I did find out about it in 2011 when a homeless hacker-ish friend claimed "this could be worth thousands now it's worth $1", therefore wanted to crack some free internet for us in order to mine some coins... But ultimately he never got that connection sorted. There was no strong enough WEP available from the neighbors, was trying dictionary brute force WPA prior to reaver/WPS, so gave up after a week. He instead got some coins P2P, followed by selling around $5-10 for some high grade weed (a classic case)
Funny thing about some people who might have a vision, they frequently will have lack of stick-with-it-ness or even lose their conviction. Another problem if a person is materially lacking in basic comforts such as a home, regular meals and maybe even has some bad habits, then those kinds of peeps will have tendencies to cave or cash in their profits...
so even if that guy was able to gardner together $500 to $2.5k to buy a BIG BTC investment, his getting 5x to 10x profits which would have been $2,500 to $25k - depending on how much he invested, would still have amounted to chicken feed in the event that he would have been able to HODL all the way through to present times - which surely is almost an impossible hope for a guy in such a position, unless he were to actually physically lose access to his coins and then regain such access at a later date.
If the second scenario were to have occurred, he likely would not have deserved such rags to riches, but many of us do surely love a rags to riches story, even if he would have blew the fuck out of $30 million to $120 million too, but gosh would have taken him a lot longer to blow such levels of accidental (and likely undeserved -
repeating myself) wealth.
Then again exposed in Winter 2014 while living with a core dev & (legal/unofficial) "hackspace" for a few months. I did learn a lot, but they were too busy getting high for me to take them seriously. Even when they weren't on acid, it seemed like they were on acid basically. But ultimately, even while being computer literate by then, it still seemed too young and too high risk despite the potential. Especially while beginning it's down-trending at this point after blow off top + had no money then anyway
Plus the crew were annoying af to live with, proper waste of space, so put me off for personal reasons investing in "their ideas".
I agree with both of those points (or are there three points?) that investing in something needs money, and there can sometimes be annoyance and distractions by the lifestyle choices of the peeps who might have some of the right ideas but are not really setting good role model examples in other ways.
You know that does remind me of some similar dynamics here on the interwebs, sometimes. Sometimes some of us BTC maximalists can be annoying as fuck in terms of turning off newbies who have differring views about either how to get into bitcoin or to have creative approaches to complementing their bitcoin investment with shitcoins. And, sure sometimes they might not be wrong with their overall approach, but vigorous debates on the interwebs (not know each other personally) can surely create some turnoffs and even some people may end up taking actions of either NOT buying bitcoin or betting against bitcoin because they get into some interpersonal battles - and jeez I heard Peter Schiff interviewing with Pompliano yesterday or so, and that little twat Schiff was making some decent points about diversification, but he did seem to be somewhat distracted by some pride ideas, including that he did not want to pump the bags of the bag holders such as Pomp and others... I do agree that there are several spots in that interview that Pomp had lost a lot of humbleness (which was kind of childish and not really a good look), but still people (BTC HODLers) can sometimes get a bit arrogant and have desires to rub it in a wee bit more than they probably should - even if it might well feel good at the time to enforce the "I told you so" idea with some actual performance metrics.
Sure I understand that you druggie buddies (roommates) were personal turn offs for somewhat other reasons, but still we can sometimes get distracted by personalities and lifestyles rather than appreciating some of the underlying facts (and broader underlying forces) for what they are.
Regarding money.. I mean holy shit... Sometimes when I was in College, I was scared as fuck to be investing very aggressively in anything, and I recall cashing in some of my investments (what a fucking dumb fuck I have been in my life to consider that giving some investments 8 years or more to ride caused them to be eligible for cashing out for expenses rather than folding them into other investments.. what a dumb fuck I have been sometimes, too), so I can appreciate difficulties in investing even modest amounts of something like $25 to $100 per week - when there can be some extended periods of time of decently tight cashflows.
I also had considered that investing in my education was important (which was true), and I had some hostilities in terms of engaging in some kinds of work, merely to improve my cashflow because sometimes I took voluntary positions (and not receiving any cash) to improve my resume and to get connections and experiences in higher status brain work categories rather than potentially pigeonholing my lil selfie into manual labor type experiences... but in the end meant. pretty damned low levels of cashflow from time to time and difficulties to invest into anything besides making sure all the monthly (or whatever) bills are met.
And really no investment was really available in those earlier times - except mining and bitcoin largely did not have a price until mid-2010. and that was quite vague and weird (such as two pizzas for 10k bitcoin).. so I would not even have considered that there was any meaningful "investment" opportunity in the financialization sense of the word (not just talking about time to mine it or to involve yourself in BTC development or some other kind of investment) into bitcoin until perhaps 2011-ish.. and of course, more and more opportunities for financially "investing into bitcoin" came about with the passage of time.. and moreso maybe in 2013 when more exchanges came about such as Coinbase and Local bitcoins and some others began to become more available.... .. but even then.. still pretty damned niche of an investment - so sure.. somewhere between 2011 and 2013 seem to be about the earliest of days for financial investing into bitcoin - niche as it was (unless you want to explain some other ideas about what you mean by missing out of investment opportunities into bitcoin by nearly 10 years..
