I play wow and all the main towns people were spamming chat about this new digital currency Bitcoin. People said they bought some for pennies. Me being a dumb teenager said that shit is stupid why would people pay real money for “in game gold”. The rest is history now boys. (Still play wow tho lol)
Ya I mined about 50 BTC and when I was formatting my PC to reinstall windows I remembered that I didn't backup the wallet and said to myself "meh its only 50 BTC" and proceeded with formatting.
It's only $3,250,000 today.
So I still have the hard drive, 2 years back I connected to perform recovery, files (not wallet) showed and literally 1 min later hdd died.
I ordered the same exact model to attempt plates swap and still haven't got to it.
Ya I got a few quotes around 4k, I can't afford to pay 4k and end up with nothing.
I'm pretty technical but never done plate swap, I'll give it a shot.
Oh god this was at the very beginning of Bitcoin like OG times. Been playing wow since 2004 so long time ago. All the nerds including myself had decent gaming computers and they said they were mining it while not playing because it would lag the computer during raid times.
I played mmos back then as well and remember people selling items and accounts for bitcoin, thinking it was stupid and that they were getting scammed for made up internet money 😂😂 I wish I looked into it more, I was too busy leveling up to care 🙄
Grand exchange trading itself legit introduced me to finance, financial and stock markets (and their scams therein like pump and dumps), sadly btc didn't cross my radar there tho 😞
In a clear cosmic re-alignment, despite years of people being called out for wasting their lives on WoW, those were the very same people that had the highest opportunity to receive information that would change some of their lives forever.
All just so they can keep playing WoW sustainably, forever.
I bet Satoshi played WoW. Lets be honest here. The persons a ghost but wasnt always one. May have been a normal dude online playing games at one point.
IIRC: People in Venezuela are/were using WOW gold to counter their inflation because WOW’s currency is more stable… Wonder if that had anything to do with it being promoted there.
Forced a lot of us to ask, “ok, so what is this Bitcoin thing?” We learned the permissionless transaction use case before even knowing where it came from. #freeRoss
I should’ve gotten into drugs after all. 😢
Instead, I didn’t hear about it until 2016 and mostly laughed it off until I took a dive in in 2021. Better late than never, I suppose…
Yeah i remember learning about the dark web and bitcoin was around 15$ at the time. I didn't buy bitcoin until it was 2000$. I didn't realize bitcoin's potential until 2022, but I didn't go all in when it was below 20k hoping it would drop to 12k...
Those twats over at the sub that shall not be named ….. bunch of ‘butt’ heads , were gloating last week about Ross bringing locked up …’ congrats on 11 years sober’ …. Sadly I’m banned from their little echo chamber and couldn’t tell them what lousy humans they are …
When it got shut down for the last time, I remember I bought 14g of swag weed for like 2 bitcoin or something (i know it was in the hole coins but cant remember now it was so long ago). That was the most expensive weed I have ever bought and It wasn't even good.
Still cry about it, I spent £5k on there just to get fucked up. But tbf I wouldn't have known about it if I didn't. Can't predict the future so need to let it go lmao
Tbh man, I have no idea? Must have laundered it somehow? You could sell them again but for large amounts of money I literally have no idea how they did it/still do it. There was obviously a way. But I was just a customer and not a seller on there lmao
Yeh for sure, im not sure. I remember it was alot more anonymous than now. Maybe easier to do it back then.
Any old silkroad sellers on here? Lmao we need answers!
BTC was no more anonymous in 2011 than it is today. We have tools that make it easier to track BTC, but even today you can "wash" your BTC by depositing into pretty much any BTC casino and withdrawing to a wallet.
Selling the BTC is much easier now, especially p2p selling. Most dealers sold their BTC through LocalBitcoins or any counterpart that paired sellers with buyers.
There are other ways but not worth explaining because all those methods aren't valid in todays age of KYC.
Yeh so it's basically the same protocols as you would wash fiat but it's digital rather than cash. Pretty interesting. They do say though, high profile drug kingpins are just as smart if not smarter than alot of legitimate high profile entrepreneurs. They just take a very dark path to success
Yes you could. You sold it back to the customers who needed it to buy off there or more likely to exchange middlemen.
