Of course, if I had as many BTC as you, and only had BTC and not fiat, that's exactly what I would do too, and it would make perfect sense. I merely wanted to stress the fact that we should sell our precious coins only when we have to. Anything that can be bought with spare fiat, should be bought with spare fiat, until there is no more spare fiat to spend. Bitcoin should be the last asset to spend.

You were the one! Thanks for reminding me (us).

As someone once said here in WO, when you're buying a Tesla with Bitcoin, what's really happening is Tesla is doing the buying and you are doing the selling.

I agree, luck has certainly played a role for many of us in our Bitcoin journey. But not just luck. I think that one needs to have a suitably capable brain to be able to get into Bitcoin and stay into it for the long run. The true early adopters were the "nerdiest of nerds", as you say, but they had brains too. At least those who kept their coins. Bitcoin was (and still is to some extent) a difficult thing to get into. You can't just go to a shop and buy it. You have to really want to own it, and, to some extent, you need to put some effort (physically and mentally) to get into it. This immediately pushes the lazy, weak, or dumb ones away from it.

On this coming Saturday (the 17th) I've arranged a meeting with a nocoiner cousin of mine, and we'll be meeting at my other cousin's house. So it will be me, my coiner cousin, and another nocoiner cousin. The purpose of the meeting is to initiate the nocoiner into Bitcoin, registering with an exchange, buying his first BTC (only BTC and no other type of coin, I will insist on this), transferring to a wallet, maybe a paper wallet, and also explain the underlying math & science behind Bitcoin. This takes effort, it's not an easy thing to do, even today. Just imagine those really early adopters. Setting up Linux boxes, installing the s/w, trying to understand the tech, and mining out of their CPUs/GPUs something that had no value, or very little value. It was not for everyone. You had to be nerdy, geeky, smartie, lucky, and open-minded, to want to do this. I applaud these guys.

As for me, I first heard about Bitcoin on the news on TV, can't remember when, probably back in 2010-11. Of course, news pieces are designed for dummies and did not really explain it properly. And it was quick too, barely 1 minute long. They just said "digital money", "being able to transact digitally over long distances". So what? Don't credit cards do that? What's so new about it? And the name "Bitcoin" didn't impress me for some reason. I actually hated the sound of that word. Yuck! "Who came up with that ugly name?", I said. And that was the end of it. I forgot about it. The next few times I heard about it was when Silk Road was shut down (2013), and MtGox collapsed (early 2014). Again on the news, and portrayed very negatively. And that was it again, I dismissed it, erased it from my brain and moved on.

I started seriously investigating about Bitcoin in late 2014. Here's an email I sent to a dear friend of mine (now a coiner), dated November 2014 (copy/pasted from my "Sent Mail" folder just now):

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, I forgot to send you those links about the topics we discussed on Sunday. Actually I can't remember all the things that I should send you links for. Here are the topics I do remember: Ponzi Scheme (Wikipedia's article), bitaddress.org (Bitcoin wallet generator), offlineaddress.com (similar to the above), Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Bitcoin's White Paper, by Satoshi Nakamoto). Let me know if I've forgotten something. One thing is certain. This is a big thing that has the potential to change the world. We should investigate about Bitcoin as soon as possible and understand it as much as we can. Study it (esp. the last link), and we'll discuss about it again.

The above is the earliest email record I have, where I'm seriously discussing about Bitcoin. Notice my first link: Ponzi Scheme. I was reluctant to accept Bitcoin at the time, because I had not studied it and did not really understand it. I remember reading the White Paper and getting goose bumps on my spine. It was like a revelation to me. I spent the entire week researching about it. I then called my friend on Skype and told him: "We've got to buy Bitcoin ASAP!"

I bought my first 0.5 BTC for about $100 in mid-2015, using a local Bitcoin ATM. 3 months later, I bought another 2 (or was it 3?) BTC for $1000 from the same Bitcoin ATM (price had risen since my first purchase). And that was my (admittedly, very late) start. Then came Andreas Antonopoulos, with his wonderful books and talks, that firmly cemented and gave rigor and structure to what I had already understood about Bitcoin. That was the "point of no return" for me. I was sold. I just knew that this was something big, something very big, and I was so excited to be part of it. And here we are, posting "come on, Bitcoin, do something" memes @ $60k...

So... Luck? Brains? Nerdiness? Craziness? All of the above? I don't know. But it sure has changed my life. And so far it's been the most exciting journey I've even experienced. And the best is yet to come!

Thank you, Satoshi, whoever and wherever you are.

Play this tonight/tomorrow, while we fight and win the battle for $62k...

Two Steps From Hell - Victory

Breaking ATH today will be so cool!

I'm going to visit my little niece & nephew again tonight, and their daddy is the cryptocurrency coiner cousin I posted about earlier! Sadly, he doesn't own BTC, but he's OK with his altcoins, and he's in (modest) profit too, so it's always great to chat with him, the vibes and atmosphere are so upbeat. Whenever we meet, I always recommend to him to move all his altcoins to BTC once he's satisfied with the profits. I hope one day he'll listen to me...

Don't worry, the fact that you own BTC means that you belong to the top 0.1% of the smartest people on Earth. Your brain is fine.

