubble created some headlines.

Some of them never had bitcoins.

But the others already understand what Oscar Wilde said:

Some of them commited suicide as many ppl who won in lotteries. And BTC was kind a winning lottery for most.

Surely they did not leave altogether but everyone for himself. Btw. if it is about money, there is no community. People can realize it after they make themoney not with gradual work but with one lucky or brilliant shot.

Community lives from joined hopes of (poor) people that some day, they will do together something...

But once it is reached, the people realize that fulfilled dream is like sex from last year & castration all in one. Dream is life, life is dream, challenge is gone, there is no shared dream, so community and even personality has huge problems.

What is left is gambling and not community then. Gambling is at least temporary relief from the emptiness of the life.

When you have no money and you want them, you have many co-fighters in this world. There is no need to talk about it, but the shared goal to make money and to do something is the human glue. But last thing you want, after you fulfill the stupid dream, is to talk with other newbies about their dreams and see them either failing or succeeding, which is both horrible.

So it makes sense that they gamble, fuck some expensive whores or do some coke. The rest I believe work, which is maybe a bit less destructive.

Maybe you can email one of them and ask "why are you disappear from this forum".
but there is a possibility they lost their account or they started new life ;D

Some would have sold hundreds and thousands for pennies when they thought they were making a killing. I can imagine they will be too disillusioned to come back to Bitcoin now.

Then there are those who may have forgotten their password, or created another account.

Many users registered here for information purposes etc., also many users had questions about mining and mined a few satoshis then.

I talked to a few people that I used to know from that time and they just got fed up with this forum and all of the crimes being committed here. I even took a break and came back as another nick. This forum isn't necessary for Bitcoin anymore. There is plenty of information available about using Bitcoin. The altcoin threads get more hits than Bitcoin threads do now. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=unread

They must have a great bussiness because they rich already
Being busy all the time  8)

But if they want to ask anything detail about bitcoin, I'm sure they will coming on this forum

This is probably because people are so willing to invest in new altcoins, probably with the hope that it will have the same success that Bitcoin has had.

I think a lot of people sold during one of the many times it's price increased 5x or 10x. I don't think many people were able to forsee the success that bitcoin had.

Just because people are active in bitcoin and have bitcoin does not mean they need to post or be active here

Maybe they're normal people, who live normal lives, without having to worry about the day-to-day happenings on a bitcoin forum.

I see things much more simply ...
perhaps he married ...
has started a family ..
now have a baby
has changed jobs and has much less free time ..

probably he hopes to get back up on bitcointalk soon!

I noticed the same thing, and wondered why.

Perhaps they went underground, like Satoshi, because they want to be left alone (for tax or other purposes).

many propably forgot their account names or emails.

it is possible too!!!

a lot of things, could be happened ...
and not necessarily aaaaaaall negative ...

Most people use throw away emails when they register on forums. So when they forget their passwords, they can't recover their accounts. I think those people are still around, they are posting with new(er) accounts.

Maybe just forget their username and password,so when they come back,they would chose to register a new one.

Or they lose all coins in Bitcoin gambling then lose faith in Bitcoin,the result is they never come back. :D

Maybe they just got fucked by Pirate@40 and decided they didn't like the idea of Bitcoin anymore since the government was necessary to clean it up. The governments involvement in this case was valuable and that's hardly a libertarians wet dream. You'd have to be a pretty hardcore retard to see the pirate fiasco happen and not understand why government oversight exists.

This is an interesting historical read: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100007836/bitcoin-pirate-scandal-sec-steps-in-amid-allegations-that-the-whole-thing-was-a-ponzi-scheme/

What's the pirate@40 thing you're talking about.  I don't think I've heard of this (even though I'm not a wet-dreaming libertarian anyway).

See the link I posted. Basically some Texas redneck in a wife beater T-shirt ran a ponzi using Bitcoin and the members of this forum lapped it up like chocolate ice cream. After they realized they all got fucked everyone ran to mommy government to "fix" the problem for them. Hence the reason for government oversight - the people demand it.

How you can be a hero member and not know of Pirate's ponzi?

Oh you joined after that. That makes me feel... old. Like when I realized Jurassic Park came out over 20 years ago. Dang.

Here's his main thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50822.0

Here's the thread where people started getting a little worried (interest rates being lowered). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91306.0

Edit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOcycgXpms