Quote from: Melbustus on February 03, 2015, 09:20:57 PM

Elaborating on these, from when I discovered bitcoin in 2011, I thought it'd take >10 years to get to where we are today. There was basically nothing in terms of ecosystem or buy-in from any notable "mainstream" people, and we were experiencing a 94% crash from a blow-off peak. It certainly seemed like it would take forever to bootstrap the ecosystem, if it was to happen at all. Furthermore, bitcoin hadn't *really* been battle tested at that point. The risk was huge for a number of reasons.

The risk is still large, of course, but there's little comparison. We've experienced *too-rapid* growth in awareness and hype, and now we settle in to the longer task of building polished tools, educating people, and integrating bitcoin into broader systems and workflows. It's going to take time, but we're over what was a pretty high-looking hurdle from 2011's point of view.

Elaborating on this, people in 2011 looked at 2009/10 prices and had the exact same conversation, however risk in 2011 was significantly lower than in 2009/10.

In 2009/10 bitcoin was not even a standalone entity yet. It was a very small community of developers lead by Satoshi who set most of the direction. Mining was largely centralized and supported by satoshi in '09. Bitcoin was a novelty and it was not proven yet if it would successfully function on it's own in the wild with usage beyond a small number of aligned individuals.

2011 was the year Bitcoin successfully transitioned to a standalone entity and demonstrated that it would function out in the wild without the training wheels of it's founder. That was a huge transition, which justified the price increase from $0.10 in 2010 to >$1 prices in 2011.

Each of these two transitions (the one above and the one Melbustus states) came with a significant move in valuation.

Just think how many transitions there are to go between today and mainstream adoption.

Edit: I was not involved during this time period, and base the above on what I've read. I vaguely remember first reading the word bitcoin in a slashdot article title in 2009, but did not investigate at all due to work time pressures. It was a New Yorker article on Satoshi of all things in late 2011 that my wife suggested I read that got me involved and I immediately latched onto it. Still regret not reading that link in 2009.