The early-adoptor unfairness

[Gabi]

Buy bitcoin NOW instead of starting "early adopter are unfair" bawhhh thread

Guess what, these threads appear ONLY after bitcoin rise a bit

Guess what, why you didn't open that thread when bitcoin dropped to 2? Oh right back then bitcoin was DEAD. You risked 0, you bough 0 bitcoin at 2$. And now you whine as a KID because OTHERS bought them at 2 and are making a +200% PROFIT
Bawhhh

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[gewure]

Buy bitcoin NOW instead of starting "early adopter are unfair" bawhhh thread

Guess what, these threads appear ONLY after bitcoin rise a bit

Guess what, why you didn't open that thread when bitcoin dropped to 2? Oh right back then bitcoin was DEAD. You risked 0, you bough 0 bitcoin at 2$. And now you whine as a KID because OTHERS bought them at 2 and are making a +200% PROFIT
Bawhhh

dude.. that is as natural 'human' behaviour as it can be..

[molecular]

I once complained regularly about early adopter unfairness, but now that prices have touched all the way down to $2 and stayed there long enough to be well within reach of anyone with vision, I don't think the complaint has merit anymore.

Bitcoin is either going to be really big or really not.  If it's going to be really big, then being able to get your fill on them at $2 or $3 or $4 is a fucking deal.

+1

But you can bet your ass, in summer, should bitcoin hit $100 or something even crazier, you'll have newbies complaining that they haven't been in the game in 2011 and that this is obviously unfair

[molecular]

If you look at the actual rewards, then yes mining in 2009 was lower risk.  But that's using hindsight.  That's cheating.  You can't do the risk/reward calculation using today's numbers.  That's survivor bias.

As late as May 2010 those months and months of work would get you two pizzas.  When mtgox opened, early adopters sold bitcoins for pennies.  Were these people just stupid early adopters?  Or was it the general consensus among the adopters that bitcoins just weren't worth that much?

So essentially the complaint is against the "numbers changing", so this is basically a complaint against the world taking a certain course that the individual had not anticipated. So actually, this is a complaint against the complainer himself: his uninformedness or his lack of imagination and/or balls to take action.

There are 1 million games to be played, why complain not being one of the best in a certain one? As sipa says: "petty jealousy".

[2_Thumbs_Up]

What makes bitcoin viciously beautiful is that it doesn't really favour early-adoption. It favours adoption. Period. The incentive to adopt it never ceases without artificial costs being forced upon it from the government.

Even more beautiful is that bitcoin's deflationary nature actually punishes non-adoption. The complaints from non-adopters will surely only increase over time, especially if bitcoin ever becomes big enough to affect exchange rates to the degree that price-inflation actually increases for non-adopters. It's the greenback all over again.

[Nesetalis]

tons of whine in this thread..
but I figured I would add my 0.02BTC
If bitcoin truly takes off, then I think we are seeing the birth of "old money".
People who made the right investment at the right time, and got lucky.

The "risk" in the early adopters, is the desire to sell. Some one may have 500,000 bitcoins, and they could have dumped many of them at 20-30$. In the short term, this is a very very good deal, thousands and thousands of dolars, a very good ROI.
But what about next year? or the year after? Maybe bitcoin will get to 1000$, or 10,000$ or maybe it will hit 0 like the doomsayers preach.
It is still a risk, and the people who stay in long enough, and sell at the right point... or don't sell at all as bitcoin takes off will become the new "old money".
Fair? when has anything ever been fair in economics, never.
Whine some more, but be smart at the same time, watch your investment in bitcoin. Maybe 100BTC at 2$ will be enough to make you rich too, or maybe not.

[mc_lovin]

You know how if you bought a 1970 Hemi Cuda back when they were brand new, you could have bought it for a few thousand dollars and if you didn't ruin it, you could sell it for MILLIONS of dollars today?  That's like right now you can buy bitcoin at a few dollars and left it for ten years and then all of a sudden bitcoin is worth $10,000 per coin, you'll be like DAMN it was so unfair of myself to not purchase more bitcoins back in the day!  Same thing.  Some people are just going to miss out on the bitcoin profits but it's hardly unfair.

