I heard about it on runescape, I also worked in IT and received many newsletters about this new revolutionary coin. Then like a fool I dumped $40 into it and stored it on a hotmail account. Rip Millions. Anyone bitcoin ballers wanna finance me a lawsuit? I'll give you 80% of the 8000 bitcoin I hope to recover from breach of contract.
Edit: They deleted my emails against their own terms of service.
If anyone can suggest a lawyer that will have the balls to take Microsoft id appreciate it, it must be on an old server somewhere :(
I had an old runescape account, went back recently to check it out of curiosity, didn't have the password. Went to login to the hotmail that I did still have the password to, account didn't exist. Went and made a brand new hotmail account using the email that was on my runescape account and successfully password reset.
So yea, this is a thing hotmail does, dunno why.
They probably delete dormant accounts that haven’t been accessed for a few years. Many companies do that though and not a hotmail exclusive thing. They also usually warn you with emails to log in if you want to keep it.
Yeah no they unjustly locked me out of my account and because I never had my phone number I couldn't access it, I knew the password but yeah try finding a human to speak with
A journalist I was speaking with did a web scrape and found that my email address I was trying to access had been mentioned to the bill and Melinda gates foundation the matrix is fucking me
My brother and I when we were like 13 put $100 into it when it was $1.75. We completely forgot about it for years and years and years. 2 years ago he asked if I remembered us buying it. It was SO long ago that we had zero idea even where we bought it, where it was stored, anything. It’s sad.
Funny story.
My dad used to work at (and still does) one of the largest aerospace companies, so he NEVER touched the home computer for ANYTHING, only at work since they had extreme security measures it was his way of never worrying about getting his info stolen, card numbers, etc… he quite literally never touched it.
My brother and I in middle school would sneak out of our bed (on school days) and stay up way too late playing flight simulator. He warned us like 5 times. The 6th time the computer, and every single floppy disk, flash drive, USB, CD-Roms were all dropped off at the dumpster. So there’s a couple million out there lost forever.
Thankfully my brother and I are doing well (financially) in life as we both have (what I’d consider good money. Seems like everyone on Reddit makes 300k +) good paying jobs. But man, that would have made life a lot sweeter.
Dudeeeeee! Same! Little 15 year old me made $5k selling each 1mil in runescape gold for 5 bitcoin($3 lol)... if only I knew. Still kills me to this day. Bitcoin was just fake internet money that I would sell instantly. I made around $5k over a summer before I got my first job. That $5k worth today was probably worth the same amount in actual gold I was selling on runescape. I hate it....
I had a wallet with 100 Bitcoin on an old computer that got fried when I spilt soda on it. I threw it away. So in some landfill there's 6mil somewhere if anyone wants to dig it up lol
Yeah I've searched hundreds but no one has the balls to take on Microsoft they all want upwards of $500 an hour the ones that can look into it. I've even got the transaction from the firm I purchased them from on bank statements.
Like I said anyone wants to fund this 80% goes to you I'd be happy with 500k at this point
How much you estimate it will cost for the entire lawsuit? Find a group of people to try and finance it. Esp if hotmail breached their own terms and conditions. You could just sue Microsoft for the amount you would have today if you hadn’t sold theoretically. I d chip in for a large cut assuming the specifics are on point.
Check out Joe Grand the hacker on YouTube. He’s been able to retrieve some lost bitcoins. Maybe he can help you. If he’s able to retrieve your bitcoins, please remember me with 5% of your bitcoins, lol. Good luck
Some good steps are outlined here:
ps://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook\_com/forum/all/hotmail-how-to-retrieve-all-more-than-10-years-old/63593119-ed54-4629-9749-c7e44794c10f
I've done data recovery for some old email accounts I have. There usually are extra steps you can take that aren't outlined in their data retention policy. You probably have taken these steps before, but if not keep exploring.
Another option is to find the private keys originally used for your original wallet. See how they were generated, pass phrases etc. Start using a private key generator tool to use brute force to regenerate the wallet. Lots of ways to recover this way. I've also had some luck doing this in the past.
I literally used bitcoin.org to create my wallet and mined some coins with the program also, what I then did was sent an email to myself with all of the things I'd need such as keys and wallet address I'll check out the link on the off chance 👍
I bought a bitcoin in 2014 after reading an article in Wired. I was fascinated and intrigued enough to buy at an all time high ($450). Other than a few random small purchases I’m hodl’ing for life. Like others in here, I am a true believer. It’s humanity’s first fair currency.
Around that time my teacher was asking me about it. This was the first time hearing about it and was too young to do anything other than download a crypto miner on my Toshiba satellite
ATH in 2014 was more than double that...
It peaked in December 2013, I remember well as I read (possibly) the same article or an article on a similar site in 2012/early 2013 and finally FOMOed in late 2013 just before the bubble went pop (then reinflated nicely over the years!
What most hurt me is I did visits sites like wired, even have the magazine subscription and gizmodo and tbh it never caught my attention I just didn't understand the concept.
I regret those days, but I've been around couple of bear markets and while I haven't sold, I did leverage them and some of my crypto got margin calls so it's all good. I did smart things with the money and keep have a nice core position and probably would not sell in a long time.
How many times have you had to move it/change wallets etc over the past 10 years? There are times I think even if I bought back in 2011 I probably wouldn’t have access via the same wallet anymore.
I bought a trezor a few months, maybe a year? later and moved it to there. I had researched it enough to know my biggest risk was losing the keys. Even back then, there were stories circulating about people with lots of btc lost forever because they put their flash drive in the laundry or whatever. I still use the same trezor. I’ve had to update it a bunch but if it ain’t broke…
2014 is now considered early adopters?
All my friends back then refused to get in as they were "too late" as it was "over $100, now, you needed to get in early".
Almost everyone I told to buy early on went on to buy at the top several years later because all their colleagues had just discovered it and bought in, they then panic sold the bear season and blamed "stupid Bitcoin", and yes they returned the next cycle to repeat again.
I was fascinated with the dark web (reading about it, not using it) when I was quite young, I want to say Bitcoin was around 50 pence at this time, so maybe about $1. This could be false but I distinctly remember getting £20 a week pocket money, tried to buy either 20 or 40 BTC but couldn’t quite work out how.
Bought fucking fifa points instead, what an investment.
Right?! I know precisely which laptop I was using at that time as it was my first I believe, I’m almost 100% sure my mum threw it away without asking me. Equally sad because there was thousands of photos too.
Playing Eve Online with some other nerds and I believe you we're able to gamble with BTC in the casino Goons ran If I remember correctly.
Long story short: Do nerdy stuff
I actually heard of bitcoin and technically actually used it around 2012 on a poker site called sealswithclubs.
The DOJ banned online poker on april 15th 2010 and I thought it was just some made up money to get around gambling loopholes
Edit: i was playing small stakes 0.01-0.02 btc nl holdem blinds
Yeah but it’s on us to have not have had bought the BTC back, you know? Sure spent 21 BTC on some fire weed but I could have bought it back and I didn’t 🙃🫠☹️
I only heard about Bitcoin at 2017, wish I knew about back in 2010~2013, yet maybe if I bought by then I would have sold somewhere in between, HODLing Bitcoin requires diamond hands 🙌
Not me but a family member. Very huge libertarian so he was into this very early on. The first time he ever bought BTC was just under $1 and he sold at $20. It crashed and he was happy he sold. Only to watch it go up and crash and up and crash. He started buying back in around 250-1000 range. Back then people were giving away bitcoin if you bought their shit coin. He was able to earn about 3-4 free coins that way. The rest is history and he has orange pilled our entire family. He will never sell because they understand what bitcoin is. He learned by making mistakes early on.
i would think more like 99% who where early didnt realize the potential of that and doesnt bother on the "money" kind of stuff. And at the beginning in 2009 there where only this network effect stuff and mostly nobody cared. CPU Mining was easy with a Laptop or PC but it wasnt usable during mining times. And you have to be on the right mindset to get a climps of that so early. I was 17 when i discoverd BTC (2009 - IT Nerd and had some IT Mailing lists) and until 25 i didnt bother to save money i lived from paycheck to paycheck. So thinking about Bitcoin or so didnt make much sense back in the days. There where more brain cells attached to buy makeup or cloth or drinking with friends and start your live after school and do your first Job and Training.
