Quote from: Hueristic on April 23, 2025, 02:51:31 AM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 23, 2025, 02:32:30 AM

so if they don't have the numbers, they will make some estimates.

Who would do such a thing!

To provide context, I was referring to young people (such as relatives) who will sometimes speculate about how many bitcoin that a guy might have based on the young persons having had found out that a guy has bitcoin.

It seems to me that people are somewhat naturally curious and/or gossipers, and kids can sometimes be more problematic since they are still in the process of learning that there might be some value in exercising discretion.

Some young people are more immature than others too, and even if we might describe some reasons that they should not engage in gossiping, our attempts to guid them (and control their communications) might end up having the opposite effect.

Surely there are some members who have attempted to resolve these kinds of matters by maintaining sealed lips in regards to bitcoin-related topics, so I am not sure if that would be an appropriate resolution for a lot of guys, including that likely many of us, including a lot of the active members of this thread, have been talking with family members and/or acquaintances about bitcoin for years, and some of the family members cannot help themselves, except to say something... and perhaps too much and perhaps not even whittingly realizing that conversations that they had with folks several years earlier would be remembered.

I posted about this before, yet in the summer, perhaps 9 months ago, I went to a wedding of the daughter of a cousin of mine, and I did not even feel like I knew very many folks at the wedding, yet there were quite a few of them who knew me, and when I was introduced to them, they had heard from another one of my relatives about how "into bitcoin" that I was, so there were several folks who I either met for the first time, or perhaps I had met them many years earlier, but they had some information in regards to my bitcoin holdings, and surely some of them had assumptions about my bitcoin holdings that seemed to be weak in their factual tethers, but they still had some questions (and/or conversation points) for me that related to bitcoin.. and frequently, they would get to the very basic of questions that relate to how many bitcoin that I have.

It was strange to meet several quasi-unknown folks in such a context, and I frequently would try to downplay aspects of my bitcoin involvement, while still acknowledging aspects of what they were saying, and frequently, I would try to turn the question back on them, and many times, I would ask them if they had gotten into bitcoin, and they would say that they had not done so, even though they wished that they would have (presuming that the bitcoin run had already happened, blah blah blah).

I am not saying that I really know how to deal with these matters, and some times, there could be ways of dispelling some of the myths, but there are also likely folks who say too much about my bitcoin holdings thinking that it will not have any ramifications, and sometimes they don't even know specifics, but they have some ballpark estimates that they consider to be based on reasonable pieces of information that they have, and yeah, maybe even if some of us might not tell specifics to parents, parents will frequently have certain pieces of information, and perhaps too much information.

Even my cousin example that I had given earlier. I had given him some information in relation to some business related matters that we have going on, and I surely consider that he will mostly know not to say too much about what he knows, yet at the same time, there can be some leaking of information that goes beyond his expectations, and sometimes it is easier for others to talk abut the finances of people that they know rather than talking about their own finances. At the same time, young people can frequently end up overhearing these kinds of conversations between adults and about other adults, and the young people might even behave in even more loosed lips kinds of ways.

Quote from: philipma1957 on April 23, 2025, 03:49:46 AM

yeah I pulled my btc out.
I will leave the ten trump coins there.

I will keep it open for taxes

I recall when my Coinbase account was closed in 2018, they gave me notice that I would have something like 30 days to trade out of my positions and that I would not be able to transfer out dollars because they had not resolved the unfreezing of my bank account, so I had to withdraw whatever assets that I had on there, and so at that time, i am pretty sure that the only assets that I had were bitcoin and dollars, so then once the 30 days (or whatever it was) ran out, then I had an additional 30 days to withdraw everything from my account. They gave me a deadline to withdraw everything that I had from my account.. and there were daily limits and perhaps even longer term limits, yet I was able to achieve the withdraw portion within the timeline that they had given to me.

In other words, I did not have any choice to keep any aspect of my Coinbase account open or to keep any assets on there.