[jago25_98]

regardless of what you think on early adoption i have spoken to average people and that is the critism they make. 
It's a fair critism and it's even acknowledged with the built in inflation in the protocol, is it not?

The only answer i can give is that it's a fair critism but exagerated. The advantages of btc outwiegh this.

Trying to say 'it will rise more' in all it's forms for me only feeds into ponzi scheme likeness, but this is what gets people most; blinded by greed they argue one thing but as soon as they stand to make some money they sell out on thier values!

+1 on pointing out early adopter risks, most people didn't relise they were spending electric on bitcoins else they wouldn't have mined so it was mostly dumb luck... And many had the hardware anyway.

A good title for a blog entry: "the million dollar pizza".

The point of this thread is to say that the early adoption problem is still there
 -bitcoin has solved the centralisation of money but that's all.
Speculation and debt (especially compounded) are 2 more of the biggest monsters to humanity and btc doesn't address that. It also doesn't address network clumping.

I've said it before and i'll say it again;
Bitcoin is a revolution but it's still only money.

Those problems of debt, speculation and clumping effect all our lives. I firmly believe that if it wasn't for this we wouldn't need to go to work every day.

[caston]

yes I was mentioned in the top post. It is completely my fault that I didn't become an early adopter because I didn't search google thoroughly enough.

If I had of simply typed "open source currency site:ning" into google or even just "open source currency" I would have found it somewhere even if it was a few pages in. If I had of searched for "money" or "cash" on sourceforge instead of "currency" I would have found it in mid 2009. Instead I found cclite. I was also asked to setup an online store for one of my customers and I looked straight at Prestashop instead of checking all programs in sourceforge under the e-commerce category which would have also led me to finding bitcoin.

By far the stupidest part was that I started writing an article on open source currency for the advanced civilisation wiki but I used some existing links from the website for a LETS I had setup for my city based on the CES system called Perth Community Exchange.

http://www.adciv.org/Open_collaborative_design/Open_Source_Currency

http://www.adciv.org/Open_Source_Currency

If I had of done my research I would have found bitcoin in March 2010 months before the 10K btc pizza deal and while bitcoin market was still quite new and accepting paypal.

At some point I remember reading about bitcoin but I was looking for a post-scarcity solution for the world as everything I had read about alternate currencies such as on openmoney.ning.com and ripple and so on were post-scarcity ideas. I can remember one of the guys that posted quite a lot on openmoney.ning (his name was Seth) that was also the first to comment on Satoshis p2p ning site post in February 2009. He didn't re-post it on openmoney.ning.com but to his credit his did use the words open source currency which helped make it easier for find on the search engines.

I did also get an message where it was discussed on the cclite list in late 2010 and then another one on the mailing list of the perth-exchange mailing list by one of our members. This was really about the same time it was being discussed on slashdot in relation to wiki leaks. At this time it was still possible to buy them for 20cents or so. I sent a reply to the message saying they should release an android version then I must have forgotten about it completely.

It was also mentioned earlier than this on slashdot for the 0.03 release but I hadn't been reading slashdot around that time even though prior to that I had been reading slashdot since about the late 90's early 2000s. It's also easy to miss slashdot articles as they get posted quite quickly.  

About February 2009 I started work on Rejuvepedia which is supposed to be an open source collaborative effort to build an encyclopaedia on human rejuvenation.

You can see my posts to imminst about it here:

http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/27554-rejuvepedia/

So yeah I am blaming myself really bad for not getting into bitcoin early and I feel quite empty and have an unhealthy fascination with somehow entering the parallel universe where I started mining in 2009 with a few commodity PCs and quad xeon servers bought for ~$10 each at auction. The other parallel universe I would like to enter is the one where I didn't meet a certain girl of an internet dating site when I was about 23 but that's another story. If I do both avoid meeting that girl at get into bitcoin early that would be ace. But if it wasn't for that girl I would have never gone done to path to seriously becomming interested in radical life extension which means I never would have started Rejuvepedia.

I did get a lot of work done on Rejuvepedia while the whole bitcoin thing was happening. I was using on trading system called Batercard (I am a call out computer tech) which got me into debt because of the monthly and trading fees and because I spoiled a girlfriend with a lot of gifts I bought through the system. I really wish I had of instead put that money into bitcoin. I joined Bartercard about Jan 2009 *bangs head against wall* I then started perth community exchange because I wanted an alternate currency system that didn't charge fees in fiat.

