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it just dawned on me that it appears i am the first one IN THE WORLD to have done this. not to mention to the magnitude i have. if someone else has done something similar they sure haven't stepped forward to admit it in this forum or elsewhere. i guess i'll either be defined as a visionary or a dunce.
I came fairly close to trading some Krugerrands and/or junk silver straight across for Bitcoin in about June of 2011. I probably would have if I could have easily arranged it. But it would have been a pretty small fraction of my PM holdings. Part of the rational here was that I was paranoid about a clamp-down on the exchanges. The route I went was to convert fiat as it came in to Bitcoin instead. This turned out to be fortuitous due to the longish duration price drop of BTC and the lack of any legal issues associated with the exchanges.
A theoretical issue is that the money I sent to an exchange is a matter of record in various databases an it could be rationally assumed that I acquired Bitcoin. But if I were terribly concerned about that I probably would not be blathering on on this forum.