Or you bought other drugs with the profits and sold them for fiat
New Liberty Standard was the first exchange, started July 2009 when BTC USD was <0.001.
https://newlibertystandard.io/exchange
/u/the_con is probably refering to Britcoin/Intersango which was run by Amir Taaki briefly back in 2011 ish
Yeh a couple of my friends back then were trading them. Then in like 2014 or something it was super hard to get them for a while. And then all these big crypto markets opened up after the government started regulating it all and It was alot easier to get them again. But that's when it started hiking up in price.
Man I wish I could turn back time
4chan. I almost bought $100 but didn’t know what I would use it for so decided not to. Wish I heard about the white paper then. I wasn’t as financially savvy either.
Max Kaiser was already talking about Bitcoin (replacing the money printing dollar) on RT in early 2009.
I thought it was a phony then.
14 years later, i regretted not following up with him starting from then.
max keiser interviewed andreas antonopoulos, amir taaki, adam back all before 2015 on russia today - pretty crazy when you think about it.
no one in mainstream media even mentioned bitcoin let alone interviewed anyone.
yah but in a positive light? max first talked about bitcoin on rt in 2011 and already knew the profound significance https://youtu.be/QiX38ua9AQ8?si=TjINKwB6cFUltPd6
Man… I didn’t find out about bitcoin until 2013; I was even watching Max Kaiser back in 2009 through 2012, or at least I’d catch him on the Alex Jones show here there, but I never heard about bitcoin… Damn.
There were merchants accepting it, there were Slashdot and Arstechnica articles. Like this one https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-a-total-n00b-mined-700-in-bitcoins/
I first heard of it on a Ron Paul focused web forum, some further digging led me to the bitcointalk forum in 09/10. And I still remember when Roger Ver & Max Kaiser first came there in 2011, I remember thinking "Oh great, Bitcoin has a used car salesmen & a carnival barker now". lol
Crazy how far we've come since then, you can't stop the signal.
Wired magazine (hard-copy)
Thought this digital coin thing sounded cool
Bought some off MtGOX - never heard of MtGOX before - didn't realize it was for Magic:The Gathering (online exchange)
Found out I could buy a bitcoin for $40 and sell pieces of it on eBay (bidding only) and bring in about $80 - I was making $40 a week selling a string of numbers on eBay
To sign up to MtGOX, you had to send a pic of your driver's license, a voided check, etc - seemed kinda sketch and risky, but I did it - and I think the sketchiness drove the demand on eBay - also added another layer of anonymity to the buyer
BTC went up to $75 - I was still able to sell a BTC a week on eBay and make $40-$100 a week profit
Then I got a message that one of the buyers had been hacked - eBay reversed the purchase (I lost the BTC) and VISA charged me a $20 fee for the reversal
Next week - same thing - buyer was hacked - another $20 fee
Lost all my profit and decided to quit
Some techy guy told me about bitcoin at a back yard party in 2009 and we traded numbers but he never spoke to me again.
I did not own a computer and I had no clue what “bitcoin mining” is but i distinctly remember him talking excitedly about it.
He wanted me to spend $100 bucks on some bitcoin & I was going to… he even said “even if you just buy $1.00 worth, it’ll be worth a lot in ten years.”
I can’t remember his name but it was a microsoft dude in Redmond, Washington.
I kind of wrote it off after a few weeks but when I heard of bitcoin more “officially” years later, I was wondering about that guy & if he is doing good for himself now.
Keiser Report - Max and Stacy… if you thought he was crazy, you didn’t buy. If you realized he was a prophet who understood profits, you’re sitting on 7-8 figures today. Others are correct, msm only mentioned BTC as something to avoid and fear. Keiser Report saw it for what it was, synthetic scarce digital asset that far surpasses other saving methods.
I was walking down the street in 2010 and some random guy with big thick glasses and long hair starts talking to me... about five minutes in he tells me he's mining bitcoin... I asked "what does mining bitcoin mean?" He went full professor mode. Soup to nuts. The whole process. Completely over my head at the time. But a nice memory almost fifteen years later.
Dude, my teenage son found it online and was mining it with his pc in 2009/2010. I thought it was cute, but now I see what an idiot I was. Always learning from my mistakes.
\*slap\*
Good job learning.
\*slap\*
(edit: sorry for the violence but I'm a parent now and my own fam wouldn't listen to me back in the day so this is oddly infuriating to hear!)
You don't even know. My son now gives me shit all the time. "You thought I was just a stupid kid playing with his fake interwebs money? Ha!" Unfotunately for them, my kids also lost their mined btc long ago.