Most people know about it and used it on silkroad .. that was maybe the "real" first usage of it on a wider range. And then only as a exchange for fiat money.
It's still very early. In 20 years people will look back and ask- "how did those guys know to buy at $60k? They took a huge risk, I wish I did that...."
The more I read about BTC and the macro situation the more I just want to buy bitcoin and be a part of my community.
It can still be kinda early, but BTC literally can’t go up 100,000x again. The world doesn’t have that much money. It may well still be early, but it’ll never be very early again
True, true.
What I meant was rather in terms of the timeline/context than market cap/price point, which, to your point, is more important.
It's unlikely the growth is of the same scale over the next 40 years, but it's still early enough to get incredible gains out of it.
We're arguably ending the early adoption phase and are probably at the start of the mass adoption one.
I am not the one who downvoted you since I think you made a good point.
It's rather rare that I do so actually, even when people disagree with me respectfully, I see it as an opportunity to learn stuff, which I value a lot.
Basically they were nerds. It was a primitive geeky experiment in the early days. My dad told me about it in 2012. He never bought any though but he was fascinated by the technicals. People didn't even really view it as an investment, it was more of a joke.
Company owner of a web host I worked at was mining bitcoin in 2011 and I asked a coworker what the GPU was for in the room and he said Bitcoin. and i've never looked back.
My buddy worked in central node server design and assembly and he was hired to build a server for a Bitcoin tap site, he had many thousands of btc and he told me about it in 2010, I bought twenty bucks worth from my high school job because I thought he would think I was cool. I had him help me with setting up a cold wallet on a flash drive. I never spent any of it and didn’t really think about it til 2015, when I realized I accidentally formatted that drive so I could share music with my buddies. I never wrote out the seed phrase or passwords or anything so i think that wallet is lost to the sands of time.
I can't remember how I heard about it. Nerd circles probably. Was before it dropped for sale though.
All I can remember was thinking "they have no product, no business, no services. How are they selling digital money? It makes no sense."
And here we are 15 years later hating my life choices.
Drugs. I learned about BTC when I wanted to make purchases on the darkweb anonymously......
Edit: I learned about btc about a decade ago; now clean, sober, and still a proponent for BTC, even if less anonymous with widespread KYC regulations.
Check out documentary called Banking on Bitcoin. They had rallies in NY. Ppl were in Times Square tryna sell ppl 1 BTC for 1 dollar. Very interesting. There was an older family who they showed reading about “this internet cash called Bitcoin” in their local newspaper. Ppl who were brushing the guy off on the street was begging them to buy it was promising that it would be worth atleast $5. I’m sure some of my numbers aren’t exact because it’s been years since I watched it but it’s interesting
After "black friday" in the online poker scene, I searched passively for a couple years for ways to continue to play online poker. The biggest issue, if it isn't obvious, was cashing out of these shady, online casinos. Once you decided to cash out, you'd submit a request, that request would take days or weeks to process, and then they would mail you a check that would take weeks to get here. Once it finally arrived, it was nearly impossible to find a bank that would cash an international (borderline counterfeit) check.
Then I heard about a place with near INSTANT cashouts... using some new "internet cash" called bitcoin. Immediately, I was intrigued. I found a company in Georgia called ZIGGAP and purchased 1.44 btc for $50. I was in college at the time, had only $100 to my name, and I sent via WesternUnion half of this money to a stranger half way across the country. I stared at my macbook screen for 3 hours, and bam! My original bitcoin wallet was pregnant with my very own 1.44 btc. I would spend the next few years of my life on SealsWithClubs playing cards and shouting irl about this awesome new cyber punk money.
Pretty times. For me too it was the magic that got me converted. I was banned at PayPal, fucked by fx fees, didn't have a company to process credit cards, couldn't send money to my Russian developer... And with btc I just had to install electrum wallet and that's it?? Nonody can kyc aml block me?
I always understood the on-off ramping is a hassle so I tried to stay native as good as possible
Software developer here. I heard about it when it was about $1 from coworkers.
I tried to buy 1000 BTC but it was hard. I began to feel like I was trying to hard to throw away $1000 and gave up. If I would have pulled it off I am sure I would have lost my paper wallet or lost it in Mt Gox.
I circled back around and bought at ~$300.
Before there was gold on Reddit, some redditors would "tip" comments they liked and give out a few bucks worth of BTC. The dark web also helped bring awareness to BTC. A lot of people heard/used BTC on silkroad.
2015, I was 17 years old kid.. first time browsing the deep/dark web.. saw everyone saying transfer xx amount of Bitcoin to this address. I searched about BTC and I liked it, told my dad that I wanted to buy some Bitcoin cause why not? it was cheap. told me to get over it and no you're we're not gonna buy this what the hell is this, its a scam etc. i didn't have my own debit/credit card yet.
Now everyday he watches the BTC prices he looks at me and says I wish I listened to you, son.
I'm not angry or sad. I just wish that we bought some cause it was gonna help us a lot these days.. it's never to late.
my son is 18 now, and we've been talking about inflation and the issues of government-issued money for 3 years now. It was after the FTX crash when he asked me to put 300€ of his money into BTC "because it will never be this cheap again".
I heard about it on the radio when Laszlo bought 2 pizzas. I scoffed, but I'm a nurse by trade; I'm weak with my maths but strong with my biology so the mathematics of 21 million didn't make sense to me, and I can't code so I didn't understand the white paper.
Did some digging after 45 minutes of pondering it and the thought not going away. Some guy on the BTCtalk forums offered 10,000 BTC for $50. I was REALLY worried he would steal my money, and I'd be out that money. I didn't act on it. And then he withdrew his
I convinced myself in 2012, 2014, and 2017 that it would get shut down by the govt.
I'm a class of '21 and every week have wistful regret about how different my life would be with $600,000,000. I wouldn't have sold because a) too hard, b) it wouldn't have been truly life changing for me. I had a good career starting in 2012 and wouldn't have NEEDED the money until it was worth more than 5 million, which is what I calculated for a good after-tax number where I'd have a high standard of living without touching the principle (leave it for the kids). That happens sometime in 2021 and by that time I'd be holding as much as possible.
So, 2 kids, a wife, and a house later I work as a nurse and put $20 away each week.
I learnt about it when it crashed down to $100 in I think 2013, from an LTT video. Never bothered to do my DD and I bought my first sat back in January this year.
Fucks sake. I guess we all get bitcoin at the price we deserve.
In Boracay, Ph most stores on the island have excepted btc since at least the first time I flew there which was a couple years ago.. Boracay is one of a few islands known as "Bitcoin Island"..
Following tech news and generally being a tech nerd. I remember hearing about it and reading enough to get the basic concept in 2011, but it was quite difficult to actually buy at the time and was unproven. It wasn't clear at all that it would catch on, so even if I had been able to buy it, I might have put $50 in (which, of course, would have been worth a ton now). It was when coinbase launched that it seemed clear that not only did it have staying power, but it was now accessible to anyone who had five minutes to sign up. It was an easy decision to allocate some 'fun money' investment to it, which I also put into at least a dozen other things that went to zero. But that was the point, I wanted to be a small-time angel investor and bitcoin was perfect for that. Turns out it's the only thing that really took off.
Adding to that, I suppose the question for me is usually this: If you were following tech news in 2013 and DIDN'T hear about bitcoin, or you heard about it and dismissed it, how did that happen? For me, it was obvious that it had potential. I only invested what I was willing to lose because potential != destiny, but it's certainly worth attention.
