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To avoid confusion, this guy put in around $10 I think, maybe $50 at best, what he had at the time. The clue here Jay is that he was without home
Thanks for the context, and I purposefully provided high potential investment levels to try to help to imagine a way that someone who might be somewhat down and out might still garner up a good amount of money and how that could ended up being life changing money had it just sat for a long time. Sure, it would be harder to arrive at higher levels of returns with $10 to $50 (the reality) as compared with $500 to $2,500 - even though my numbers were a bit of a conceptual stretch...
Oh for sure, some one who bought a mere 10 BTC or 50BTC in 2011 for $1 per bitcoin would be doing pretty damned well at these BTC prices, too.. and sure a forced HODL situation may well be the ONLY way that someone who is already struggling with having a home might be able to NOT have weak hands a variety of times in the past 10 years.. 10 years is a long time for someone with potentially weak hands to show their will power to HODL through it.
Despite his insight, he wasn't in a position to be hodling for 10 years.
I surely understand that part, and that is part of the reason that I mention that some people would ONLY have a possibility of becoming rich from bitcoin by a kind of forced HODL.. such as losing their keys and then reuniting many years later.
Was quite happy with the 5-10x profits. This isn't so different from many tech nerds back then it seems. Most buyers around $1 weren't investors, they were simply different and likely autistic or with Asperger, computer geniuses at heart nothing else, and happy with simple gains more often than not. I think he later invested "real money" later on in life, but was permanently left with a sour taste in his mouth over "how much money he could have made" and never got over that.
Actually, you are correct we witness those kinds of bitter no coiners all the time who cannot get over their having had sold too much too soon and frequently selling their whole fucking stash believing that they are a genius.. but then seeing how lacking in genius status that time ends up showing them to have been.
None the less, the weed he acquired was the best tasting spliffs I had smoked in a long time. The most valuable to date by far! This holds value in itself, as a memory for all involved.
The rags to riches from these price levels is a rare occurrence it seems. For sure it seems like anyone with a 2010/2011 account here did amazingly, but also worth noting most of those involved were probably too intimated to engage with an online community, even if dominated by fellow nerds. Out of a hundred geeks who invested around $1, I imagine only 1 of them held until around $1K at best. Surrounded by an society that isolates you, it likely crushes your confidence as an investor too. Geniuses are usually treated like psychotic morons at the end of the day.
Gosh.. I do know that people can have their various kinds of specialties, but frequently there might be needs to have knowledge in a variety of areas, and gosh if some guys might have gotten distracted by some of the technological aspects. .. and may even be geniuses, but then get caught up in shitcoins because they have troubles really appreciating the sound money angle of bitcoin... not even saying that bitcoin maximalists will even always know or understand what they are investing in with any kind of in depth insight pertaining to many angles in which bitcoin can be appreciated.
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.
For sure the so-called representatives were awful and far from role models, though this was 2014 so a different time-line in fairness. In the UK, it appeared to mainly dominated by burnt-out anarchists and parasitical squatters involved in the development, or at least this is how it felt from my unique perspective. I don't just mean bitcoin core software, they were also beyond that creating the latest controversial BTC software and online spaces. While many early live streams were from squats and other alternative individuals etc, in the US it was very different it seems, much more civilized I imagine. You're completely right that as Bitcoiners we can be incredibly off-putting, and it's something as a "community" we need to address.
I don't even know if any of the off-puttedness needs to be addressed. The good, bad and the ugly can come to bitcoin, and no one can stop them. I have no desires to change the world, but there are ways to fit in and to attempt to take advantage of what is there. I don't give too many shits about some of the scaredy cats who failed/refused to invest in bitcoin and even maybe they are still hostile to bitcoin because there are a bunch of meanies on the interwebs. The longer they wait, the more they are going to fail/refuse to help themselves, and bitcoin no doesn't care if they have to buy it at $1.65 million rather than getting at dirt cheap bargain prices of $47,500 while supplies last at these prices.