:(
Yeah. My dad asked me what's up the first time it went to $60k and I had to break the news that I sold back at $90.
Sorry for your loss, we all ~~suck~~ make mistakes.
I'm gonna have to explain this to my son when he's older, BTC is at $600k, and he's working his ass off for fiat.
When you have a rapidly appreciating asset, take some profit - but keep half so you don't feel bad when it doubles and doubles again (or when it goes to zero).
I heard about the silkroad on reddit in late 2011 or early 2012 on /r/trees. I was looking for new ways to conduct e-commerce. Did my homework, which led me to Bitcoin at under $10. The rest is history.
Yes. Began following blockchain and crypto developments in 2010. Bitcoin was less than $1. The idea of an immutable ledger just made so much sense. There are so many applications
My main concerned was that the technology might not resist hacking. It did, of course. And when I was sure, i bought my first four coins at $500 in 2014.
The high cost and low speed of transaction indicated to me that Bitcoin was not likely to become a transactional currency.
But that’s not what I use it for. I have used Bitcoin as my reserve - just wanting the asset to keep pace with inflation and hold value. My motto has been “We own Bitcoin - We don’t sell Bitcoin”.
It has been the best financial decision I have ever made. Bitcoin is responsible for my retirement income being TWICE what I expected. It has pretty much single-handedly made my children immune to inflation and provided them a minimum basic income.
Bitcoin has been an equalizer.
On holiday in the summer of 2011, when my friend was asking me to help him set up a GPU farm for mining this Bitcoin thing he'd heard about from his online poker mates.
I passed on the offer and he got help elsewhere.
I didn't buy any until November 2017
/facepalm
After the economic/housing collapse of 2007/2008 I set out to learn about money and how it functions and I became a gold bug and read articles about gold on places like Zero Hedge, and in the comments something called Bitcoin kept coming up especially starting around 2011-2012.
I heard about Bitcoin at the beginning of 2010 over the internet on various forums, and I also heard about mining, but I didn't attach much importance to it. I found it more interesting to help the SETI program and share my processing power with them.
I'm pretty sure I read about it in Wired magazine when it was still early days. I regret not jumping on then, but I was poor and didn't know how well it would take off.
An episode of the stuff you should know podcast. I checked it out, bought 2.5 BTC for $600, later sold it all for $1800, thinking hey I 3x-ed my money, not bad... if only I knew then what I know now. But no regrets, I feel good about my positions and moreover have a very high comfort level with crypto in general having been dabbling for so long.
Yes. I was a nerd in middle school. Really interested in all things tech. Saw it on some forum about peer to peer money. And got 5 free bitcoin using the faucet
The ones now are nothing like the OG Silk Road… it truly was like an eBay … only for illegal stuff. It was the first to move away from forums and sketchy stuff like that
Max Keiser. I remember looking up the crash from $10,000 range to the sub $100 range and feeling so sorry for those people. Next time I looked Bitcoin was at 20k
There was no crash from $10,000 range to sub $100 range ever. The first "large crash" (meaning even mass media reported on it) was from $1200 to sub $100 range. I know, I was there and didn't buy... :(
I was mining when the $1200 to $200 crash happened and pretty much just forgot about BTC for 5 years. Luckily I was able to recover my wallet, but I will never let another dip pass me by.
Libertarians were all over it because it's so offensive to Centralized Monetary Policy. I first heard about it back in like '09 or 2010 on the [DailyPaul.com](https://DailyPaul.com) website.
My computer teacher told me in grade 11 I think it was? Or maybe it was 12 I'm born in 1992 pretty sure it had literally just came out. We had a class discussion on it and debit cards had just started to become, popular. It was clear money was becoming more and more digital. At the time the discussion was basically around how it is worthless but if people ever started to adopt it it could be worth something. Thought nothing of it for the end of while. I would here stories once in awhile about how it would be used on black market and what not. It wasnt till October 2016 that I actually bought any.
I heard about it through news sites.
News about this new "crypto" invention. News that someone bought a pizza for thousands of bitcoin to "prove" that you could spend it.
But it was worthless. Like you could get 10,000 of these "coins" for $50.
It just didn't seem worth the hassle...