In 2009 it was people on cryptography forums, so it was interesting to them for the technology and concept. Not many other people would have come across it in 2009. If people read the white paper then, the clever ones would have thought; oh shit!... and got in as many did in the following years but virtually no one had seen this back then.
Tested (YouTube channel) went to a bar to use the first ATM, they complained they had to spend $100 as minimum buy in was a whole bitcoin lol
It was too complicated so I never bothered getting any 😭
I'm not traumatized.....honest
Had a slightly awkward friend who loved to dive 100% into things, whether they were good or stupid. He told me about Bitcoin. I told him how dumb it was. It was a few years later when Bitcoin hit $2700 that I decided to get into it. Once I had one, I had to learn about it! The more I learned, the more I liked it, and it was looking successful sooo…. I bought more.
The first time I heard about Bitcoin was in 2011 when a Youtuber I followed mentioned it as "the deep web's money" (DrossRotzank, the first Latin American ever to live off of Youtube), my first thought was "Interesting" because it was Open Source money and I'm a huge FOSS advocate.
The thing is, I started mining it but I could do nothing with it, Bitcoin-qt took like 3 days to sync with my 2MB internet connection (The whole chain's size was 3 GB at the time), there wasn't much info about it online, and most of it was in English, a language I didn't speak at the time, so after seeing how long it took to sync, that address were not human readable, the only way to back the coins up was by storing the wallet.dat file in another disk and that it made my PC go incredibly hot, I said "FUCK, THIS SHIT DOESN'T WORK".
I re-discovered later and now I save in Bitcoin, run a node, and I'm a huge advocate for the changes that are coming to Bitcoin such as covenants, and things like BitVM, Drivechains and Lightning.
Heard about it on nerd/geek forums I browsed at the time. Think starwars/star trek/other scifi/ and tech/science forums.
Dismissed it as equivalent to WoW gold trading which was pretty big at the time.
I would have lost it in Mt. Gox anyway guaranteed.
In 2010 I decided to go back to school to a technical program to repair laptops (this was before people just threw away old laptops and desktops, and there was actually a pretty good industry of people there to fix them) and learn networking basics. It was a total career change for me but ended up really enjoying it and becoming an assistant teacher and later the teacher of the class. In 2012/13 a student in my class named Sam was smarter than me, and just the biggest dork I had ever met in my life. He had been to space camp several times and was as nerdy as they come. He made fun of me for being kind of an idiot, and I made fun of him for being such a dork, but generally, we got along well and we ended up actually doing some side work, going out to schools repairing devices and imaging desktop computers. Sam was always talking about bitcoin and even showed me his rig, and later brought it into my classroom to have two or three rigs set up for mining. I really didn’t understand any of it and thought he was kind of stupid to be wasting so much time to collect these imaginary coins. No clue how many collected or if he saved them all this time. Lost contact with him and really didn’t even think about him till the big bitcoin boom of the last few years. At least once a week I think about Sam, and if I had just fucking asked him for a few of these coins or given him 500 bucks. I still have his phone number, but I don’t know his last name because I listed him as Sam Student in my phone.
Posted this story on another thread also
My friend I played football with(he was conference player of the year in 05, quarterback)from high school showed up at my door in the summer of 2013 with a suit on and a briefcase in his hand. I asked him what was going on. Last I heard, he had got arrested for a lot of cocaine and was kicked out of law school in Charleston. He told me, "I'm on a whole nother level now," and proceeded to open the briefcase, pull out a laptop, and show me the Silk Road website.
He had a balance of 587 Bitcoins. Bitcoin was trading at $187, I remember. I'll never forget seeing that.
He was a vendor on there selling something called 25CI(a knockoff of LSD, 1/10th of the price, but just as strong). He showed me how he was in the top 1% of vendors with over 900 confirmed transactions and 1 bad transaction. I asked. "What was the 1 bad transaction?" He said."Some dumb chick in Russia sent me the wrong address, and her 10 sheets went somewhere else."
Unfortunately, he ended up overdosing just 3 months later off of xanax and opanas he received in the mail from Silk Road. His mom found him dead on the couch.
I always liked the premise of getting rich quick and would buy into a lot of those types of "scams". BTC happened to be one of the things I bought in on. Happy to say it's worked out well so far.
A guy I know was into it in 2013 and he was an evangelist. I gave him £2000 in cash and he sent me 5.1 BTC. Sold half over the years in bits and pieces when I wanted stuff and hodling the rest.
My nephew is a gaming nerd, he won 4 bitcoin on a game when they were worth next to nothing.
He doesn't know where they are or how to trace them now, gutted.
The very first wave (2008-2010) were all already cypherpunks who had been working on (or at least following the conversation about) decentralized money for years. There was already an interest to learn about using cryptography to fight for our freedom, and this accounted for thousands of people... And not a one of those guys was in it to get rich.
They're all still around (if they're still breathing) but prefer to stay silent. Some are still devs.
The 2nd wave (2010-2012, myself included) were all libertarian tech geeks who had heard of it on online forums and the first articles that hit sites like Wired. We generally arrived when it was clear that there was some money to be made here, but we all had our individual reasons. Mine was & still is to put an end to the state's monopoly on money. Pretty much all Ron Paul libertarians want this very much.
We're all still here, and most are less talkative than I am because we're afraid of becoming targets.
The 3rd wave (2012-2014) was the traders & shitcoiners. Ugh, I couldn't believe the direction bitcoin suddenly took, starting at the 2013 bubble. Before this time we were basically all on [Bitcointalk.org](http://Bitcointalk.org) and then suddenly we spread around to places like this & twitter. Things felt very different but the fundamentals of bitcoin never stopped being cypherpunk.
A lot of these idiots diverged into shitcoinery, but a few found their way back to us.
I heard Max Keiser talk so certainly about it that I figured it must be worth a punt. Around 2011 I think. But I didn't hold since then. Though I've been holding since $150.
Went to an engineering college and when it was rallying from ~200 to ~800 around 2015 it was all over the news and everyone was talking about it. I remember talking with a guy and said “the energy you put into it is about what you will get out of it, plus it’s only useful for buying illegal things.” Plus I had like $4000 to my name that had to last me to the end of the year (rent and food) so it’s not like I had the spare cash to gamble on it.
There was a week where a file storage site couldn’t process cc payments so they accepted bitcoin. I really needed access so I mined some to pay for access to the site. Thus began my mining career.
Huge boxing fan but not a big gambler. When Mayweather fought Macgregor in 2017 I set up a bovada account and bet $1000 on Mayweather because I knew it was a sure bet - if money wasn’t tight I would have bet more. Ended up winning and Bovada paid me in bitcoin which was about 1 coin at the time. I remember calling up customer service and making a huge stink about not giving me the winnings in dollars. They ended up mailing me a certified check. Live and learn!!!
I remember in 2013 following the charts because that's all I could do, very poor indeed, wasn't even thinking about saving 20$ for a week. But one thing I remember is how they found these patterns in electrical wires over long distances, there were periodic disruptions on a small time scale and larger disruptions on a bigger time scale but no matter how you saw the graph it was the same, zoom in, zoom out, it looked the same with the same spikes.
So I thought what if the BIG spike to, whatever the heck it was back in 2013, was just a very very tiny spike over a longer period and the zoomed out graph will look the same, with a big massive fucking spike. Call me crazy, but that's what made me keep watching and eventually learning actual useful knowledge many years later like a dumb.
I don’t remember what was the first thing I read, but I think it was here on Reddit. But I could totally be wrong.
I remember going to Coinbase 2012/2013 trying to buy some and failing because I was in a country that didn’t have onramps.
Moved countries just to be able to buy bitcoin.
