I have said this before somewhere some time, but can't exactly recall when that was. My role in this forum was a different one from day one and I have done a couple of things to acquire BTC. I made three major mistakes and one thing just came into my life that changed most circumstances naturally.

First mistake, I traded because BTC was so volatile that in the beginning I never really fully grasped whether this thing called bitcoin is going to go global or not. I can tell you that I had discussions with some people who were closely involved with BTC or had their first experience developing a digital currency in the 90s and the feelings about bitcoin were indeed mixed. I was not in a position, at least I didn't feel like I was, to just hold whatever I acquired when the price went up substantially. It was confusing because sometimes the value of your portfolio melted away by 60% in a day. I couldn't give the whole volatility reasonable meaning and when these crashes happened, I instead thought I was stupid to not sell. Which eventually led me to selling too much too early.

Second mistake was a classic one: I left a substantial amount on an exchange that went bust. Now I say a substantial amount more like in the value terms of today. Back at the time it was still substantial, but it wasn't like hundreds of thousands. I used two exchanges to gain from arbitrage. It worked for a while, and then it didn't... This taught me a major lesson: never touch arbitrage opportunities in crypto anymore because there is a reason unknown to the public why a coin is cheaper or more expensive on one exchange than on another. I remember people talking about Binance Australia trading for so much lower or higher, can't recall, but I knew that the reason is probably because your funds get stuck in Australia. And that was the case.

Third mistake is a huge one and it depends on which country you are living in: taxes. Doing arbitrage and trading entails taxes and I am sure most people do not have proper accounting in place when they trade back and forth, on several exchanges, with several coins... It's the worst you can do and I had to learn my lesson again. It's very bad and once you are on the radar, which was the case in my case because I was running a small business that accepted BTC, it's literally impossible to provide the evidence you need to convince tax authorities in your favor. Another very important reason to simply DCA and HODL. No headaches at all then.

The last important detail is a change in my life, wife and family, and I took on a challenging job in electrical engineering in another country. That somewhat put my passion on hold for a bit, but not entirely though. I still own some that I don't move because that is the safest way in regards to taxes.

I can add that I own some XMR as I was one of the first to mine it via AWS instances. Most people didn't know how to set it up right when it was launched in April 2014. It was quite complicated as there was no mining software provided in the forum and you had to understand how to deploy AWS instances with Putty and some terminal commands and so on and so forth. Some of those are dormant and I have never touched them and I will leave them where they are. I did sell some because renting AWS instances was an interesting experience: you could easily burn through $1k a day in cost. Good though that by then I learned how to do proper accounting... No tax issues with that one.

Obligations in the coming years afterwards didn't get any smaller and to put it mildly, I have gone through a steep learning curve as I was never confronted with saving and investment strategies when I was young. It just wasn't a thing in my family and sometimes I think this is a huge factor. You can't develop this emotional resistance concerning volatility or thorough financial planning with all the issues in mind if you didn't go through it yourself.

Today I would say I am a fundamentally different person than I was 13 years ago. But I wasn't the only one who made mistakes. I know a software developer who was very early into bitcoin and he sold tens of thousands of BTC at $1 to buy a car. Quite a young guy at the time. We didn't have all the resources and the history to look back on that people have now. We didn't have the proof that bitcoin couldn't be attacked. Now it's quite easy even for someone who is not a developer or can't read code: today's newcomers can tell themselves that 1.3 trillion USD market cap is a nice target for all the hackers/attackers in the world and that amount securely protected by the network is proof enough that it can't be attacked.