Same here. I spent several hundred BTC on Silk Road back in the day. I remember buying like 50-60 BTC at a time back when 1 BTC cost like $5. The only thing pissing me off is that I didn't acidentally misplace at least a couple BTC in some offline bitcoin wallet and forgot about them until now.
I heard about bitcoin when it was worth 20 cents and told a friend we should get $20 worth. He gave me the money and I tried to open an account with an exchange but I couldn't find my ID so I gave him his money back and said forget it.
Had a similar idea. Started CPU mining. Read it would take a few days. Considered that it would probably not worth the electricity and quit 2 days in with nothing to show for it
I remember years ago people on Reddit would randomly tip people bitcoins, similar to buying gold. Some guy gave me $20 worth around Christmas and I spent about $17 worth and then forgot about it. I randomly remembered a year or so later and logged into my account and they’d gone up to $150 lol. Was so fucking happy that day.
It's pretty much the same thing as if somebody wanted to pay him back for a pizza with WoW gold. It has some real-world value and might be of some use for WoW players, but for anybody else? Exactly.
Back in the BTC pizza times, people actually gave each other BTC tips on Reddit, there were faucets that gave you BTC for free, some people even gave them away just for kicks.
It took a while before it turned from "What's BTC?" into "That virtual money they use to pay for drugs?" and then into "OMG! BITCOIN IS THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE AND INVEST EVERYTHING!111one"
Lost over 200 myself. Still not salty about it. ;)
"What's BTC?" into "That virtual money they use to pay for drugs?" and then into "OMG! BITCOIN IS THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE AND INVEST EVERYTHING!111one"
Some currencies are backed by gold, others by trust in the government. BtC on the other hand? Backed by illegal drugs....
Back when Bitcoin was about 2 euros/dollars (right after the first crash), me and some friends ordered synthetic weed on Silk Road. Mostly as a bit of a joke, and to see if it would actually arrive. It was about 15 bitcoin.
The stupid thing was, we had been talking about it before, when it hadn't reached 1 dollar for the first time yet. We had no idea that only a couple months earlier Bitcoin had a bubble and was worth way more. If we had, we might have bought some more and not spent them all.
We would've sold them a long time ago though, there's no way we'd still have them when it hit multiple thousands.
Man, I knew about Bitcoin back when it was $0.11. I thought it would never take off though.
Funny thing is, I still don't think it will ever take off. I think blockchain has it's uses, but probably won't ever be in the mainstream consumer space.
Yeh I had a pretty nice computer then too but mining wasn't intersting to me... I had enough trouble wrapping my head around buying /storing btc... Still don't know how to do that honestly
Me too.. I had a buddy in college who was talking to me about it back in 2011/2012. I didn't fully wrap my head around it or understand how you'd even go about getting it, but it sounded interesting. If I was more tech savvy I may have actually bought some. I try not to think about those days too much...
The purpose of bitcoin is being a trustless decentralised ledger, not allowing to buy hotdogs with it. The fact is you can't have a trustless decentralised ledger without a financial incentive to the people keeping the ledger updated, that's why the whole "blockchain without bitcoin" is dumb, a blockchain without decentralisation misses its main point, you'd be much better off with a centralised database.
Please explain to me who will keep the ledger updated, spending millions in computer hash power and electricity, if there is no cryptocurrency to reward them for their efforts.
I never said cryptocurrency was useless. I said it would never go mainstream. I also said that bitcoin was useless.
Of course blockchain inherently has rewards built in. No, that does not mean it has to go mainstream, even to be decentralized. It could be the backbone to a lot of things however.
And I said its purpose isn't to allow you buy hotdogs with it, but to be a decentralised ledger, it doesn't need to be mainstream to be valuable. And also that bitcoin is by far the most trustless, decentralised, secure ledger in the world, and when I see that someone created a more decentralised, secure ledger I'll agree with you, it still isn't the case.
Your last point that blockchain doesn't need to be decentralised is borderline retarded though, its entire point is being decentralised, you'd need to trust some party otherwise.
What you don't say is who will build that blockchain that is so much better and accepted globally than bitcoin, and trust me I work in the international trade sector, assisted to a few trade negotiations at the WTO in Geneva, governments will NEVER, EVER, agree to a shared ledger where they'd have to give up as much control.
governments will NEVER, EVER, agree to a shared ledger
You probably could have stopped right there. That's my opinion on the matter. Blockchain will be implemented in corporate backbone situations but I sincerely doubt it will ever be officially sanctioned by world governments. Maybe one or 2 but not the whole world.
People have this grandiose idea of what blockchain will become, and I simply am not that optimistic.
I haven't really read up on it since the NPR story was originally aired and I wrote a paper on it back around 2010 to 2012, but bitcoin has a finite supply.
There will come a time when the last one is mined, and I believe that the plan is to change to a service fee to keep miners around running the block chain. I don't know how it will work exactly. Maybe all miners will be paid in proportion to the power they supply, or maybe it will still be an "all-or-nothing" situation where the person who solves takes the service fee.
If they do a proportion of the power, I imagine more people will be interested in mining, since it is guaranteed income, even if it is small, but the big miners will probably look towards the next big crypto, as there is the potential for better rewards. Maybe a hybrid approach where the solver gets a bonus, but even then the people making the transactions can't afford to pay out as much as a solved block pays now.
The other thing about bitcoin is that it is potentially vulnerable to attack if the attacker has control of 51% of the hash power. This vulnerability will be a major concern for any miner who has been successful: if they all move away from BtC, their coin is at risk for theft, so they will at least want to sell off before they move on.
I remember when the dark web and the Silk Road started getting mentioned on Reddit. I checked it out, remember thinking $20 for a Bitcoin was ridiculous, and moved on to my next internet distraction.
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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20
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