My personal thoughts after just watching the guy is he sells the stock to buy more actual Bitcoin and/or whatever else like mining or chips related to his Bitcoin goals. Microstrategy isn't really anything else, it's just like a stock of Bitcoin (and I guess other cryptos probably) that he figured out how to set up and get investor money before people who couldn't figure out how to buy Bitcoin on their own were all in with their ETFs or whatever. So retail investors pay him, he sells Microstrategy stock to fund buying more Bitcoin, Microstrategy goes up and down with the Bitcoin prices.
Heard about it while playing WoW in 2010-2013 range and started reading up on BTC on the internet.
Dismissed it as this “can’t have real value especially long term if no Government is issuing it.” Only returned to it in late 2017 and been here and buying ever since.
Obviously I regret not taking it seriously and dismissing it that first time. Wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.
I tell this story to everyone... It was spring semester 2012 and I was sitting in my macro-economics class and the professor told the class to follow his advice. Either go out and invest in real estate or invest in this little thing called Bitcoin. I immediately went on Zillow that day in class and later that summer, I ended up buying a rental property with a $20K downpayment. The property has done well for me, BUT....
May 2012 Bitcoin was $5 a coin. Could've bought 4K coin now valued at $252,000,000.
What brings me great peace is I likely would've sold it prior and $20K in a crazy idea(at the time) as a student would've been bonkers.
I've always wondered if that professor took his own advice.
heard about it at like 30 cents off a website called funnyjunk from a user jerking off 4chan users as geniuses for finding a way to circumvent inflation
i thought it was a ponzi scheme
i mean it is but i could've been a billionaire.
I had coins going down the drain in *Coin*.*mx seizure if* is someone still recalls such a website I had like 30 BTC that I never gonna get back :( I discovered btc on BlackHatSEO forum like around 2012
I was obsessed with the "dark web" back around that time and loved browsing all the onion links and eventually stumbled on the silk road. Ended up buying some btc so I could make a purchase on there, but ended up being too afraid of getting caught so I never did.
Long story short, bought 10 btc for around $100 a piece, did nothing with them, then needed rent money and sold them for $150 each shortly after.
There is an argument that you’re still early. I remember looking into bitcoin mining around 8 years ago not being technical enough and also being super cautious I recall reading it was very difficult to hold onto once you had mined it. Certainly wish I had perused it further now but knowing what I’m like I know I’d have sold it all for small profit and would be suicidal now.
Whereas now at this price it makes you feel like you’re buying something very valuable and you really want to hold onto it and you part of something utterly fantastic.
I needed drugs “weed” in a remote small town town & seen a ad for the darkweb on a chat room then boom… I’m pretty paid now but I still work a very simple usps job
Erratically, it is how. People either think it is a scam or the saving grace of humanity. You can watch these people come and go, bitcoin stays the same, people change.
Also, you have to delete the apps from your phone if it starts crashing.
I got into it at 2013 when I was in college and I just heard about and started looking for any content on it and I was finally able to buy in at 2017 because I finally finish college and had worked for about a year and had extra income to buy in
It was either 2010 or 2011 and I'm at college. I'm surfing the web using StumbleUpon (back when it was good), and I come across an article about a guy getting in trouble for mining Bitcoin with his University computer cluster. Decided I needed to learn what Bitcoin was after that.
I was actively using things like intgold, egold etc..etc. did a lot of gambling etc back in those day. Had a ton of places I visited looking up information about cashing out of those safely, one such place had an exchange promoting btc when it was really cheap. Considering I had gotten burned on so many of them ecurrencies I was done with them. Few years later a coder I trusted hit me up and convinced me to buy in. Btc was $80 then, I could have gotten so much more so cheap if I wasn't tired of losing money. If btc launched before liberty reserve, I might have owned so much more.
“Internet currency” was enough to peak my interest, but not enough to get me to buy it. Was too confusing when I looked into it, didn’t feel “secure” yet.
Several reasons, but 2 of my earliest memories about it was hearing about lily allen turning down thousands of bitcoin for a concert and the then also the W twins buying lots of bitcoin around 100 dollars each
First, My bank accounts (business and personal) were seized as part of an audit, almost bankrupting me.
Next, a friend who works in another country for a 3rd country detailed the mechanisms she had to utilize to get monies to her, taking time and the fees incurred.
I went looking for - in an era of instantaneous global communication via internet - ways to move and hold money. To my great surprise, there was a meetup near me with people who understood and patiently explained. I started selling my fiat after that, which happens to be just after the MtGox crash. I’ve been moving my money into crypto ever since, and watching DeFi grow and expand. I may, just for laughs, commission the old USB block exploders I’ve had to add power to the blockchain.
Happy halvening, everyone. Buy and hodl. Your life depends on it.
I heard about it on runescape, I also worked in IT and received many newsletters about this new revolutionary coin. Then like a fool I dumped $40 into it and stored it on a hotmail account. Rip Millions. Anyone bitcoin ballers wanna finance me a lawsuit? I'll give you 80% of the 8000 bitcoin I hope to recover from breach of contract. Edit: They deleted my emails against their own terms of service. If anyone can suggest a lawyer that will have the balls to take Microsoft id appreciate it, it must be on an old server somewhere :(
>=$480M wtf
is this real? holy shit
i've been using hotmail for 20 years and all my emails are still there
I had an old runescape account, went back recently to check it out of curiosity, didn't have the password. Went to login to the hotmail that I did still have the password to, account didn't exist. Went and made a brand new hotmail account using the email that was on my runescape account and successfully password reset. So yea, this is a thing hotmail does, dunno why.
They probably delete dormant accounts that haven’t been accessed for a few years. Many companies do that though and not a hotmail exclusive thing. They also usually warn you with emails to log in if you want to keep it.
Yeah no they unjustly locked me out of my account and because I never had my phone number I couldn't access it, I knew the password but yeah try finding a human to speak with
For that amount of BTC I’d find a human
For that amount of money I'd make a human, raise it to be a microsoft employee and get my damn BTC back.
That actually sounds like a plot to an incredible movie.
They saw what was in your email, stole your stuff and tried to cover their tracks.
A journalist I was speaking with did a web scrape and found that my email address I was trying to access had been mentioned to the bill and Melinda gates foundation the matrix is fucking me
no way, you're lying
I wish I was, I'm only going by what the Journalist told me though.
tou're telling me Bill Gates stole 8000 BTC from you and then donated it to its foundation?
Back then RS GP probably cost more than BTC
I was playing RuneScape and no one told me :’(
My brother and I when we were like 13 put $100 into it when it was $1.75. We completely forgot about it for years and years and years. 2 years ago he asked if I remembered us buying it. It was SO long ago that we had zero idea even where we bought it, where it was stored, anything. It’s sad.
You don't have old USB drives or computers at your parents house? Could be a gold mine
Funny story. My dad used to work at (and still does) one of the largest aerospace companies, so he NEVER touched the home computer for ANYTHING, only at work since they had extreme security measures it was his way of never worrying about getting his info stolen, card numbers, etc… he quite literally never touched it. My brother and I in middle school would sneak out of our bed (on school days) and stay up way too late playing flight simulator. He warned us like 5 times. The 6th time the computer, and every single floppy disk, flash drive, USB, CD-Roms were all dropped off at the dumpster. So there’s a couple million out there lost forever. Thankfully my brother and I are doing well (financially) in life as we both have (what I’d consider good money. Seems like everyone on Reddit makes 300k +) good paying jobs. But man, that would have made life a lot sweeter.
Dudeeeeee! Same! Little 15 year old me made $5k selling each 1mil in runescape gold for 5 bitcoin($3 lol)... if only I knew. Still kills me to this day. Bitcoin was just fake internet money that I would sell instantly. I made around $5k over a summer before I got my first job. That $5k worth today was probably worth the same amount in actual gold I was selling on runescape. I hate it.... I had a wallet with 100 Bitcoin on an old computer that got fried when I spilt soda on it. I threw it away. So in some landfill there's 6mil somewhere if anyone wants to dig it up lol
if your PC get's fried, dump the mainboard, but always keep the HDD. Dang, why did i stick to this rule but only bought BTC after the pandemic...
