Does anyone else have any bitcoin stories like this? I know that i'm definitely not the only one who lost out on this! Please feel free to share as i'd love to hear your stories, too!
Your idea of sharing origin stories does seem to be a good one, and surely your case does seem to have some strange aspects to it - and you are likely correct that if you had made that initial purchase in 2010 (and if it was not a scam like Lucius mentioned as a possibility), then your life would have likely been changed forever, because anyone who ends up taking a stake into something like bitcoin would be more likely to pay attention to that something than if they do not take any kind of stake.
Who is to say if you would have been able to hang onto such bitcoin or if you might have lost the paper, too.. but still an interesting origin story.
One of my difficulties is attempting to figure out the extent to which I had exposure to bitcoin before late 2013 - because I know that I knew the word "Bitcoin" and I had it tabbed on my computer browser as something "to get to later" for about 1-2 months prior to my getting to it and researching into it.
Unlike you, I took action right away, but part of the reason that I took action right away was because I was at a place in my investment life in which I was looking for something like bitcoin.. to supplement other investments that I already had... so when I actually got to the point of looking into bitcoin, I was already in a mental and financial place that I was ready to get started.. and I therefore created a strategy that largely took me about a year to figure out what I was doing - even though it was kind of like two stages of dollar cost average investing - each stage being 6 months in duration and I was studying bitcoin while I was investing into it and trying to figure out any kinds of ways that I might change what I was doing while I was learning about it and slowly building my stake/position in bitcoin at the same time.
Another difference with me when I came across bitcoin was that I had already had a bit more than 20 years of relatively conservative and slow building of my investments through those 20 years, and surely I had not considered myself any kind of pro because my overall average returns had been about 5.5% per year on all of my investments including various mistakes that I made along the way and overall I considered that to be reasonable performance that I would like my including bitcoin into that mix to be able to reach similar levels of performance and I was ok. if it either under performed or over performed because I considered my investment into bitcoin as a kind of supplemental experiment (a hedge) that may or may not end up paying off or needing to pay off.
Surely, my first 2 years or so into bitcoin (from late 2013 to late 2015), the bitcoin returns were mediocre at best and largely my bitcoin returns were dragging down the rest of my investment portfolio, but after late 2015, I started to feel a lot more confident because bitcoin had a couple of price spurts (the first one from $250 to $500 in late 2015 and the second one from $425 to $700 in May/June 2016), so even though my average cost per BTC was around $500 during that time, it started to seem that my persistence in DCAing into BTC was tarting to pay off.. and of course, we know what happened in 2017 and even the dip in 2018 ONLY brought down the BTC price to the lower $3ks which would still have been 6x higher than my average cost per BTC in 2016/2017...
I did make some mistakes through-out my bitcoin investments, so for sure, I am not going to proclaim that I am some kind of star player, and these days I largely like to round off my average cost per BTC as being around $1k in order to account for my so many mistakes throughout the years.. and it is a bit easier to do the math on $1k per BTC in contrast if I would try to pick some other number that might not really end up being very representative of my various mistakes in BTC along the way anyhow.
It seems that one of the points of telling stories is to attempt to either be entertained by them or to learn from them, and surely through the years, many of us will learn that a lot of advantages can come from attempting to act upon the information that is in front of us and to attempt to account for our own situation in figuring out how to act and how much we might want to change what we are doing.. and/or in the case of bitcoin, we can attempt to learn that if we already have a position in bitcoin, do we have enough of a position and are we taking adequate steps to build that position if it does not seem to be enough.
On the other hand, if we already have a position in bitcoin, then we can attempt to figure out if we are maintaining and securing that position well enough, because there are a variety of ways that mistakes are made, including bitcoin HODLers who believe that they have built a decent bitcoin position, and then they screw up by not adequately securing it.. and there is a lot of responsibility in being your own bank, but there are also risks by leaving coins in a custodian too.. especially if the amounts might be a lot and if the custodian might not being responsible in its own behaviors... so in the end, we need to figure out what kind of balance we want to maintain whether we are still accumulating bitcoin or we are trying to keep our stash secure - and even getting to points of being able to strategically liquidate portions of our stash that are at price points (and times) that are completely of our own choosing.
