Just like it sounds. Due to the price of btc dropping as I expected it to, I thought I'd come out and see who has been making out with the big bucks, and who has lost money speculating. If you're a miner or just use btc as short-term exchange, and hence don't really speculate, select that option.
I'll bite - I've lost 50%, but 5 of my 7 coins were mined, and they were mined in the glory days! So I've lost about $15...
What about you guys? No need to reply if you want to stay anonymous.
I paid ~$100 for 3 bitcoins on eBay back when that was the going rate a few months ago. I did it mostly out of enthusiasm for the bitcoin concept. If you can understand the white paper you cannot help but be impressed by the genius of it. I don't really care about lost value, $100 is not alot of money for me and I consider it all having been spent on "entertainment" so if I never get anything out if it, that's fine with me.
I have lost a little bit of the three bitcoins already by playing around with the bitcoin client; I hacked it to try to send out thousands of transactions to see if I could DOS the network, just for fun, and the 0.5 bitcoin I had in that wallet is probably gone forever since the client choked completely and mucked up the wallet file so badly that I am not sure it's recoverable. Well I am sure it is but I don't think I'll ever bother to spend the time necessary to recover that 0.5 bitcoin.
In the intervening months my enthusiasm for bitcoin has waned considerably. While it is a cool concept and well thought-out, the implementation leaves alot to be desired. I think that Satoshi should have made a much more robust piece of software before unleashing it prematurely on the world. As it is, there are so many technical limitations and difficulties with using bitcoin, mostly due to the immaturity of the software, that it's hard to believe that it will ever gain major traction.
I think that as long as bitcoin can be used for transactions in which pseudo-anonymity has extreme value (e.g. buying illegal goods), there will be a positive pressure on the value of bitcoin. But I don't ever expect it to 'take over the world' or to make up a significant fraction of any financial transactions. There are just too many other financial instruments with built-in advantages over bitcoin as well as having decades/centuries of a head start.
I think that mining bitcoins is probably the only really valuable way to acquire them, because that is the only way to have true psuedoanonymity. The bitcoins I bought on eBay can be traced to my Paypal account so I couldn't use them for 'illegal' transactions even if I wanted to. I have never mined bitcoins and don't know if mining pools guarantee pseudoanonymity (seems like they could since they don't need any way to identify pool members to function properly), but I think that self-mined bitcoins will always have intrinsic value above and beyond market-bought bitcoins for that reason.
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