[faucets]
back in 2011 when i started my interest in btc and before i started to gpu mine and receive actual btc i wanted to test my core wallet to make sure i knew how to receive btc and could create an address and play with how the wallet worked. so i remember getting some btc once from a faucet, maybe gavins as there were hardly any at that time. wish i could remember which one and how much.. thought it was less that 1 btc though.
but heres the thing. im still running and actively using the core wallet i created in june 2011. and i cannot find that transaction. should of been the 1st transaction in the wallet.
now before i started mining to i do remember creating a few early test wallets as i want sure if i was doing it right, plus my internet sucked so bad i may of not waited for full sync, figured i did it wrong, and just ignored the early test wallets and created new ones. ergo that 1st transaction from an early faucet (gavins?) to my one of the early test wallet is likely lost.
however since i almost never delete anything i still wonder if i still have the early test wallets, as i have many early wallet.dats on my old backups. and im pretty anal about backups. so, one day, all those old early wallets copies will get plugged in and run against the blockchain. who knows maybe i will finally find out what happened to that early faucet transaction lol.
Did you feel 'early' or already kind of "late' when you entered in 2011?
I definitely felt 'late' in Q3 2013 and blamed myself for not acting upon reading about btc in Wired for the first time in Nov 2011 (at ~$2).
It was one of those "bitcoin is dead" articles, but i distinctly remember why I did not invest: it said that you have to use Linux or something to that extent (to run the chain and the wallet) and I had zero interest in Linux at the time (to my ignorant self circa 2011, it seemed kind of irrelevant, lol).
seemed pretty early to me as the infrastructure was still pretty rudimentary. btw i was using windows, linux miners were a thing but many miners could run on windows by then. info was spread all over the place, bitcointalk was still the place to find most stuff and a lot was way over my head. and i was used to distributed computing (f@h) so i was already very comfortable building multi gpu rigs and running varied weird clients. but i still took a few weeks to wrap my head around miner software, mining pools, workers, wallets and all that. and that was just the btc side. getting actual fiat was another area that was a minefield. like i was no way doing kyc stuff with some of the rickity "exchanges" that existed then. mt gox needed dwolla, what fun. both are defunct now althiugh mtgox wound up being the ultimate hodl scenario lol. well kinda.
so thats a long winded way of saying judging based the infrastructure at the time, the learning curve, and finding things that actually worked.. well yea it did seem early to me. of course to OG lazlo and co, it was old hat by then.