Actually, the spec Forum can use non-trolling input more than any other...

I'll tell you something, proudhon - our stories with bitcoin are very similar.  I turned on my first miner the last week of March '11 - although you were correct to start buying:  you did so earlier than I.  Eh.  Hindsight.

I'll share my terrible story though...

When I was around twenty Reagan was president.  Interest rates were insane and silver was spiking like a mohawk.  I had some coin silver (I was working a cash register while studying physics):  it was easy to find in change in those days.  But I also made the greatest financial mistake of my life.

For a lousy one thousand dollars, you could buy a CD at a bank, and they guaranteed you to be a millionaire when it matured.  I forget how long that was:  30 years maybe?  I could figure it out, but I hate interest calculations.  It was paying over 17% though - locked in.  And with the contempt of youth for anything that smacked of the staus quo, I passed.  I even had the money...

And yeah - those things change you.  So when bitcoin tanked in June '11 I pretty much just blew it off.  Maybe because that terrible mistake had already changed me as much as anything could; where money was concerned, anyway.  I kept mining (occasionally at a theoretical loss) and well... fuck it, right?  I'd already made up my mind about bitcoin, and I wasn't going to change it just because the shit crashed to damn near nothing for a few months.

Think about it...