It's not 2014 anymore, but as you (kind of) put it, on the interwebs it can seem very un-inviting, cliquey and cult-like.
As bitcoin adoption get's larger it encompasses every kind of person in the world, whether we like them or not.
Sure bitcoin seems to have started from a kind of niche group of cyber nerds and druggies or whoever found some early use for it, and whether they have accumulated coins or not, no one should give any shits.. they have to protect themselves and their stash if they have any... sure some people got removed from their coins through nefarious means, too..., It's not easy to be your own bank and surely there are loopholes and weaknesses in some of the interface and even wallet mechanisms. Sometimes HODLers might not even want to discuss how they hold their coins, which is fair too.
There have always been criticisms of various kinds of user interfaces challenges, too... and having more options in how to hold your coins has not always led to easy to use - and many people just say fuck it and hold their coins on Robinhood or something like that - and many of us realize those are holding vouchers rather than actual coins, but some people feel better about getting BTC price exposure through various 3rd party vehicles rather than trying to learn some of the more complicated technicalities in the various ways to hold your coins or to use your bitcoin or even to purposefully hide your wealth, if that's what floats your boat..
And, we also know that some people have gotten tricked in the past in terms of believing that there was a decent amount of privacy in their bitcoin holdings, but then there can be some weak links in terms of how public might be their holdings in terms of the chain of custody and then if there are some disadvantages that might come if trying to obscure the chain of custody.
There are a lot of people who are freely attempting to educate others or to learn, and even participation in forum like this can be helpful to both share knowledge and attempt to learn from others, but sometimes there can be bad information, too... So of course personal responsibility remains a thing for any of us who get involved in bitcoin and some people get scared by all of this, or maybe they feel that they do not have time because they are working 3 dead end jobs and they do not have time to learn.. and those are personal choices too.. even though some people have started out with very shitty situations and have difficulties getting out of their shitty situation, and perhaps bitcoin can help or perhaps bitcoin can cause them to have even worse situations because they use it as a way to gamble rather than figuring out a way to use bitcoin as a reasonable and prudent investment or otherwise learn about various ways to potentially personally and directly profit from it without over doing the matter and contributing to causing a good thing to play out in bad ways in their personal life and the way that they ended up approaching the whole bitcoin matter (and hopefully not getting too distracted by shitcoins, but hey peeps are going to do what they are going to do.
I mean we literally have a gang here.
You can think about it like that if you want... and many many many times, I might be arguing with someone or telling them to fuck off or even telling them that they have a lot of dumb ideas, so they might get pissed off at me, even while at the same time, I may well be sharing information to suggest the various conceptual ideas that they might need to consider in order for them to be in a better position to help themselves.
I don't even claim to know everything or to necessarily be right, but I do believe that it can be very helpful for each person to figure out particulars of their own situation such as their cashflow, their other investments, their view of bitcoin as compared with their other investments, their timeline, their risk tolerance and their skills, time and abilities to learn, plan, strategize and tweak along the way including figuring out the extent to which to trade or use financial tools (which are likely more advanced and unnecessary techniques). It can be very very difficult and challenging just to figure out the answers to the various above categories of questions. and then to come up with some practical and personalized plans, and no one is going to give any shits about them so peeps need to attempt to figure out ways to help themselves and tailor their strategies and don't get emotional about other peeps on the interwebs, even if we might be calling them dumb the whole time .. and some people learn how to learn and learn how to not get emotional and to still be able to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of both information available and how to share information in ways that help them to learn better.
I write novels of posts all the time, and sure sometimes I want to help others, but frequently I am just helping myself to attempt to better think through ideas.. and sure there might be some attempts to give back and sure there is some luxury in terms of NOT having to make money off of the shared information. A lot of people work for free or somewhat free in bitcoin.. including that there might be ways that they generate some income from services, but there may well be a lot of free stuff that is provided and all over the place for guys/gals/institutions that are willing to look for it and sort through some of the better stuff out there.