I can remember sort of trying to strike up conversations about alternate currencies with a lot of people and try to contact a lot of people that were into them already but it didn't help me find bitcoin. Obviously most people back then had no idea about digital coins and proof of work hashcash and so on. I should have searched harder to find it myself.

Obviously though I need to keep focused on what opportunities will come up next and work out what I can do next. I'd like to see rejuvepedia and its spin-off project in-utero succeed as working out how to reverse the aging process is much better than getting rich!

[Killdozer]

I just think it's great that bitcoin is based on math and solid cryptography, which does not care about people's feelings or what is "fair". Whining won't get you anywhere, either use bitcoins or don't.

[caston]

I've recently started thinking about the early days of the web and domain names in a similar way to how I have been thinking about bitcoin. If only I had of bought a supra 14.4 .32bis modem instead of a sega master system 2 in the early 90's (when I was about 12) and then a proceeded to register hundreds of domain names.

A bit of a scam the whole early adopter DNS system when you think about it.

[anu]

yes I was mentioned in the top post. It is completely my fault that I didn't become an early adopter because I didn't search google thoroughly enough.

In the technology adoption lifecycle of Bitcoin we are not even close to the early adopter phase. If you want to become an early adopter, you have to wait 2 or 3 years and buy your Bitcoins for $100+. Now is the innovator / pioneer phase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

[caston]

It would have been a terrible waste of time if it the internet didn't become what it did, and you would have given up the sega for nothing.

Well I had a PC as well.  Actually my first computer was a microbee that I got in '87. That actually did have a modem but our family didn't get a modem when we had the 286. Much later in about 1996 about a year after the web started to get famous thanks to shows like "hot chips" on ABC we finally got a 14.4 modem ... when the 28.8  was available.

Before that I was mostly using my PC as a games machine and mostly in DOS. I never started up Windows (2?)3.1 because it was shit. The kids at school bought games consoles because their parents couldn't afford computers. So it was the "cool" thing to get a games console. That's the lesson don't follow the crowd. Do your own thing that most people have never heard of. Do it at least 10 years before it will become mainstream. Any modem at all even a 9,600 at the right time could have put my on a completely different path to getting on the net 2-3 years earlier which would have made a huge difference to my life.

You probably don't often hear examples of ideas that people spend time and money on yet never amount to anything, but this happens all the time. Hindsight is the only thing that allows you to say, "Their advantage was unfair."

Hindsight is a bitch but i'd rather have it than be blind. I think that the best opportunities have no risk at all.

There is no way to know the future and we are mortal beings. Any time or effort we spend on one thing means it is lost to a multitude of other possibilities! Also, the early adopters of Bitcoin just didn't run a CPU and make thousands of Bitcoins, they interacted with each other and started to create the infrastructure we enjoy today (otherwise it wouldn't exist). Even if someone did only run a CPU and hoard thousands of coins, they made an impact on the network and the market.

That's true just like the web. The people that started it convinced the world to give them a lot of money. Maybe in the days prior to the web when it was mostly usenet and whatever else no one would have dreamed that the internet would one day be commercialised.

[memvola]

A bit of a scam the whole early adopter DNS system when you think about it.

It's one thing to say that the system is flawed because they couldn't foresee that there would be hundreds of millions domain names in the future. It's another thing to call it a scam. The whole architecture is dependent on names, which by their nature are scarce. If there weren't a DNS, then catchy IP numbers would be expensive. I don't have any alternatives to propose, do you?

Regarding Bitcoin early adoption, all comments here are pretty convincing. Bitcoin can still fail miserably and your whole investment could go down the drain. It could have been that way before, too. Maybe if you had been an early adopter, it would have been that way even.

[JA37]

Fair, unfair, doesn't really matter.
Red wrote a great summary a while ago. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48521.0

I personally think that he's spot on. Most people won't care about Bitcoin at all seeing how the vast majority of the coins in existence are in the hands of a tiny minority. I personally have no interest in giving my (real)money to someone who happened to mine a gazillion coins on their PII on blind luck a few years ago.  I mainly hang around here to get a good laugh from the extreme libertarian views one can find in some threads.

