Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 11, 2021, 03:09:51 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 10, 2021, 10:29:43 PM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on April 10, 2021, 05:13:19 PM

Quote from: shahzadafzal on April 10, 2021, 05:02:28 PM

Quote from: d_eddie on April 10, 2021, 04:40:55 PM

Wasn't he referring to seasonal rains?

Isn’t it Bitcoin season?

Yes, since 2009 actually Grin

Of course, overall bitcoin has done quite well since it went live in January 2009, yet who the hell really knew about it for some time... except for a few guys that were really in the nerdiest of nerdy circles in terms maybe having some potential technical knowledge.

And, still bitcoin did not really get any kind of attempts at tangible price discovery until around May 2010, the time of the pizzas transaction.. and maybe there have been some spreading of the news about bitcoin as the price was getting assigned to it and it was being found out about by more and more people. I am pretty sure that I heard the word, "bitcoin" a few times before I looked into it, and maybe I just thought something superficial that it is a kind of invented money like Lindy Dollars or whatever.

I do believe that we should be attempting to consider some of the nuances of bitcoin's price movements and cycles which does seem to cause it to have seasons in which some folks could well be in a world of hurt if they are not able to figure out strategies to get through the cycles.. both financially and psychology, and surely hardly any of us were able to get into bitcoin in 2009 or even sometime soon thereafter be able to have some of the pleasures of experiencing the price appreciation of its whole life... We only know about bitcoin between 2009 and whatever time that we got in through the experiences of others - not that I am saying that you actually "have to" own bitcoin in order to benefit from its invention and they incentive systems that it has set up that will likely end up benefiting everyone, whether they own it or not... and sure the owners of bitcoin do seem to have gotten quite rewarded through the years and likely to continue to be rewarded as far as what seems to be likely in the future.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 10, 2021, 09:05:22 AM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on April 10, 2021, 08:51:32 AM

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 10, 2021, 08:47:56 AM

To level up, you need merits and activity, and to become Legendary you need 1000 merits and an activity of 775-1030 (chosen at random).

He had the merits, not the activity.

Gawd, i got it wrong (again). I'm not surprised, like most of you aren't too... Roll Eyes

EDIT: Maybe BTC can buy me a reliable brain again in the future. But then i will be old, so i won't need it by then Angry

Don't worry, the fact that you own BTC means that you belong to the top 0.1% of the smartest people on Earth. Your brain is fine.

I hate to quibble with a fellow bull - but seems to me that there is some level of smarts and luck in terms of finding out about bitcoin and then acting upon such knowledge. When I found out about bitcoin in late 2013, I was so damned ready for it because it seemed to have been exactly the investment category that I was looking for and so maybe I am one of the rare ones in which the concept clicked almost immediately in terms of the proposition of bitcoin and my desire to get a stake in it, but I surely am not claiming to be any kind of genius in terms of the strategy that I established and if there might have been some better ways of going about my investment into bitcoin in terms of where I was at at the time that I found out about it.

And, yeah, I use the term "found out about it" loosely because I hardly even knew exactly what bitcoin was except for some descriptions of it and what it was trying to achieve, and so part of my initial goal was to start to get a stake in bitcoin but to also study the matter at the same time and to figure out if maybe I needed to readjust my strategies or my ideas about what it was that I was investing into.

There are so many people who neither had the luxury of being in the mental/financial place that I was when I got into bitcoin nor are there many people who have the luxury to spend a lot of time studying a matter...

Many of us heard about the August 2020 article regarding yuppies dismissing bitcoin (a r/bitcoin link on the topic, too), and yuppies are considered to be smart people, but the article is likely correct about some mental blocks that cause difficulties for them to take action in terms of either investing into bitcoin or researching into it more. Most of them will likely come around sooner or later, and many of them are likely smarter than a lot of us here, just smart in different ways that end up causing them to be a bit of laggards in the likely largest transfer of wealth in our lifetimes, and perhaps the largest peaceful transfer of wealth in the history of man, perhaps? perhaps?

I agree, luck has certainly played a role for many of us in our Bitcoin journey. But not just luck. I think that one needs to have a suitably capable brain to be able to get into Bitcoin and stay into it for the long run. The true early adopters were the "nerdiest of nerds", as you say, but they had brains too. At least those who kept their coins. Bitcoin was (and still is to some extent) a difficult thing to get into. You can't just go to a shop and buy it. You have to really want to own it, and, to some extent, you need to put some effort (physically and mentally) to get into it. This immediately pushes the lazy, weak, or dumb ones away from it.

On this coming Saturday (the 17th) I've arranged a meeting with a nocoiner cousin of mine, and we'll be meeting at my other cousin's house. So it will be me, my coiner cousin, and another nocoiner cousin. The purpose of the meeting is to initiate the nocoiner into Bitcoin, registering with an exchange, buying his first BTC (only BTC and no other type of coin, I will insist on this), transferring to a wallet, maybe a paper wallet, and also explain the underlying math & science behind Bitcoin. This takes effort, it's not an easy thing to do, even today. Just imagine those really early adopters. Setting up Linux boxes, installing the s/w, trying to understand the tech, and mining out of their CPUs/GPUs something that had no value, or very little value. It was not for everyone. You had to be nerdy, geeky, smartie, lucky, and open-minded, to want to do this. I applaud these guys.

As for me, I first heard about Bitcoin on the news on TV, can't remember when, probably back in 2010-11. Of course, news pieces are designed for dummies and did not really explain it properly. And it was quick too, barely 1 minute long. They just said "digital money", "being able to transact digitally over long distances". So what? Don't credit cards do that? What's so new about it? And the name "Bitcoin" didn't impress me for some reason. I actually hated the sound of that word. Yuck! "Who came up with that ugly name?", I said. And that was the end of it. I forgot about it. The next few times I heard about it was when Silk Road was shut down (2013), and MtGox collapsed (early 2014). Again on the news, and portrayed very negatively. And that was it again, I dismissed it, erased it from my brain and moved on.