It's great being a part of it, but as an outsider, it literally seems like a cult following delusional theories.
A lot of things might look like a cult when first learning about them and looking from the outside, and sure there are folks who have been involved in bitcoin for nearly 10 years and they still believe that it is a cult and whatever, they can believe whatever they like.. or get distracted by misleading framings...
I frequently have proclaimed that there is always quite a bit of truth in any myth, in any propaganda framing, and even in conspiracy theories.. .and so surely critical thinking skills can come in quite handy in terms of NOT getting too wrapped up by misleading framings, even if there is likely a decent amount of truth in the misleading framings..
Many of the misleading framings (talking points) are recirculated in bitcoin through the years, and sometimes there may well be beliefs that some battles have been resolved, but they come back again and again. Sometimes there might be some cult feelings in regard to bitcoin because some dumbass talking point might get raised and some long time bitcoiner might seem to go a bit batshit crazy in reaction to the raised (or re-raised) talking point, and the newbie may consider that the talking point had a lot of good points, but the long time bitcoiner just cursorily dismissed them, therefore, it feels like a cult.. blah blah blah... the bitcoiner did not back up his points, and he used "fuck" a lot in his response.
It's time to reflect on how we approach others, in order to avoid further alienating them from such an obscure concept in my opinion. It always has been.
I don't feel any such an obligation. Sure, sometimes there might be some usefulness in explaining some things or pointing out resources, and one reason that bitcoin does not have a marketing team is because it does not need it. There are quite a few people willing to market for free and even if they don't market, bitcoin will market itself with its sound money y principles and value is going to gravitate into it, whether it is marketed or not and whether people recognize the value of it or not... so each person is responsible to figure out his/her own position and how to strategize their accumulation of BTC to get a stake, how much of a stake they believe they need/want (if any.. sure they can make the dumbass mistake of allocating none if they want) and how to manage their stake (perhaps changing) over time in order to NOT get too much shaken out of their desired stake too soon.
For sure Bitcoin does what is wants, will carry on without the need for any disbelievers, but I think I know you well enough to know that you care about educating those who wish to learn and benefit from this opportunity.
For sure, I share information.. but I am ONLY going to go so far in terms of helping out people who might believe that they do not want to be helped.. people also need to engage in some efforts to attempt to help themselves, and sure if the little old lady is crossing the road I may well help her.. but I am not going to necessarily suggest that she goes on the other side of the road if she believes it is better on her side of the road (even if I might believe otherwise), and sure I might spend a little time to educate her, but I only have so much time, too, and she may well be better off talking to someone she knows rather than a passing by stranger, such as me.
Again you're right that distancing your opinion from the person providing an idea is also crucial, this goes both ways. Eventually I did end up studying Bitcoin because of these wreck heads, but arguably enough damage had already been done to distance myself for sometime from the idea of blockchain due to those who represented it. Completely my own narrow-minded mentality for sure, but another example of how this dynamic goes both ways if you know what I mean. I imagine you do.
Sometimes we are not in a position to learn, and surely there are ONLY so many hours in the day.
Maybe it would be a good idea to learn coding for someone who is younger, but it might not be a good use of time for someone who is older, even if it still could be helpful to that older person but it might not be a good use of time to learn coding. discretionary of course. Some young people have no interest in learning anything that seems like it might be work, so they like to learn through osmosis, but still does not mean that they might not profit a lot from taking some classes on a certain topic. Sometimes you do not know what you do not know, but sometimes it is not useful to learn certain things depending on where you might be in life.
Of course, I frequently will tell some no coiners or pre-coiners to figure out their various personal circumstances first, and as a newbie it is good to invest 1% to 10% of your investment portfolio into bitcoin, but of course, people can do whatever they like, even though I suggest 1% to 10% as a kind of beginner guide but also realizing that one is going to learn and even understand bitcoin way more once they go through an active process of setting up some accounts and establishing a basic beginner stake and then after doing all that the person would be in a better position to learn about if to increase the stake or to keep it the same or even to understand themselves (financial and psychological circumstance) much better through such active interactions.