I had some similar situation with Bittrex, yet they were completely closing.. or at least the first time, they had delisted Monero, and so I had Monero with them, and I sold 1/3 of my Monero while I was researching other ways to potentially hold those Monero in a private wallet, and then the time when they closed, around early 2023 (March/April), then I had around 4 shitcoins with them, so I figured out where I was going to put the shitcoins and then also I figured that I was going to withdraw the BTC, yet with the BTC, I had withdrawn them to the wrong kind of account type, and so I had to get support to reverse my transaction and to allow me to withdraw again and to withdraw in an appropriate kind of a way.. I think that it needed to be from a legacy address to a legacy address... so there can sometimes be difficulties dealing with exchanges and/or moving around value and/or logistical issues to resolve (or to learn) in the process.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 23, 2025, 02:32:30 AM

[edited out]

I can relate. I believe many of us have had similar issues with friends and relatives. I guess the only way to completely prevent this, would be to act in complete secrecy, completely alone, and never ever talk about Bitcoin to anyone in a way that would hint that you may be a coiner yourself. Try to imagine your life 10 years ago. You just bought, say, hypothetically, 10 BTC for $2000. Would you worry so much about OPSEC? I don't think most people would. Unless you are a complete loner, with no interaction with humans, it would come naturally to mention this to a close friend or relative, and maybe even attempt to explain about Bitcoin to them and make them buy some themselves. It's only natural to want to help loved ones by suggesting to them something you think may be successful. As for me, I remember even giving little chunks of $1 worth of Bitcoin to many of my students at that time, just to show them how it works. How's that for OPSEC? Things have changed so much since then, and those 10 BTC you (hypothetically) bought for a mere $2000 have (hypothetically) turned you into a millionaire (soon multi-millionaire)!

Frequently, I like to use anywhere between $250 and $300 per coin to be approximations for the cost per coin during that 2015 period, yet surely there were a lot of periods that coins could have been gotten cheaper than $250, and perhaps most of 2015, prior to October had BTC costs that were less than $250, absent the July spike up to $317-ish.

Personally, I bought coins through several parts of that period, and surely my lowest purchase was around $180, and I was largely running out of money during that time, so I did not have very many BTC purchases less than $225... So surely one of the things that happened to some of us guys buying BTC all the way down from $1k to $200-ish is that we were running out of money for some of those lower priced BTC buying opportunities... one of the problems of becoming overly bullish too soon or at least ongoingly stacking bitcoin, including my own considering that $380 to $420 was a kind of bottom, which held until it did not hold, so yeah gruelling to have a lot of purchases between $380 and $420 between September 2014 until December 2014, and then that did not hold anymore, and sure, even if the BTC price did not exactly half from there, that additional 60% to 70% drop to put us into the lower $200s did not feel good, and it lasted until about October 2015-ish to be stuck in such a seemingly low price doldrum for so long, yet still difficulties to buy a whole hell of a lot of bitcoin at the lower ends of that range because the money had been spent over and over, and as more money comes in, it is getting as certain amount of spending on bitcoin, but maybe also feeling some needs to hold back some cash, too.

So, it does feel more realistic for me to be describing average BTC costs that were in the ballpark of $250 to $300 for that time, but even with your example of $2k or even $3k to 6k, surely guys could have had picked up anywhere between 10 to 20 BTC for fairly reasonable prices of that time and for most likely a budget of less than $6k. and so like you mentioned, there might not be any reason to NOT share some of those kinds of details with friends and relatives.. maybe not all of the complete details, but enough of the details to potentially cause them to conclude that you have a decent amount of BTC.. and maybe it does not even matter how much you paid for them, except for the fact that the story of your coin quantity becomes quite feasible when accounting for the reasonable price that you may well could have acquired a decent amount of coins.

And I frequently tell the story to a lot of folks about how gruelling my own accumjulation of bitcoin had been because I had some cashflow issues through much of 2015, yet each time that I had $20 to $400 extra come to me, i would split it in half and use half of it to buy bitcoin, so even if I had something like $400 come in and if I used $200 to buy bitcoin at $250, then that would have had been 0.8 BTC for one of those purchases, and surely even something simple like a $25 purchase would have had been 0.1BTC during a lot of that year to the extent that some one might have had some tight cashflows, he still might have had been able to assemble $2k to $6k worth of purchases between January and October and then ended up pretty well off.

