I'm just jealous I did not know about this in 2009 as my opinion then would not be any different to that which it is now and I would have poured a large chunk of my savings into it.
People say shit like this. Maybe its true. I *did* find out about it a long time ago. In 2010 I heard about it, and made a hlaf hearted attempt to set up a client mining, but work got in the way. I read about it again and I bought $100 worth in Feb 2011, which got me 100BTC. Seemed like nice round number. The thing is you have no idea how much of a risk it was.
Take for instance the chart...
Looks familier eh! exponential growth and me buying at the top... I should bet the farm right?
There was nowhere other than silk road which took it. It was widely derided (check out comments on bitcoin stories on slashdot back then). $100 was a lot of money for me at the time. I was still struggling to clear debts accrued starting a business, I owed tens of thousands of $ in back taxes. It took some real fucking nuts to risk $100 on what was basically a total punt at the time. I was buying off strangers on paypal that I met through bitcoinmarket. I was shifting money through intermediaries I'd never heard of (I am in UK) to get dollars, and they were all taking a slice.
Maybe you are prescient, and knew for a fact it was going to return 6700% to date. You would have had to hold through $32 and the retreat back to $2.
I couldn't do, with hindsight its easy to see that would be the best course of action. Instead I had to take profits on the way. I'd be a fool not to right? I sold around half of them at 7. Why wouldn't I!? 600% profit in 40 months... but then beat myself up when it hit 15 within days. I sold half again at 28, total fluke, because I was kicking myself when it carried on going up....
Then the painful slide. I bought often on the way down, this time I was sure, I knew it was going up, and over the months I sunk several hundred more dollars into it. But it never stopped going down... I ended up with over 200 coins at one time worth half of what I had spent.
When the turnaround came it was nice, but I was always playing catchup, I was leveraged at bitcoinica, I was in the black again. I pulled the leveraged positions and left several hundred dollars sat on bitcoinica in lowball limit orders, to catch the downward spike. It never came. Instead the zhou-crew walked with my dollars. A painful reminder of the risks of this market.
The block reward halving approached. Every ounce of me said the dollar price must inveitably double, but I was $1500 deep. In an experiment that could stop at any time. People seem to forget that. So I held on and dare not risk buying more.
Sure enough it came, the price rose, slowly then faster. We hit $30 and stalled. I sold enough to pull out €1000. Still with all that has gone before, I beat myself up about that decision, when I know I should just be satisfied with the fact that I now have a few more coins than I started with and they cost me nothing. Now business is good and I'm not in so much debt, its not such a big deal to find money to put into BTC, but my holding is already worth several thousand dollars. AND IT COULD STILL GO TO ZERO.
That's reality, that's what you go through when you find out about this thing 2 years ago, and its the reality people will go through if they find out about it tomorrow.
To say, now, looking back, well I would have just put a big chunk of my savings into it back in '09. You are free to say that, but I am free to doubt it.