I started seriously investigating about Bitcoin in late 2014. Here's an email I sent to a dear friend of mine (now a coiner), dated November 2014 (copy/pasted from my "Sent Mail" folder just now):

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, I forgot to send you those links about the topics we discussed on Sunday. Actually I can't remember all the things that I should send you links for. Here are the topics I do remember:

Ponzi Scheme (Wikipedia's article),
bitaddress.org (Bitcoin wallet generator),
offlineaddress.com (similar to the above),
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Bitcoin's White Paper, by Satoshi Nakamoto).

Let me know if I've forgotten something. One thing is certain. This is a big thing that has the potential to change the world. We should investigate about Bitcoin as soon as possible and understand it as much as we can. Study it (esp. the last link), and we'll discuss about it again.

The above is the earliest email record I have, where I'm seriously discussing about Bitcoin. Notice my first link: Ponzi Scheme. I was reluctant to accept Bitcoin at the time, because I had not studied it and did not really understand it. I remember reading the White Paper and getting goose bumps on my spine. It was like a revelation to me. I spent the entire week researching about it. I then called my friend on Skype and told him: "We've got to buy Bitcoin ASAP!"

I bought my first 0.5 BTC for about $100 in mid-2015, using a local Bitcoin ATM. 3 months later, I bought another 2 (or was it 3?) BTC for $1000 from the same Bitcoin ATM (price had risen since my first purchase). And that was my (admittedly, very late) start. Then came Andreas Antonopoulos, with his wonderful books and talks, that firmly cemented and gave rigor and structure to what I had already understood about Bitcoin. That was the "point of no return" for me. I was sold. I just knew that this was something big, something very big, and I was so excited to be part of it. And here we are, posting "come on, Bitcoin, do something" memes @ $60k...

So... Luck? Brains? Nerdiness? Craziness? All of the above? I don't know. But it sure has changed my life. And so far it's been the most exciting journey I've even experienced. And the best is yet to come!

Thank you, Satoshi, whoever and wherever you are.

I don't disagree with anything you are saying, AlcoHoDL, and maybe in time 1, I might frame matters in a certain way, and then in time 2, I will frame matters in another way that might say the same thing but emphasize differing parts. I mean there can be a kind of conviction, but then a kind of luck too. I mean there is luck to having an ability to spend time reading pie in the sky articles about some concepts that are going to change the world and actually have that resonate with you. I remember so many people telling me that I needed to read the whitepaper first, and I cannot even recall if I read much of it because I would start to read it and then get caught up in some of the maths and sciences and get confused and then just see what others said about it, and thinking that sounds right.

I don't tell too many people that the first 1.2486 bitcoin that I bought, I transferred 1BTC to an exchange and I believe that I bought .84 BTC worth of a variety of altcoins (the 8 that they had at the time in equal fragments). Those things are now called shitcoins, but whatever, I was trying to learn by actively participating, so I can relate why folks gravitate towards trying to learn about other projects, even if they might mostly focus on bitcoin (including yours truly and including that I just have become less and less receptive towards those other projects - but maybe i am lucky in that regards too.. that I already was pretty well off in terms of my other investments, so I thought that bitcoin was risky enough without going further into risk upon risk upon risk upon risk.. and I am thinking that there is a bit of luck in that rather than any kind of meaningful smartness coming from me).

Yes, a kind of hail-mary pass to invest , but it still took me about another week to get my BTC stash back up to 1.2486. I made a whole bunch of BTC buys.. small ones within a pretty short period of time because I was playing around and learning and also I had given myself a 6 month budget that I divided by 26 to have weekly budgets that I tried to stay within with my bunch of scattered and somewhat random ongoing purchases of small quantities.

And think about your first reading list in November 2014, but then your decision that you must buy right away, but it took you until Mid-2015 to actually act.. you lucky bastard. I had already been buying all the way through 2014, but you were beginning to buy in 2015 when the BTC price was mostly between $200 and $300 for most of the 2015.. maybe mostly in the mid to lower $200s.. like $230 to $240 for quite a long time in 2015.

Think about it too.. from building up a stack of BTC, but still having some uncertainties along the way, because face it, if we actually had conviction, we would have sold our houses (or whatever) and put it all into bitcoin. I was not going to do that because I was not that convicted, and I just did not want to have all my eggs in one bitcoin basket. Even in late 2014 (maybe around August or September when BTC prices were in the upper $300s for a considerable amount of time, I was considering cashing out about half of my 401k and putting it into bitcoin, which would have largely doubled my BTC stash.. and I just could not bring my lil selfie to do it. I felt that I had already put enough into bitcoin, which was then getting close to 10% of my quasi-liquid investments value.. and I was thinking that was enough... lucky or smart or whatever.. it still worked out, and I have no regrets - even though perhaps I may have been even richer if I could have managed all of that good enough NOT to lose them in my early 2017 sim port hack that took a decent quantity of my coins... maybe I would have lost more? Don't know? Don't know. Maybe it would not have mattered.? I feel lucky that a very fucking size-able loss of BTC hardly ended up making much of a difference in my overall wealth because BTC's appreciation more than made up for the loss in a relatively short period of time.. was that lucky or what (maybe unlucky too, depending on how a guy might look at the matter?).

Some of the coincidental smartness too, came with work and just an ability to have time to ponder on the bitcoin topic rather than maybe having some other daunting situation that I would have had to spend my mental powers.. seems like a kind of luckiness.