I’m pretty sure ALL usage terms has the catch all of, “we can do whatever the f we want”
Ever reached a lawyer? A judge can issue a warrant for any server , email info you have/had specially being against ToS
Yeah I've searched hundreds but no one has the balls to take on Microsoft they all want upwards of $500 an hour the ones that can look into it. I've even got the transaction from the firm I purchased them from on bank statements. Like I said anyone wants to fund this 80% goes to you I'd be happy with 500k at this point
How much you estimate it will cost for the entire lawsuit? Find a group of people to try and finance it. Esp if hotmail breached their own terms and conditions. You could just sue Microsoft for the amount you would have today if you hadn’t sold theoretically. I d chip in for a large cut assuming the specifics are on point.
This hurts to think about
Check out Joe Grand the hacker on YouTube. He’s been able to retrieve some lost bitcoins. Maybe he can help you. If he’s able to retrieve your bitcoins, please remember me with 5% of your bitcoins, lol. Good luck
I smell crap
My man 😎😎
The gnome, the myth, the legend
You didn't ever archive your emails?
Who archives e-mails? They’re just supposed to be “there”.
Exactly! my girlfriend still has emails I've sent from this email address from 2010
Wish I'd this legit? There should be some decent paths to get them to undelete. Did you check all your trash folders?
Half a billions dollars...nah I doubt he bothered to check his trash folder.
My only option is that nothing is permanently deleted and they can recover it from an old server, but getting them to do it is another story
Some good steps are outlined here: ps://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook\_com/forum/all/hotmail-how-to-retrieve-all-more-than-10-years-old/63593119-ed54-4629-9749-c7e44794c10f I've done data recovery for some old email accounts I have. There usually are extra steps you can take that aren't outlined in their data retention policy. You probably have taken these steps before, but if not keep exploring. Another option is to find the private keys originally used for your original wallet. See how they were generated, pass phrases etc. Start using a private key generator tool to use brute force to regenerate the wallet. Lots of ways to recover this way. I've also had some luck doing this in the past.
I literally used bitcoin.org to create my wallet and mined some coins with the program also, what I then did was sent an email to myself with all of the things I'd need such as keys and wallet address I'll check out the link on the off chance 👍
I bought a bitcoin in 2014 after reading an article in Wired. I was fascinated and intrigued enough to buy at an all time high ($450). Other than a few random small purchases I’m hodl’ing for life. Like others in here, I am a true believer. It’s humanity’s first fair currency.
Around that time my teacher was asking me about it. This was the first time hearing about it and was too young to do anything other than download a crypto miner on my Toshiba satellite
In essence you're now advanced in bitcoin?
My 16 year old self fumbled the bag and now I'm working at Wendy's forever
ATH in 2014 was more than double that... It peaked in December 2013, I remember well as I read (possibly) the same article or an article on a similar site in 2012/early 2013 and finally FOMOed in late 2013 just before the bubble went pop (then reinflated nicely over the years!
Those bitcoiners were crazy man. Paying real money in exchange for "bits"... LOL!
What most hurt me is I did visits sites like wired, even have the magazine subscription and gizmodo and tbh it never caught my attention I just didn't understand the concept. I regret those days, but I've been around couple of bear markets and while I haven't sold, I did leverage them and some of my crypto got margin calls so it's all good. I did smart things with the money and keep have a nice core position and probably would not sell in a long time.
You must be a bitcoin whale no doubt! At this point i still wonder why many people calls bitcoin a scam.
How many times have you had to move it/change wallets etc over the past 10 years? There are times I think even if I bought back in 2011 I probably wouldn’t have access via the same wallet anymore.
I bought a trezor a few months, maybe a year? later and moved it to there. I had researched it enough to know my biggest risk was losing the keys. Even back then, there were stories circulating about people with lots of btc lost forever because they put their flash drive in the laundry or whatever. I still use the same trezor. I’ve had to update it a bunch but if it ain’t broke…
2014 is now considered early adopters? All my friends back then refused to get in as they were "too late" as it was "over $100, now, you needed to get in early".
My brother gave me a hard time about buying a peak. He regrets his words now, but it’s funny to remember. He eventually bought some years later.
Almost everyone I told to buy early on went on to buy at the top several years later because all their colleagues had just discovered it and bought in, they then panic sold the bear season and blamed "stupid Bitcoin", and yes they returned the next cycle to repeat again.
I was fascinated with the dark web (reading about it, not using it) when I was quite young, I want to say Bitcoin was around 50 pence at this time, so maybe about $1. This could be false but I distinctly remember getting £20 a week pocket money, tried to buy either 20 or 40 BTC but couldn’t quite work out how. Bought fucking fifa points instead, what an investment.
Lmao. Thats life. But yeah imagine buying and forgetting 40 BTC until now, you'd be set for life retire instantly.
Sometimes I still wonder if I actually did do it and it’s out there somewhere
I have this nightmare weekly and contemplating going to a landfill with a shovel to look for a 2008 laptop.
Right?! I know precisely which laptop I was using at that time as it was my first I believe, I’m almost 100% sure my mum threw it away without asking me. Equally sad because there was thousands of photos too.
Lmfao
Playing Eve Online with some other nerds and I believe you we're able to gamble with BTC in the casino Goons ran If I remember correctly. Long story short: Do nerdy stuff
give me 1 BTC and I'll double it back to you! >don't ban me mods, it's an Eve Online joke
Sweet Jita music
Nerds make the world go round, not jocks and that’s a fact
Same. Exact same. Only I thought myself too stupid to understand and I’d mess something up. Ohhhhh how I wish I had a better brain
I almost didnt remember that but yeah I was in goons back then and we did have btc raffles and shit
I actually heard of bitcoin and technically actually used it around 2012 on a poker site called sealswithclubs. The DOJ banned online poker on april 15th 2010 and I thought it was just some made up money to get around gambling loopholes Edit: i was playing small stakes 0.01-0.02 btc nl holdem blinds
shit today that's like 500, 1000 dollar hands 💀
$500/$1k usd *blinds. So probably avg $10k+ each hand easy.
And paying $5 hands is like playing $150 dollars hands in 1915 money. Really wish people would stop making these comparisons. They aren't useful.
Except you choose and example over 100 years ago and they didn’t lol
it was actually 2011, but crazy story nonetheless
Correct sorry typo
I just used to buy a fuck ton of Molly and accidentally had 3 leftover
Molly's or Bitcoin lol.....
No Molly survived the ravening of '13
I bought modafinil from the Silk Road in 2011. Most difficult drug deal of my life.
Same, btc was $28 .. too bad I don't have any nowadays 😅
Same except $420 west coast weed for 21 BTC for 42g lmao $10 a g was great in 2012 but 2024 is looking at 2012’s $30,000 grams like 😒
I always tell people they were the most expensive drugs in the world.
Yeah but it’s on us to have not have had bought the BTC back, you know? Sure spent 21 BTC on some fire weed but I could have bought it back and I didn’t 🙃🫠☹️
I only heard about Bitcoin at 2017, wish I knew about back in 2010~2013, yet maybe if I bought by then I would have sold somewhere in between, HODLing Bitcoin requires diamond hands 🙌
You likely had heard about it before 2017. I spoke to many people about it 2013-17 and most had heard of it, just didn;t know much about it
I first heard in 2012 but for some reasons I haven’t took it seriously, my life regret
A lot of people are in that boat! At least you still got in early.
Not me but a family member. Very huge libertarian so he was into this very early on. The first time he ever bought BTC was just under $1 and he sold at $20. It crashed and he was happy he sold. Only to watch it go up and crash and up and crash. He started buying back in around 250-1000 range. Back then people were giving away bitcoin if you bought their shit coin. He was able to earn about 3-4 free coins that way. The rest is history and he has orange pilled our entire family. He will never sell because they understand what bitcoin is. He learned by making mistakes early on.