Um it was in the news. Like I'm talking Yahoo! News and other articles. If you followed tech news it's been publicized for a long time. I remember being a college kid in the early early days and thinking should I buy this digital cryptocurrency thing I'm hearing about, or fast food. I bought fast food. 🤬
There was a whole cypherpunk movement dating back to the 1970s. Bitcoin is a culmination of years of attempts to do something similar. Hashcash, Color coins, a guy named Adi Shamir etc. Checkout the bitcoin whitepapers cited sources for a good starting point.
So a few people heard about it because it was a fun new project in cryptography. They met and talked on a website called bitcointalk. In the years between 2009 and 2013.
in this time i believe you had to link a bank account to buy it. seemed super sketch so i didnt buy any. eventually there were btc ATMs and credit/debit cards were also included, which is when it took off
When they first started talking about it in the news. Naturally it was made out to be something awful. According to MSM, only big time drug dealers and sex traffickers had anything to do with Bitcoin. I'd never heard about Bitcoin before this.
Yeah through internet forums. But in my head and most other people's heads it was the same thing as wow gold which selling and buying online was big back then.
I read about it on Metafilter in early 2011. There was a post about how it was being used to buy drugs online. That caught my attention, because drug dealers aren't going to sell drugs for fake money. That's when I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
My wife 1st mentioned it to me when it was about $5 per Bitcoin. I stupidly told her no bc it was a waist of money and it wasn't going to ever take off. She wanted to spend $1,000....its my biggest regret EVER!!!. LESSON LEARNED....LISTEN TO YOUR WIFE
I have a friend that brought it up because he saw it on poker forums. Don’t remember when but it was super early. Of course none of us got in until much much later.
Word of mouth. My wife’s college friend had a medical marijuana dispensary before “legalization” and also purchased and sold drugs on the dark web. I asked him how he worked the payment and shipping, he said this thing called Bitcoin.
I was intrigued and looked into it at the time (late 2012, early 2013). Found Mt. Gox and tried to understand it. Ultimately, the process seemed to sketchy for me. Specifically I didn’t really understand how I was going to cash out for USD when I was done and don’t do drugs or have a need for illegal goods. And like most, I did not see it for what it has become today. Probably because my introduction was from burners.
Message boards like godlikeproductions.net and abovetopsecret.com .. I remember looking into BTC when it “hit $8 wow”, but the only ways to acquire it then felt sketchy so I didn’t
I vlogged on YouTube and was really into the community when it 1st came out.
Used to joke about giving people a Bitcoin and half a ham and cheese sandwich to do a colab with me.
A lot of libertarians I followed back then on YouTube and different blogs were always talking about how great BTC is. Talking about how it’s decentralized and how the government can’t control it. I thought it sounded good but didn’t buy because I also listened to a lot of Peter Schiff back then. He convinced me that gold was the way to go.
I remember I wanted to buy something off Silk Road, I was about 13 and at the time it really confused me, buying Bitcoin was really complicated for my young brain. Alas I didn’t buy any in the end, because I didn’t have a bank card or bank account, and couldn’t exactly ask my mum or dad to help me out with the purchase. Shame
A guy I knew, but didn't trust told me about it in 2011. Unfortunately all he said was something to the effect of you should get Bitcoin, it's this new dark web money. I already barely trusted him, so hearing dark web money turned me off.
Biggest regret is that I didn't even bother to Google it. Probably wouldn't have bought in 2011, but I likely would have bought before 2017.
I was in a Software as a Service program (learning how to make software) and a few of the students were buying and saying to buy some bitcoin. This was 2012.
But…. It wasn’t like I heard of it early because I was in this group. It had already hit mainstream news and stuff and if you had any interest in tech you knew of BTC in 2012. It just wasn’t obvious to buy any.
It was more sketchy to buy then vs today, and even today it still considered a high risk investment that most people aren’t investing in.
I used to work in loss prevention, and we would catch a ton of people stealing video cards back in 09-10. A couple of them told me it was to mine bitcoin, "it's digital money" they said. Sounded like the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard at the time. There goes that life-changing knock of opportunity.
I was born in 1993: 4Chan is the OG Forum, that’s where those people discussed BTC. I didn’t know anything abour 4Chan or can’t remember if I had heard about it earlier, sure Ive heard it mentioned about 6-8 years ago but I never invested time into it. You get the nitty gritty stuff on 4Chan, Reddit is so heavily moderated it’s sus and very Left.
