Quote from: kik1977 on April 06, 2021, 09:45:10 AM

Here's my story!

First heard about Bitcoin at a cyber-crime conference in Prague from a guy from the US. It was mid 2010. .......

I have been trying to figure out how to edge into my perspective too, and my own awareness and getting involved in bitcoin is ONLY going to touch upon 10 years at the end of this calendar year.

I know that several times prior to November 2013, I had heard the word bitcoin, and around October 2013, I had an open tab on my browser for a bitcoin thread that I was supposed to "look into" what was bitcoin.. .. .so really my first real knowledge and attempt at exposure to information about bitcoin came in November 2013 - because I cannot recall if I had any kind of specific impression about what bitcoin was, except for having had seen the word a few times in passing.

When I look through this thread, I see a lot of seemingly lame posts that hardly say anything meaningful regarding what members consider bitcoin to be or how they might have learned from bitcoin beyond some various superficial and vague conclusory descriptions that might say something like: I learned a lot from bitcoin because the price went up and I sold all my bitcoin so I am feeling so good about bitcoin blah blah blah..

Surely, I can accept that the shorter the experience in bitcoin then the fewer experiences that a member would have had in connection to bitcoin, and perhaps even if the time exposed to bitcoin had been short then there might have been fewer abilities to reflect upon how there may have been learnings from those exposures to bitcoin.

When I came to bitcoin, I had some ideas about investing, and I had a bit of a budget, some free time and some desire to learn about bitcoin, because just from my first few weeks that I had read about bitcoin, I had considered that it might be able to serve some aspect of my investment preferences, and that was to hedge some of my dollar investments - but to hedge them in such a way that seemed like it could be better than a gold hedge... So when I first came into bitcoin, I had been exposed to ideas that presented bitcoin as more sound money than gold, and the discussion around that framing of bitcoin seemed pretty convincing to me.

Therefore my initial ideas in order to get price exposure to bitcoin was to establish a 6-month budget for myself, and to use that money to invest into bitcoin (in a front-loading dollar cost averaging kind of a way), and then to reassess that situation when it came close to the end of the 6 months to figure out if I had learned anything about bitcoin that would cause me to make adjustments in my approach.

Pretty much after the first 6 months investing into bitcoin and researching into bitcoin triggered me to largely end up extending my budget authorization to allocate a similar level of budget to myself and to invest another 6 months until the end of 2014 and then to reassess again.

Largely by the end of 2014 - I was in, and maybe there is a bit of a sunk cost fallacy on my end that was going through my practices, but largely from the first year into bitcoin I figured that I had largely reached a goal of having a 10% allocation into bitcoin as compared with other investments that I had at the time, which was similar to the same investments that I had at the end of 2013, so the main change was to just add bitcoin into my investments.. with around 10% allocated to bitcoin.

I am thinking that in late 2013, my decision to get into bitcoin was meant to have at least a 1-2 year investment thesis, and I was thinking in terms of the potential for capital gains to be long-term rather than short-term, but then also I was thinking about the possibility that I could end up staying invested in bitcoin for more than 2 years, but even at the time that I got in, I felt too uncertain about any kind of ability to make any kind of real and meaningful commitment towards how long I would be investing into bitcoin because any ongoing investment into bitcoin would surely have had been based upon my having to learn more about bitcoin and not to get scared away from whatever ongoing investment thesis that bitcoin might have.. especially given some of the seeming uncertainties of bitcoin and some of the ways that I was learning that it was different from other asset classes.

So really the longer that I have been in bitcoin and the more that I have attempted to study various aspects and angles, and there have been various informational battles over the years, I have not really been dissuaded from the strength of bitcoins investment thesis and I have continued to attempt to engage in various kinds of self-learning techniques in order to attempt to better be able to adapt my own financial and psychological circumstances so that I would be comfortable in regards to various methods that I have had to go through various stages of bitcoin accumulation and bitcoin portfolio maintenance and at the same time attempting to use this form as a way for me to both share my learning and to attempt to either learn from the ideas of other or to learn from my attempts to better present my ideas in this forum.

I have not deleted any of my forum posts or even edited them (except maybe only a few in minor details.. and usually within an hour or so of posting to fix up the presentation or the grammar), so largely anyone who might be curious about my historical posts on topics can find them.. and every once in a while I can also explore to see if some of my views might have changed or some of the ways of my presenting the information might have changed.

So at the time that this thread started, I had ONLY been about 7 years into my bitcoin journey, so by the end of this calendar year I will be at my 10 year anniversary of being into bitcoin.

Surely the thread starter (Op) was a bit of a troll in starting this thread in which s/he hardly even followed through with the thread, but was largely just asking other members about their bitcoin journeys, wanting to target longer term bitcoiners, and seeming to have presumptions in regards to anyone who had been in bitcoin for 10 years would be rich blah blah blah. Likely we can see from posts in this thread that a lot of members who are posting have hardly any fucking clue about the value in bitcoin coming from figuring out some kind of plan in which they should be attempting to accumulate bitcoin and not be selling very much of their bitcoin. Of course, every member is going to have a different journey in regards to managing his/her various investments and cashflow in order to figure out some kind of balance of bitcoin that s/he can accumulate and have something meaningful to show after any 10 year journey in bitcoin no matter at what point that journey starts, it seems to me that part of the focus should be to attempt to accumulate BTC, even if the amount of BTC that can be accumulated might ONLY be a small amount and might ONLY build slowly over years and years and years, and perhaps by the time 10 years comes, there will be some bitcoin that are still being held and there will be some value in those bitcoin

- even though of course, there is no guarantee that the bitcoins that have been accumulated will be profitable, even though it does seem quite likely that bitcoin was a great asymmetric bet to the upside 10 years ago, bitcoin has continued to be a great asymmetric bet to the upside for all times since 10 years ago, so long as you are holding your bitcoin for longer periods of time, and it is likely that bitcoin is going to continue to be a great asymmetric bet to the upside, especially for anyone who is following an investment plan in which they continue to accumulate bitcoin over 10 years or more.. and perhaps attempting to either build the number of their BTC stash but at least figure out some plans in which they are not selling too many of their bitcoin merely because the price went up... and of course, those are personal choices regarding if any of us are selling much if any of our bitcoin along the way or failing/refusing to adequately accumulate bitcoin, even if we might be able to project out a 10 year time horizon it seems that we should be thinking in terms of bitcoin accumulation rather than dumbass trading ideas or ways to sell too much of our bitcoin too soon.