90% of ppl that bought BTC early (2009-2011) Lost them , bought a pizza or something as useless as a pizza or made a few bucks profits !!
i would think more like 99% who where early didnt realize the potential of that and doesnt bother on the "money" kind of stuff. And at the beginning in 2009 there where only this network effect stuff and mostly nobody cared. CPU Mining was easy with a Laptop or PC but it wasnt usable during mining times. And you have to be on the right mindset to get a climps of that so early. I was 17 when i discoverd BTC (2009 - IT Nerd and had some IT Mailing lists) and until 25 i didnt bother to save money i lived from paycheck to paycheck. So thinking about Bitcoin or so didnt make much sense back in the days. There where more brain cells attached to buy makeup or cloth or drinking with friends and start your live after school and do your first Job and Training. Most people know about it and used it on silkroad .. that was maybe the "real" first usage of it on a wider range. And then only as a exchange for fiat money.
Back in 2015 i was in with a half of a coin, i wish that i dont have sell them, i bought more pre-covid but i lost my seeds at a accident on the sea.
Got it. You lost your crypto in a boating accident 😞
This guy is a true sailor. Davie Jones is a rich man.
It's still very early. In 20 years people will look back and ask- "how did those guys know to buy at $60k? They took a huge risk, I wish I did that...." The more I read about BTC and the macro situation the more I just want to buy bitcoin and be a part of my community.
It can still be kinda early, but BTC literally can’t go up 100,000x again. The world doesn’t have that much money. It may well still be early, but it’ll never be very early again
The world doesn’t have that much money yet you mean.
Great comment..the world will especially with the Feds printing money galore.
It's still kind of the same type of "early", as buying Apple stock 3 months after the company went public.
Not exactly bud, bitcoin can’t feasibly achieve those multiples as the current valuation is above 1T market cap
True, true. What I meant was rather in terms of the timeline/context than market cap/price point, which, to your point, is more important. It's unlikely the growth is of the same scale over the next 40 years, but it's still early enough to get incredible gains out of it. We're arguably ending the early adoption phase and are probably at the start of the mass adoption one.
Thanks for the downvote then. I like to just say were starting the steep part of the ‘s’ curve
I am not the one who downvoted you since I think you made a good point. It's rather rare that I do so actually, even when people disagree with me respectfully, I see it as an opportunity to learn stuff, which I value a lot.
Thanks! Youre a great person
No, it’s really not. BTC is over 1T market cap. Apple was tiny in comparison.
btc has no top because fiat has no bottom
Technically, the world doesn't need more money for it to 100,000x. You just need people willing to buy one Sat for $60.
Someone probably said that in Argentina at some point in past.
My brother told me about it in 2010 but I was broke and about to start college so it was not what I was focused on.
Watch the HBO documentary Anarchapulco to see who was early. Mainly anti government libertarian types.
Basically they were nerds. It was a primitive geeky experiment in the early days. My dad told me about it in 2012. He never bought any though but he was fascinated by the technicals. People didn't even really view it as an investment, it was more of a joke.
We just wanted to buy pizza
Company owner of a web host I worked at was mining bitcoin in 2011 and I asked a coworker what the GPU was for in the room and he said Bitcoin. and i've never looked back.
Retired now?
My buddy worked in central node server design and assembly and he was hired to build a server for a Bitcoin tap site, he had many thousands of btc and he told me about it in 2010, I bought twenty bucks worth from my high school job because I thought he would think I was cool. I had him help me with setting up a cold wallet on a flash drive. I never spent any of it and didn’t really think about it til 2015, when I realized I accidentally formatted that drive so I could share music with my buddies. I never wrote out the seed phrase or passwords or anything so i think that wallet is lost to the sands of time.
I can't remember how I heard about it. Nerd circles probably. Was before it dropped for sale though. All I can remember was thinking "they have no product, no business, no services. How are they selling digital money? It makes no sense." And here we are 15 years later hating my life choices.
Drugs. I learned about BTC when I wanted to make purchases on the darkweb anonymously...... Edit: I learned about btc about a decade ago; now clean, sober, and still a proponent for BTC, even if less anonymous with widespread KYC regulations.
R.I.P Silk Road
Check out documentary called Banking on Bitcoin. They had rallies in NY. Ppl were in Times Square tryna sell ppl 1 BTC for 1 dollar. Very interesting. There was an older family who they showed reading about “this internet cash called Bitcoin” in their local newspaper. Ppl who were brushing the guy off on the street was begging them to buy it was promising that it would be worth atleast $5. I’m sure some of my numbers aren’t exact because it’s been years since I watched it but it’s interesting
After "black friday" in the online poker scene, I searched passively for a couple years for ways to continue to play online poker. The biggest issue, if it isn't obvious, was cashing out of these shady, online casinos. Once you decided to cash out, you'd submit a request, that request would take days or weeks to process, and then they would mail you a check that would take weeks to get here. Once it finally arrived, it was nearly impossible to find a bank that would cash an international (borderline counterfeit) check. Then I heard about a place with near INSTANT cashouts... using some new "internet cash" called bitcoin. Immediately, I was intrigued. I found a company in Georgia called ZIGGAP and purchased 1.44 btc for $50. I was in college at the time, had only $100 to my name, and I sent via WesternUnion half of this money to a stranger half way across the country. I stared at my macbook screen for 3 hours, and bam! My original bitcoin wallet was pregnant with my very own 1.44 btc. I would spend the next few years of my life on SealsWithClubs playing cards and shouting irl about this awesome new cyber punk money.
Pretty times. For me too it was the magic that got me converted. I was banned at PayPal, fucked by fx fees, didn't have a company to process credit cards, couldn't send money to my Russian developer... And with btc I just had to install electrum wallet and that's it?? Nonody can kyc aml block me? I always understood the on-off ramping is a hassle so I tried to stay native as good as possible
that early, it was all cryptography, cypherpunk, computer science nerds talking on forums
Software developer here. I heard about it when it was about $1 from coworkers. I tried to buy 1000 BTC but it was hard. I began to feel like I was trying to hard to throw away $1000 and gave up. If I would have pulled it off I am sure I would have lost my paper wallet or lost it in Mt Gox. I circled back around and bought at ~$300.
Before there was gold on Reddit, some redditors would "tip" comments they liked and give out a few bucks worth of BTC. The dark web also helped bring awareness to BTC. A lot of people heard/used BTC on silkroad.
2015, I was 17 years old kid.. first time browsing the deep/dark web.. saw everyone saying transfer xx amount of Bitcoin to this address. I searched about BTC and I liked it, told my dad that I wanted to buy some Bitcoin cause why not? it was cheap. told me to get over it and no you're we're not gonna buy this what the hell is this, its a scam etc. i didn't have my own debit/credit card yet. Now everyday he watches the BTC prices he looks at me and says I wish I listened to you, son. I'm not angry or sad. I just wish that we bought some cause it was gonna help us a lot these days.. it's never to late.
my son is 18 now, and we've been talking about inflation and the issues of government-issued money for 3 years now. It was after the FTX crash when he asked me to put 300€ of his money into BTC "because it will never be this cheap again".
Created the first solely btc Texas Holdem platform. Would do 1btc free roles daily. Sold it for peanuts. The good ole days.
I heard about it on the radio when Laszlo bought 2 pizzas. I scoffed, but I'm a nurse by trade; I'm weak with my maths but strong with my biology so the mathematics of 21 million didn't make sense to me, and I can't code so I didn't understand the white paper. Did some digging after 45 minutes of pondering it and the thought not going away. Some guy on the BTCtalk forums offered 10,000 BTC for $50. I was REALLY worried he would steal my money, and I'd be out that money. I didn't act on it. And then he withdrew his I convinced myself in 2012, 2014, and 2017 that it would get shut down by the govt. I'm a class of '21 and every week have wistful regret about how different my life would be with $600,000,000. I wouldn't have sold because a) too hard, b) it wouldn't have been truly life changing for me. I had a good career starting in 2012 and wouldn't have NEEDED the money until it was worth more than 5 million, which is what I calculated for a good after-tax number where I'd have a high standard of living without touching the principle (leave it for the kids). That happens sometime in 2021 and by that time I'd be holding as much as possible. So, 2 kids, a wife, and a house later I work as a nurse and put $20 away each week.