To level up, you need merits and activity, and to become Legendary you need 1000 merits and an activity of 775-1030 (chosen at random).

He had the merits, not the activity. His lucky number was 924 (or slightly less).

There is a big sell wall at $61,200... Why?

OTOH, why not?

Congrats, VB1001!

Merits we can help you with, but activity is all up to you...

Well deserved!

A wonderful Saturday morning to all WOers.

Used a Starbucks capsule for my coffee today. Tastes nice. Nespresso is a smart invention (for the lazy ones like me)...

Nice, long, green candles! This is almost chart-pr0n. No, chart-pr0n will come after we breach $100k.

$61,222.22 today's top, $560 shy of the current $61,781.83 USD-ATH (Bitstamp).
50,700 € today's top, 300 € shy of the current 51,000 € Euro-ATH (Kraken).

Will they be breached this weekend? Or today, even?

I can confirm that.

In the beginning of 2017, my cousin invested $5k in various cryptocurrencies. Currently he is in profit. His cryptocurrency portfolio is worth around $15k. Not bad. That's a 200% gain over the course of just over 4 years. No bank could ever offer that. Cryptocurrencies are so good, aren't they?

Here's the fun part: had my cousin invested his $5k solely in Bitcoin (as I suggested to him, but he didn't listen to me, because "it's too expensive"), he would now be the owner of 5 BTC = $290k. That's a whopping 5700% gain over the same period as above.

FTFY.

There's something pure and original about ABBA. They remind me of my carefree days of youth, when we never locked our homes and knew everyone in the neighbourhood.

We all hate shitcoins. I do too.

But, maybe, just maybe, shitcoins are a blessing in disguise. They do seem to help in a few things:

-- Sort out the opportunists from the serious investors.
-- Sort out the thick in the head from the smart.
-- Stress-test (and confirm) Bitcoin's unprecedented robustness and fault tolerance.
-- Weed out cancer cells, such as Craig Wright, Calvin Ayre, Roger Ver, and Jihan Wu.
-- Suck wealth out of "get rich quick" traders, just like maggots eat rotten flesh.

I often get angry when I see posts shilling shitcoins. But I shouldn't. To all shitcoin shills, I say: "Bring it on! Give it all you've got! Attack Bitcoin as fiercely as you can! Let the strongest survive!" After all, that's how the universe works. From the wild animals of the jungle, to the highest level of refined civilization. Survival of the fittest. So, bring it on, and let the winner take all.

All is fine.

I vote for Bitcoin as it currently functions on-chain. And I vote for 2nd-layer solutions for coffee purchases. We've all seen what's happened with BCH (a.k.a. bcash LOL) and BSV (a.k.a. Craig Wrong - Calvin Ayre pedo-island coin)...

I trust Bitcoin's future in the capable hands of the brilliant coders in the core development team, that slowly and extra-carefully add new elements in the code (SegWit being the most important of them so far), all under a strict consensus scheme. It's easy to criticize and suggest changes, big blocks, changes in PoW, some even want PoS FFS, but it's not at all obvious how those changes could affect the robustness and stability of the network. Just let 2nd-layer solutions handle coffee-sized purchases, and if they fail, get rid of them and develop new ones—the core network remains unaffected. It's a win-win. Don't mess with something that's proven to be the most successful network ever invented, with 100% uptime since 2009.

If anything, higher fees can serve as a spam deterrent: "Wanna transact on-chain? You'd better be serious about it." Just imagine having to pay $0.10 for every email you send. Email spam would be zero. I'm OK with that. Let 2nd-layer solutions gather your yearly espressos, cappuccinos and lattes with near-zero fees, and commit them all in a large $1000 on-chain transaction, with a $5 fee.

My 2 sats.

Edit: Updated my 2nd-layer solution example with more realistic numbers.

Saylor may be talking about instantaneous price value, not averages, or we don't know his averaging parameters, or he may be excluding certain events as outliers. It's all a matter of interpretation, averaging horizon, etc.

Some predictions talk about $400k/BTC by the end of 2021, so that's a 1200% gain for 2021 (assuming $30k/BTC at the start of 2021)... Wild, sure, but does King Daddy care?

Personally, I consider a "stable" price of $100k/BTC by the end of 2021 to be a realistic, healthy, and pretty damn good scenario. That's a 230% gain for 2021, which pretty much agrees with Saylor's Crystal Ball^TM. By "stable", I mean safely above $100k, say, $120k-$130k, with the usual volatility and ant-pump/dumpenings.

These are all SOMA guesses of course, as I believe SOMA guesses to be the best price predictors. No math or science involved—I leave that to our resident expert, the singing llama.

Edit: I calculate % gain as 100 x [V(t) - V(t-1)] / V(t-1), i.e., a 2x gain is a 100% gain.

$56k and rising. <--- This is fine.
No singing llama posts. <--- Worried!

FTFY.

Why poorer? If anything, HoDLers came out so much richer after 2017...

Instead, mindrust is dead (read: nocoiner) and poor.

^^^ "de-bozo"... That's a nice one!

The act of "de-bozoing" someone out of shitcoinery...