[caston]

btw here is the pic of the microbee modem..

came out before the days of smart modems... so you had to dial the number yourself on phone handset

only 300 baud.. but I wish I had of used it to develop a fascination with them

 http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=19#top_display_media

all the crap I got at school for "talking about computers too much" I should have ignored or possibly been "less talk more action"

[caston]

A lot of the early internet culture was about freedom of information. About post-scarcity. Ironic that proponents of the new age are usually believers in some form of post-scarcity yet the people that profit from the new age are those that get in grab all those resources for themselves.

[memvola]

A lot of the early internet culture was about freedom of information. About post-scarcity. Ironic that proponents of the new age are usually believers in some form of post-scarcity yet the people that profit from the new age are those that get in grab all those resources for themselves.

Your attitude is doubly confusing. First, you were talking about how you wish you were one of those guys, and now you are complaining about them? Second, domain names become a resource because of people's (consumer's) demand. They would be scarce regardless of who grabbed them.

[caston]

Your attitude is doubly confusing. First, you were talking about how you wish you were one of those guys, and now you are complaining about them? Second, domain names become a resource because of people's (consumer's) demand. They would be scarce regardless of who grabbed them.

Part complaint, part observation, part jealous rage.

Also consider that Mark Cuban is a billionaire thanks to the .com bubble be he has openly called the share market a scam.

Really it is the observation that sometimes when we want to make resources free for the world to have we may latter find that we ourselves missed out and what have been personally better off if we had of focused on our own personal gain. Then wait until after that to start being generous.


Also domain scarcity is interesting because there is a glut of domain space speculation now. Recently there was a a new tld .xxx and many lucrative .xxx domains (for example gay.xxx) sold for 5 figure amounts.

They keep introducing new tlds and people keep speculating in them. Once there was so little interest in .info they had to give millions of of them away for free. Now some .infos sell for 4 figure amounts.

Now iccan rules will probably lead to a lot of people losing their shirts buying new exotic tld domains and then most of the market (with the exception of domains that people actually use) going bust.

Who knows maybe .bit domains will be the next big thing when the public gets interested in them.

[neptop]

Well, it will still take a lot of time until all Bitcoins are produced and everyone know that Bitcoins as an investment option are still very risky. Of course it settles more and more, but think about it. By the end of the year Bitcoin production will be halved for the very first time and it will take more than 30 years until the production phase ends, no matter how many people mine. So, we are only in a production phase. Everyone that joins is an early adopter and everyone that joins strengthens the network and therefore the value (as in reliability, not (directly) the exchange rate) of each coin.

It's still risky, but Bitcoin does great for now. While exchanges have been hacked, wallets have been stolen, pools closed and there was a huge increase in the exchange rate to other currencies followed by a quick drop people still care about Bitcoin. Of course, some people think they can make quick money, others see it as investment and for others it means, freedom, independence and is the future of money, being easy to use in the digital age. Right now we have tools to quickly generate wallets/addresses on every device. There are Bitcoin implementation that allow you to generate a lost wallet by passwords/seeds and there are lots of approaches to make Bitcoins physical. I think we will see lots of standards on how to deal with Bitcoins and I am sure there will be more providers that will offer Bitcoins in a similar way to Paypal for all the people who are not interested in how people work. Trusted entities. See the history of computers. Twenty to thirty years ago most people that use computers (or the internet) today would have been unable to do the simplest things. Now everyone uses tons of protocols to use stuff like eBay, Paypal, Banking services and Facebook, like it would be a magical box. Bitcoin is developing and it thirty years people will maybe use Bitcoins without even noticing it. Maybe people born today won't even be able to fully understand how money worked these days. I mean most of us today wonder how people were even able to get through life without things like the internet. Twenty years ago nobody had an idea about it. Even Microsoft thought it won't become something big. They were late adopters with IE. Most people therefor used Netscape.

Neither the computer industry nor Bitcoin halted. So everyone that stays with Bitcoin and possibly gets involved, programming, enhancing the community or runs a Bitcoin related company or service may at some point be the next IBM, Microsoft or Google. I mean come on, the last one just built a simple search engine. Something every interested teenager can do these days.