It seems like every cycle guys are proclaiming that bitcoin is going to hell and it is the end of bitcoin and blah blah blah, and there surely are ways to deal with these matters, which seems to frequently end up in ignoring the noise and to stay focused on either just HODLing through or keeping on buying in the event that you still are in your earliest of stages of building your bitcoin stash.

Of course, the larger the stash gets, then there can develop questions regarding if the stash is big enough or not, and one of the errors is selling too soon, yet another error is that some guys let up upon their bitcoin stacking.

Even you, Findingnemo, are getting into OG status with nearly two cycles under your belt, and it seems to me that the first cycle is the most difficult, yet it still frequently will take a couple of cycles for guys to really start to get to a point of having enough or more than enough bitcoin, unless they were able to front load their bitcoin investment at some point in their first cycle.

I might be able to relate to you, since I came to bitcoin (got started in bitcoin)  about 1 cycle before you, and I also came to bitcoin at or near the top of the cycle... Mine entry into bitcoin was November 2013 - even though my forum registration was February 2014.


I doubt that the discovery, invention and/or playing around with bitcoin was "just for fun," since at least 10 years before 2008, there had been a series of digital money-related projects that were similar to bitcoin in regards to some of their features, yet the various predecessors had various flaws that largely related to centralization that bitcoin largely resolved.

Bitcoin's October 31, 2008 white paper had proposed ways to resolve various centralization issues with the ways that blocks were mined and the difficulty adjustment, which were ambitious and seeming to potentially resolve several prior problems of previous iterations, while at the same time, when bitcoin went live in 2009, that provided a real world example to expand out with experiential evidence to figure out whether bitcoin might work in reality, not just a game, even if bitcoin has historically been characterized and denigrated as being magical internet money.

I would suggest that even if some details and specifics in regards to where we are at today were beyond imagination in 2008 and 2009, a lot of where we are were within the realms of contemplation.  

Accordingly, even where we are today is not outside of the scope of earlier imaginations of trajectories...and yeah of course specifics were not going to be known, and maybe the diversion of GPUs to mine bitcoin and then the creation of ASICs to mine bitcoin was a bit beyond expectations, even though quite a few of bitcoin's parameters have not been broken over the past nearly 17 years, at least not so far.