For sure there wasn't a mainstream investment opportunity, especially from the UK. The housemate had already had their unlicensed exchange shut down by UK PLC after making bank so it didn't seem like a sensible idea to try and buy some coins either, even from Coinbase
Probably shouldn't add that last part in, as those involved back in these times in this location will know very well who I am talking about. But sure, I was around this scene, and could be one of hundreds of people uninterested in Bitcoin
For sure, can be interesting to have some exposure and rub elbows in certain aspects of the bitcoin scene... and yeah, the BTC community can be a bit seemingly small in some areas, even big cities or countries have some tight circles of those who are "in the know" about certain parts.
So maybe if you say when you found out about bitcoin and describe the kinds of "investment" opportunities might have been available to you in your earliest days of exposure that you failed/refused to partake in...
I think you can tell from my past exposure with Bitcoin, it was relatively high and twice over, being in the the circles I was mingling in. Mining doge in 2014-205 was also standard practice from a housemate I'd be living with for example.
(An ex-housemate I still don't know the username of on here to be honest, but was involved in bounties on here while not busy taking heroin or otherwise)
Yeah.. one thing is having exposure to people interested in a variety of broader interests, but another thing is that minds and thinking can become very befuddled and muddled when involved in a variety of shitcoins and perhaps not even recognizing and/appreciating bitcoin's foundational investment theses.
I have some friends/relatives who are quite distracted in a variety of shitcoins and shit (crypto) projects, and frequently I find it difficult to relate, and I just have to stop the conversation because I cannot take it for very long. Sure, I will play around with it for a while in real life, but it becomes quite annoying to be talking past other people in real life.. and frustrating on both sides, I can tell because even those other people seem quite disinclined to continue to pursue the topic.. because I don't give a whole hell of a lot of ground in my position either.. but I get frustrated by repeating and going back to basics and we are not communicating.. it's not sinking in from either direction.. and sometimes I wonder if any progress at all had been made to talk about these topics with peeps in real life.
By the way, if I would be more open minded (and I do consider myself to be somewhat open minded to explore various angles), probably my own thinking would have become more muddled.. for example, getting involved in doge coin, BCH/BSV, ethereum or various shit projects, could be very time consuming and even occupy a whole hell of a lot of brain space, those kinds of explorations would actually cause me to lose focus on some of the important aspects of bitcoin and perhaps even start to believe that there is some value in the various technically innovative ways to scam others (or even to scam oneself with pump and dump smoke and mirrors nonsense).
Don't get me wrong, I am not proclaiming that you are totally off of the planet - because surely there are some particulars that you could likely flush out to bring better meaning to what you are describing - rather than some concepts that could be very easily misunderstood or even mislead people into thinking that there were real and meaningful investment opportunities in bitcoin in the early days beyond for the real geeks and internet nerd specialists (not suggesting any kind of denigration of the nerds).
TL:DR: It's ok, I hear you. Primarily I didn't explain very well the "waited 10 years part". More like waited 6/7 years in total ish, followed by waiting for Bitcoin to become 8/9 years old.
Hope that helps specify the previous response
Yes.. much more clear, now, about what you meant, and sure, I was not necessarily fishing for a lot of your various sordid details, so it surely is up to you regarding how much to share or how to present the matters, but sometimes there surely can be confusion when summaries are made that do not provide some levels of context. We all have that issue in terms of the more details that we give, the more we are inviting our lil selfies to be criticized for what we did and also for presenting some points in ways that could be read in more than one way.
But sure, the more diverse research the better! After Bitcoin there were more than 5-10 different currencies that came about as well.
Nice try though
Gosh.. comparing bitcoin research and virus research seems a stretch of a topic.. and who really wants to talk about some some 5-10 different currencies in this here lovey dovey bitcoin thread, unless perhaps we have some shitcoins that we feel like bashing..
Precisely my point, hence this wasn't my initiative as to me it seems like a very dumb comparison
I was just trying to show how stupid the analogy actually is, thanks for your assistance
Fair enough... Lot's of virus on the minds of people, so really difficult to avoid the topic, and I am still of the position that there is information that goes in so many directions that it is enough to piss off people no matter what their stance - and sometimes there might be some questions regarding whether the division is sown or even allowed to fester in ways that are "on purpose" based on some other things going on that a lot of us can see the money printing issues. so having battles on all kinds of levels and from all kinds of angles does not really necessarily stop the ship from going down (or struggling stupendously) while bitcoin chugs along
.....and sure, there have been a lot of direct and indirect attacks on bitcoin too.... but we also have people in various positions of power, so not everyone is really clearly on one side or another.. which in the end, seems that more and more people find out about bitcoin, even when the news is bad and the attacks against it are seemingly great, so in that regard, sometimes the bitcoin price ends up soaring during seemingly bad news, such as making bitcoin illegal in the USA which also makes little sense, when you think about it... are they really going to go there.. of course, they can do what they want, but there is going to be backlashes, even if some dumbass draconian (impossible to follow) laws related to bitcoin end up passing.
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