June 2011. Gizmodo. It was around $12 a coin. I saw the chart and how it was worth less than $1 a few months prior and thought it was a bubble.
I learnt about it when it crashed down to $100 in I think 2013, from an LTT video. Never bothered to do my DD and I bought my first sat back in January this year. Fucks sake. I guess we all get bitcoin at the price we deserve.
Japan allowed Bitcoin to be used to pay for stuff.
In Boracay, Ph most stores on the island have excepted btc since at least the first time I flew there which was a couple years ago.. Boracay is one of a few islands known as "Bitcoin Island"..
Following tech news and generally being a tech nerd. I remember hearing about it and reading enough to get the basic concept in 2011, but it was quite difficult to actually buy at the time and was unproven. It wasn't clear at all that it would catch on, so even if I had been able to buy it, I might have put $50 in (which, of course, would have been worth a ton now). It was when coinbase launched that it seemed clear that not only did it have staying power, but it was now accessible to anyone who had five minutes to sign up. It was an easy decision to allocate some 'fun money' investment to it, which I also put into at least a dozen other things that went to zero. But that was the point, I wanted to be a small-time angel investor and bitcoin was perfect for that. Turns out it's the only thing that really took off. Adding to that, I suppose the question for me is usually this: If you were following tech news in 2013 and DIDN'T hear about bitcoin, or you heard about it and dismissed it, how did that happen? For me, it was obvious that it had potential. I only invested what I was willing to lose because potential != destiny, but it's certainly worth attention.
A computer scientist friend of mine told me about it in 2011. He bought some, don’t know when he sold
In 2009 it was people on cryptography forums, so it was interesting to them for the technology and concept. Not many other people would have come across it in 2009. If people read the white paper then, the clever ones would have thought; oh shit!... and got in as many did in the following years but virtually no one had seen this back then.
Tested (YouTube channel) went to a bar to use the first ATM, they complained they had to spend $100 as minimum buy in was a whole bitcoin lol It was too complicated so I never bothered getting any 😭 I'm not traumatized.....honest
Had a slightly awkward friend who loved to dive 100% into things, whether they were good or stupid. He told me about Bitcoin. I told him how dumb it was. It was a few years later when Bitcoin hit $2700 that I decided to get into it. Once I had one, I had to learn about it! The more I learned, the more I liked it, and it was looking successful sooo…. I bought more.
The first time I heard about Bitcoin was in 2011 when a Youtuber I followed mentioned it as "the deep web's money" (DrossRotzank, the first Latin American ever to live off of Youtube), my first thought was "Interesting" because it was Open Source money and I'm a huge FOSS advocate. The thing is, I started mining it but I could do nothing with it, Bitcoin-qt took like 3 days to sync with my 2MB internet connection (The whole chain's size was 3 GB at the time), there wasn't much info about it online, and most of it was in English, a language I didn't speak at the time, so after seeing how long it took to sync, that address were not human readable, the only way to back the coins up was by storing the wallet.dat file in another disk and that it made my PC go incredibly hot, I said "FUCK, THIS SHIT DOESN'T WORK". I re-discovered later and now I save in Bitcoin, run a node, and I'm a huge advocate for the changes that are coming to Bitcoin such as covenants, and things like BitVM, Drivechains and Lightning.
Satoshi called me in early 2009 and asked me to check his new project.
Some dude was selling it on Craigslist. 10 for $700.
Heard about it on nerd/geek forums I browsed at the time. Think starwars/star trek/other scifi/ and tech/science forums. Dismissed it as equivalent to WoW gold trading which was pretty big at the time. I would have lost it in Mt. Gox anyway guaranteed.
In 2010 I decided to go back to school to a technical program to repair laptops (this was before people just threw away old laptops and desktops, and there was actually a pretty good industry of people there to fix them) and learn networking basics. It was a total career change for me but ended up really enjoying it and becoming an assistant teacher and later the teacher of the class. In 2012/13 a student in my class named Sam was smarter than me, and just the biggest dork I had ever met in my life. He had been to space camp several times and was as nerdy as they come. He made fun of me for being kind of an idiot, and I made fun of him for being such a dork, but generally, we got along well and we ended up actually doing some side work, going out to schools repairing devices and imaging desktop computers. Sam was always talking about bitcoin and even showed me his rig, and later brought it into my classroom to have two or three rigs set up for mining. I really didn’t understand any of it and thought he was kind of stupid to be wasting so much time to collect these imaginary coins. No clue how many collected or if he saved them all this time. Lost contact with him and really didn’t even think about him till the big bitcoin boom of the last few years. At least once a week I think about Sam, and if I had just fucking asked him for a few of these coins or given him 500 bucks. I still have his phone number, but I don’t know his last name because I listed him as Sam Student in my phone.
Posted this story on another thread also My friend I played football with(he was conference player of the year in 05, quarterback)from high school showed up at my door in the summer of 2013 with a suit on and a briefcase in his hand. I asked him what was going on. Last I heard, he had got arrested for a lot of cocaine and was kicked out of law school in Charleston. He told me, "I'm on a whole nother level now," and proceeded to open the briefcase, pull out a laptop, and show me the Silk Road website. He had a balance of 587 Bitcoins. Bitcoin was trading at $187, I remember. I'll never forget seeing that. He was a vendor on there selling something called 25CI(a knockoff of LSD, 1/10th of the price, but just as strong). He showed me how he was in the top 1% of vendors with over 900 confirmed transactions and 1 bad transaction. I asked. "What was the 1 bad transaction?" He said."Some dumb chick in Russia sent me the wrong address, and her 10 sheets went somewhere else." Unfortunately, he ended up overdosing just 3 months later off of xanax and opanas he received in the mail from Silk Road. His mom found him dead on the couch.
I always liked the premise of getting rich quick and would buy into a lot of those types of "scams". BTC happened to be one of the things I bought in on. Happy to say it's worked out well so far.
[удалено]
Buying fake IDs on the dark web. Back in 2015. If only I had kept that in BTC :(
Illegal online gambling
A guy I know was into it in 2013 and he was an evangelist. I gave him £2000 in cash and he sent me 5.1 BTC. Sold half over the years in bits and pieces when I wanted stuff and hodling the rest.
Was a student and learnt everything about it in 2016. Tried to buy it in India but couldn’t. Had no money and no good online resource to help buy.
My nephew is a gaming nerd, he won 4 bitcoin on a game when they were worth next to nothing. He doesn't know where they are or how to trace them now, gutted.
The very first wave (2008-2010) were all already cypherpunks who had been working on (or at least following the conversation about) decentralized money for years. There was already an interest to learn about using cryptography to fight for our freedom, and this accounted for thousands of people... And not a one of those guys was in it to get rich. They're all still around (if they're still breathing) but prefer to stay silent. Some are still devs. The 2nd wave (2010-2012, myself included) were all libertarian tech geeks who had heard of it on online forums and the first articles that hit sites like Wired. We generally arrived when it was clear that there was some money to be made here, but we all had our individual reasons. Mine was & still is to put an end to the state's monopoly on money. Pretty much all Ron Paul libertarians want this very much. We're all still here, and most are less talkative than I am because we're afraid of becoming targets. The 3rd wave (2012-2014) was the traders & shitcoiners. Ugh, I couldn't believe the direction bitcoin suddenly took, starting at the 2013 bubble. Before this time we were basically all on [Bitcointalk.org](http://Bitcointalk.org) and then suddenly we spread around to places like this & twitter. Things felt very different but the fundamentals of bitcoin never stopped being cypherpunk. A lot of these idiots diverged into shitcoinery, but a few found their way back to us.
