How did we do at the beginning to have bitcoins? (2010-2011 ...)

[Husires]

What is difficult about downloading a wallet from the store or from an official site (signature verification is an additional step) and then saving your wallet seeds in paper (a metal plate is an additional option) and not sharing them with anyone, not randomly clicking on links or downloading unknown programs (using an open system is extra step source)

For buying bitcoin, it differs according to your country and according to the data that you can provide, but it is simply the same as online shopping, you search for the best option according to your country, buy bitcoin, withdraw those coins to your wallet, and we are done.

Your use of additional steps enhances your security.

[Zlantann]

Hello,

Today there are a thousand and one ways to obtain bitcoin, CEX, PtoP exchanges etc ... I read that the concept of seed and BIP39 was proposed later. This is all a bit confusing to me.

How did you do at the beginning to have bitcoins and how were they kept? I guess it was reserved for the rather computer-savvy people? When did it get easier?

Thank you

It's a pity that those early times will never come back. When I read some posts about how people earned Bitcoin by just answering a few questions, I always regret that I wasn't here then. But I doubt if I would have accepted to embrace Bitcoin because I might think it was a scam or a Ponzi scheme. Even if I had accepted it, I also doubt if I would have been able to keep my coins to date. So many people lost their coins because they were careless about storage and safety. The early Bitcoiners are not just tech-savvy but visionaries. They believe the unbelievable and saw the unseen. But I am glad to be here now and have been able to earn some coins through various means. It is better late than never.  Basically, you can get Bitcoin by mining, buying, and earning.

[Becassine]

Hello,

Today there are a thousand and one ways to obtain bitcoin, CEX, PtoP exchanges etc ... I read that the concept of seed and BIP39 was proposed later. This is all a bit confusing to me.

How did you do at the beginning to have bitcoins and how were they kept? I guess it was reserved for the rather computer-savvy people? When did it get easier?

Thank you

It's a pity that those early times will never come back. When I read some posts about how people earned Bitcoin by just answering a few questions, I always regret that I wasn't here then. But I doubt if I would have accepted to embrace Bitcoin because I might think it was a scam or a Ponzi scheme. Even if I had accepted it, I also doubt if I would have been able to keep my coins to date. So many people lost their coins because they were careless about storage and safety. The early Bitcoiners are not just tech-savvy but visionaries. They believe the unbelievable and saw the unseen. But I am glad to be here now and have been able to earn some coins through various means. It is better late than never.  Basically, you can get Bitcoin by mining, buying, and earning.

I believe that especially with bitcoin, you shouldn't regret anything or you'll go crazy. Between those who lost access to thousands of btc because of a lost PC, a scam or something else, those who sold everything in FOMO mode, those who invested elsewhere and lost everything. We can only rejoice if we still have a little left. Learn from our mistakes and those of others and have no regrets.

[m2017]

It's always been easy, or at least not hard, or complicated at all.

How we got them?
We bought/exchanged them from people who owned some, like right here in this forums marketplace-section, in exchange for some pizza for examle, the irc-channel was also a place to meet fellow bitcoiners,
or we just mined them ourselves, which in 2010 was quite easy even on low-end-CPUs.

How we kept them?
Bitcoin QT, the wallet known today as Bitcoin Core, was the only wallet around in 2010.
In late 2011 Electrum came around and lots of others followed.

We had no seeds back then, but a backup of our wallet.dat-files, or even just the private keys did the same,
seeds are just more convenient to handle.

I'm assuming wallet.dat-files was just stored on hard drives and CDs? Which over time became the cause of many sad stories, with the tens or even hundreds lost bitcoins.

Disc inscription:
Mining
March 2011
Stash
1 BTC Sell
for 100$

Did you/others also have that disc with bitcoins (wallet.dat backup) or is this more of a meme than the truth?

[Pandu Geddon]

How did you do at the beginning to have bitcoins and how were they kept? I guess it was reserved for the rather computer-savvy people? When did it get easier?

I still remember when I created an exchange account and started buying my Bitcoin there. I don't have a wallet and at first, I thought it was safe enough for my Bitcoins. I left my Bitcoins on the exchange platform for quite a while until I finally understood that I actually only had access to my exchange account. The bitcoins that I have on the exchange account are not completely in my control.
I decided to buy a hardware wallet and move it.

[lassdas]

Did you/others also have that disc with bitcoins (wallet.dat backup) or is this more of a meme than the truth?

No idea about others, I personally never stored (important) backups on CDs.

Even today I still got a whole bunch of wallet.dat-backups that go back to 2010, stored on different thumbdrives and SD-cards.
Just checked them and guess what? Everything is still where it's supposed to be, I can still read it all, nothing is corrupted.

"sad stories":
Yeah, sad, but... if people are not careful with their backups, especially if it's "money", they might lose it.
That's even true for seed words, if you lose them, your wallet is gone.
So be careful and think about what you're doing.

[Jon_Hodl]

I remember that when I stacked my first sats, It was difficult to find a wallet to store them and I wasn't really sure how to do it anyway. I just bought some sats and sent them back and forth with a super clunky wallet that I downloaded from some random forum thread.

After sending it a few times, I looked my transactions up on-chain and they were all taking a massive fee of like 25¢ per transaction by the wallet itself. I almost quit Bitcoin because that fee was a substantial portion of the amount of sats that I was sending back and forth. I finally found BitAddress.org and printed off a paper wallet and sent my finds there for a while until I did a bunch more research and learned how to use other wallets and how to properly send/receive bitcoin.

Not long after, I found some bitcoin faucets that you could get a tiny amount of bitcoin for free but it didn't take long before it was overwhelmed with traffic and shut down.

I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to use bitcoin years before I found it because the number of wallets that I used in my early days were so limited, I had a lot of trouble using it. Thank goodness I didn't give up and stuck with it because it is the only thing that gives me hope for a better future.