I'll refrain from informing you how many points I was attempting to make. There are clearly more points you are able to identify from my writing than I am intending to provide
No problem.. I am too talkative
(some people refer to it as "wordy" which sometimes I deny), sometimes.
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)
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).
This I've come to recognize in myself more recently, more or less this year. I've always been interested in shitcoins (as you probably are aware), but primarily for the "sick satoshi gains" that comes with it. But I did realise the amount of time I was wasting learning about alternative technology was exhausting, it left me feeling disconnected from Bitcoin at best, and uninformed at worst. Now I just look at charts, I don't give a duck how "amazing" a project sounds. If the chart looks good for satoshi profits, I'll gamble with my trading account knowing more often than not it helps to generate more BTC. I used to be obsessed with different technological experiments, now I just find it a waste of my time, even if deep down still at relatively fascinating. But I think it was also a necessary learning curve tbh.
There is only so much time in the day, and each of us take different journeys.. and I am not even suggesting that there is no value in various shitcoin projects.. but I can make choices for myself for how to spend my time. Sometimes I will see some kind of shitcoin project, and then I wonder where is the bitcoin connection? Why do they need to print a coin, and I suppose another thing is that if my investment in bitcoin (and other investments that I have that are not in shitcoins) are doing quite well, then why do I need to add another level of complexity.. but sure, if there are some projects that you are able to identify as personally interesting, then sure it might not be any skin off your back to invest time and money into such project and maybe even flip it into more satoshis.. if it does not cause you to feel guilty.. sometimes I see stuff that I consider to be potentially profitable, but i find it morally questionable to get involved in such projects... so sometimes I don't want to compromise myself or even bring such ambiguity to my own thinking about my own behaviors...
I recall that I had various points in my life in which I was pursuing activities, and not even wanting to get financial compensation - or thinking about making BIG bucks by jumping through x, y and z hoops.. and so sometimes I find it to be quite amazing that I got involved in bitcoin in the way that I have.. and maybe getting richie is kind of a side bonus and not a central focus, even though when I put money into bitcoin I was hoping at least to try to have an over all return that averaged around 6% per year which would put my bitcoin investment on par with my traditional investments into stocks (and other stuff that I had over the years).. but I was also o.k. to take the gamble to potentially lose the money that I invested into bitcoin, but it seemed to be a place that had decent upside potential that may or may not pay off, but was still interesting to study along the way..
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.
Hehe I know you weren't fishing for sordid details; nice use of the word sordid by the way, haven't heard that in a decade! I simply share these details with you, on this public forum, knowing that you are one of the few persons within this space that is capable of identifying the potential value of the information I provided. You already discovered more points than I was intending to offer, and I know you discuss in detail with high intellect to all members involved here. I literally only bother to express myself in detail to someone like yourself, as no one else would care or even acknowledge much relevance in the information I am trying to share. I hope it helps you in your journey of educating the masses, as you so acutely do in your "spare" time.
hahahaha we are all balls of mess when getting into it, and sometimes people can go through very similar experiences, but they talk about it (or describe it) in much different ways, so it could cause some curiosity regarding why they may have framed their history, their present or their future prospects in such a way.
Sometimes we might conclude: "something is wrong with this picture" and then other times, there could be an explanation as English being a second language... and sometimes, it is just that the person might have some experiences that cause difficulties/challenges to see the subject matter in any other way.
There are some members on this forum (or in this thread) that we have been having variations of the same argument for years, and sometimes it could just be time to just give up, but other times, the variations of the same argument come through in differing ways because bitcoin is not in the same position as it was the last time we treated the topic (whether a year ago or some other timeframe) and each of us also might not even be the same persons
(some say bots), even if we keep going back to similar spins of our earlier arguments.
Part of the conversation might include:
"Didn't we already cover this two years ago?"
Poll