By the way, I had also reiterated my BIG mistake several times in which I had been building up cash, and so by the time the run from $300 to $500 took place in end of October and into the beginning of November, I ended up making a mistake of making a pretty BIG purchase at the end of that little spurt, so it ended up costing me more than 6 months before that particular purchase that was right around $500 per coin got back into profits at the end of May 2016.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

Aside from having a boating accident (which may not be so believable these days), what I've done is to make sure my very close circle of people that know certain sensitive information about me are aware of the implications and ramifications of spreading such information to others. So far, I have the feeling that it has worked. Only time will tell, but I believe that the recent (and especially the upcoming) Bitcoin price appreciation, has made many of us more "concerned" about certain things and practices.

It has become crazy how much some of those purchases had become worth in these days, and maybe one of us might say that I am going to shave off 0.1 BTC at around our petty prices (from a few days ago) of $83k, and so then that 0.1 BTC would have gotten me $8,300, yet perhaps I had ONLY paid around $25 for that particular BTC tranche. Sometimes we have to use concrete examples like that in order to make our point, yet it still does not mean that my whole stash has an average price of $250 per coin, and so I had been suggesting that my whole stash is around a $1k average per coin, yet even now, that $1k per coin is starting to seem too cheap, and difficult for some folks to relate to.

Some of us might have to readjust our cost per coin up to $10k per coin, and we can still make our point while making our point.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

I guess even our posts here in WO could potentially put many of us in an unpleasant situation, should our accounts be associated with our physical identities. I would even suggest that the mere fact that we are regular WO participants, regardless of the content of our posts and how "poor" we say we are, could be enough to cause this, should such a leak occur.

hahahahaha.. That seems to be part of the reason that sometimes we might have to admit that some of our claims might be partially fictitious, or based on a mix of fiction and truth... so then yeah, even sometimes, like you say, folks will try to read the more bullish case into our situation, and so sometimes it just becomes unrealistic to suggest that we have as many coins as might be claimed that we supposedly have... so yeah, I got some coins at $180, and some at $225, and some at $317 and some at $500, yet still if my overall costs end up going from $1k to $10k, it should be obvious that I don't have as many coins as if my average cost were in the $250 to $300 arena for all of my coins.. because I did not get all of my coins in 2015.. I got them at various times staring from 2013 all the way until present, and various mistakes had also been made along the way that might not had been boat accidents exactly but they were still mistakes that raised my costs per BTC at various points in time.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

And this will only become worse in the future. WO could be considered a whale honey-pot, and hence the target of malicious entities.

Yep... even guys with seemingly innocuous bitocin stashes of 10 million satoshis or 21 million satoshis or even my previously admitted 63 million satoshis will really start to seem like a lot, and some of us might wonder why we admitted to achieving such statuses.

Maybe mindrust did not really mindrust but instead he had a boating accident?

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

I don't want to name names, but some of us here have mentioned purchases which put their Bitcoin amounts in the triple digits or more. So, it always helps to exercise good security practices when it comes to post content, forum access and profile management. VPN? Tor? A neighbor's Wi-Fi? All of the above? Pick 'n' mix and find what works for you. And, sadly, I find OPSEC and $100k/$1M parties to be a contradiction in terms and will likely never happen.

I agree with what you are saying, yet still feel like mentioning that Saylor had a $100k party.

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on April 23, 2025, 09:12:14 AM

BTW, we're getting close to $100k again, I see. Can you imagine? 10 years ago @ $200 to now @ 100k (expected). An average of almost 1.9x / year! Mind-blowing!

I like to proclaim that my overall average appreciation is in the ballpark of 65% per year, even though surely some of the purchases had done better than others, to the extent that I still have any of those lower cost coins.