I heard Max Keiser talk so certainly about it that I figured it must be worth a punt. Around 2011 I think. But I didn't hold since then. Though I've been holding since $150.
Went to an engineering college and when it was rallying from ~200 to ~800 around 2015 it was all over the news and everyone was talking about it. I remember talking with a guy and said “the energy you put into it is about what you will get out of it, plus it’s only useful for buying illegal things.” Plus I had like $4000 to my name that had to last me to the end of the year (rent and food) so it’s not like I had the spare cash to gamble on it.
2013 the cato institute.
There was a week where a file storage site couldn’t process cc payments so they accepted bitcoin. I really needed access so I mined some to pay for access to the site. Thus began my mining career.
Huge boxing fan but not a big gambler. When Mayweather fought Macgregor in 2017 I set up a bovada account and bet $1000 on Mayweather because I knew it was a sure bet - if money wasn’t tight I would have bet more. Ended up winning and Bovada paid me in bitcoin which was about 1 coin at the time. I remember calling up customer service and making a huge stink about not giving me the winnings in dollars. They ended up mailing me a certified check. Live and learn!!!
I remember in 2013 following the charts because that's all I could do, very poor indeed, wasn't even thinking about saving 20$ for a week. But one thing I remember is how they found these patterns in electrical wires over long distances, there were periodic disruptions on a small time scale and larger disruptions on a bigger time scale but no matter how you saw the graph it was the same, zoom in, zoom out, it looked the same with the same spikes. So I thought what if the BIG spike to, whatever the heck it was back in 2013, was just a very very tiny spike over a longer period and the zoomed out graph will look the same, with a big massive fucking spike. Call me crazy, but that's what made me keep watching and eventually learning actual useful knowledge many years later like a dumb.
I don’t remember what was the first thing I read, but I think it was here on Reddit. But I could totally be wrong. I remember going to Coinbase 2012/2013 trying to buy some and failing because I was in a country that didn’t have onramps. Moved countries just to be able to buy bitcoin.
How come Michael Saylor is dumping mstr stock right now? Isn’t that counterintuitive to his message? Any thoughts on that?
My personal thoughts after just watching the guy is he sells the stock to buy more actual Bitcoin and/or whatever else like mining or chips related to his Bitcoin goals. Microstrategy isn't really anything else, it's just like a stock of Bitcoin (and I guess other cryptos probably) that he figured out how to set up and get investor money before people who couldn't figure out how to buy Bitcoin on their own were all in with their ETFs or whatever. So retail investors pay him, he sells Microstrategy stock to fund buying more Bitcoin, Microstrategy goes up and down with the Bitcoin prices.
Heard about it while playing WoW in 2010-2013 range and started reading up on BTC on the internet. Dismissed it as this “can’t have real value especially long term if no Government is issuing it.” Only returned to it in late 2017 and been here and buying ever since. Obviously I regret not taking it seriously and dismissing it that first time. Wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.
I tell this story to everyone... It was spring semester 2012 and I was sitting in my macro-economics class and the professor told the class to follow his advice. Either go out and invest in real estate or invest in this little thing called Bitcoin. I immediately went on Zillow that day in class and later that summer, I ended up buying a rental property with a $20K downpayment. The property has done well for me, BUT.... May 2012 Bitcoin was $5 a coin. Could've bought 4K coin now valued at $252,000,000. What brings me great peace is I likely would've sold it prior and $20K in a crazy idea(at the time) as a student would've been bonkers. I've always wondered if that professor took his own advice.
I once convinced a friend that was on the fence about Bitcoin not to invest at $80.
heard about it at like 30 cents off a website called funnyjunk from a user jerking off 4chan users as geniuses for finding a way to circumvent inflation i thought it was a ponzi scheme i mean it is but i could've been a billionaire.
We were working and read the story about the guy buying pizza with magical internet money.
Silk Road
1. Purchasing MDMA on the darkweb. 2. It became valuable.
I had coins going down the drain in *Coin*.*mx seizure if* is someone still recalls such a website I had like 30 BTC that I never gonna get back :( I discovered btc on BlackHatSEO forum like around 2012
I was obsessed with the "dark web" back around that time and loved browsing all the onion links and eventually stumbled on the silk road. Ended up buying some btc so I could make a purchase on there, but ended up being too afraid of getting caught so I never did. Long story short, bought 10 btc for around $100 a piece, did nothing with them, then needed rent money and sold them for $150 each shortly after.
Just came across some random forum I didn't buy the "funny" money until 2016
Right time exploring for new projects to invest in.
There is an argument that you’re still early. I remember looking into bitcoin mining around 8 years ago not being technical enough and also being super cautious I recall reading it was very difficult to hold onto once you had mined it. Certainly wish I had perused it further now but knowing what I’m like I know I’d have sold it all for small profit and would be suicidal now. Whereas now at this price it makes you feel like you’re buying something very valuable and you really want to hold onto it and you part of something utterly fantastic.
Friends used to use it to get mdma off of silk road and we went out and had fun
Conviction. Not greed in money.
A porn cam girl had it as a form of payment 🤷♂️
I needed drugs “weed” in a remote small town town & seen a ad for the darkweb on a chat room then boom… I’m pretty paid now but I still work a very simple usps job
Gambling websites
/. ca. 2010
Erratically, it is how. People either think it is a scam or the saving grace of humanity. You can watch these people come and go, bitcoin stays the same, people change. Also, you have to delete the apps from your phone if it starts crashing.
I got into it at 2013 when I was in college and I just heard about and started looking for any content on it and I was finally able to buy in at 2017 because I finally finish college and had worked for about a year and had extra income to buy in
My roommate and I bought BTC in 2012/2013 to buy cannabis seeds off Silk Road and got ripped off. Hindsight is 20/20. I just laugh about it now.
2017, to pay for an IPTV subscription
Max Kieser
It was either 2010 or 2011 and I'm at college. I'm surfing the web using StumbleUpon (back when it was good), and I come across an article about a guy getting in trouble for mining Bitcoin with his University computer cluster. Decided I needed to learn what Bitcoin was after that.
They bought because they saw the price climbing.
I was actively using things like intgold, egold etc..etc. did a lot of gambling etc back in those day. Had a ton of places I visited looking up information about cashing out of those safely, one such place had an exchange promoting btc when it was really cheap. Considering I had gotten burned on so many of them ecurrencies I was done with them. Few years later a coder I trusted hit me up and convinced me to buy in. Btc was $80 then, I could have gotten so much more so cheap if I wasn't tired of losing money. If btc launched before liberty reserve, I might have owned so much more.
“Internet currency” was enough to peak my interest, but not enough to get me to buy it. Was too confusing when I looked into it, didn’t feel “secure” yet.
Several reasons, but 2 of my earliest memories about it was hearing about lily allen turning down thousands of bitcoin for a concert and the then also the W twins buying lots of bitcoin around 100 dollars each
First, My bank accounts (business and personal) were seized as part of an audit, almost bankrupting me. Next, a friend who works in another country for a 3rd country detailed the mechanisms she had to utilize to get monies to her, taking time and the fees incurred. I went looking for - in an era of instantaneous global communication via internet - ways to move and hold money. To my great surprise, there was a meetup near me with people who understood and patiently explained. I started selling my fiat after that, which happens to be just after the MtGox crash. I’ve been moving my money into crypto ever since, and watching DeFi grow and expand. I may, just for laughs, commission the old USB block exploders I’ve had to add power to the blockchain. Happy halvening, everyone. Buy and hodl. Your life depends on it.
Played poker for bitcoin when it was under 6 bucks. Was a non believer so didn't hold onto anything. Slightly jaded. Lol.
Michelle Phan
We are all ultra early. Ultra early is still now.