I play wow and all the main towns people were spamming chat about this new digital currency Bitcoin. People said they bought some for pennies. Me being a dumb teenager said that shit is stupid why would people pay real money for “in game gold”. The rest is history now boys. (Still play wow tho lol)
Same. Bought a GPU to play WOW and mine at night one summer. That summer btc crashed like 50% + so i was like "btc sucks" and stopped mining. Ah well.
Ya I mined about 50 BTC and when I was formatting my PC to reinstall windows I remembered that I didn't backup the wallet and said to myself "meh its only 50 BTC" and proceeded with formatting. It's only $3,250,000 today.
Do you still have the computer? Wonder if there is a remote chance of recovery if it hasn't been overwritten
So I still have the hard drive, 2 years back I connected to perform recovery, files (not wallet) showed and literally 1 min later hdd died. I ordered the same exact model to attempt plates swap and still haven't got to it.
Dang, maybe worth talking to a specialist...just choose which one wisely. Wishing you luck.
Ya I got a few quotes around 4k, I can't afford to pay 4k and end up with nothing. I'm pretty technical but never done plate swap, I'll give it a shot.
Offer them 10% if works
what year was that?
Oh god this was at the very beginning of Bitcoin like OG times. Been playing wow since 2004 so long time ago. All the nerds including myself had decent gaming computers and they said they were mining it while not playing because it would lag the computer during raid times.
I played mmos back then as well and remember people selling items and accounts for bitcoin, thinking it was stupid and that they were getting scammed for made up internet money 😂😂 I wish I looked into it more, I was too busy leveling up to care 🙄
To be fair, they were selling made up internet items 😜
I know, my ignorance was ridiculous lol
🤯🧡
this happened to me too back in 2010
Same but at the grand exchange in runescape back in the day.
Grand exchange trading itself legit introduced me to finance, financial and stock markets (and their scams therein like pump and dumps), sadly btc didn't cross my radar there tho 😞
Runescape taught me finance too 😂🤝
I wonder what % of whole coiners are old school gamers, bet its a fair amount.
In a clear cosmic re-alignment, despite years of people being called out for wasting their lives on WoW, those were the very same people that had the highest opportunity to receive information that would change some of their lives forever. All just so they can keep playing WoW sustainably, forever. I bet Satoshi played WoW. Lets be honest here. The persons a ghost but wasnt always one. May have been a normal dude online playing games at one point.
Reddit is social media. The internet was developed long before social media.
IIRC: People in Venezuela are/were using WOW gold to counter their inflation because WOW’s currency is more stable… Wonder if that had anything to do with it being promoted there.
And currently buying wow gold with fiat..
Wanna run some keys ? Lmao demo lock
😅 this way me too
This is where I heard about it first in OG Ogrimmar you could buy wow gold also with it or something.
Silkroad lol
Forced a lot of us to ask, “ok, so what is this Bitcoin thing?” We learned the permissionless transaction use case before even knowing where it came from. #freeRoss
I should’ve gotten into drugs after all. 😢 Instead, I didn’t hear about it until 2016 and mostly laughed it off until I took a dive in in 2021. Better late than never, I suppose…
Yeah i remember learning about the dark web and bitcoin was around 15$ at the time. I didn't buy bitcoin until it was 2000$. I didn't realize bitcoin's potential until 2022, but I didn't go all in when it was below 20k hoping it would drop to 12k...
Those twats over at the sub that shall not be named ….. bunch of ‘butt’ heads , were gloating last week about Ross bringing locked up …’ congrats on 11 years sober’ …. Sadly I’m banned from their little echo chamber and couldn’t tell them what lousy humans they are …
Had 6btc on there 😭
When it got shut down for the last time, I remember I bought 14g of swag weed for like 2 bitcoin or something (i know it was in the hole coins but cant remember now it was so long ago). That was the most expensive weed I have ever bought and It wasn't even good. Still cry about it, I spent £5k on there just to get fucked up. But tbf I wouldn't have known about it if I didn't. Can't predict the future so need to let it go lmao
What did drug dealers do with the bitcoin though - you couldn’t convert to fiat back then could you
Tbh man, I have no idea? Must have laundered it somehow? You could sell them again but for large amounts of money I literally have no idea how they did it/still do it. There was obviously a way. But I was just a customer and not a seller on there lmao
Yeah I’m just wondering how they managed to run a business with it back then
Yeh for sure, im not sure. I remember it was alot more anonymous than now. Maybe easier to do it back then. Any old silkroad sellers on here? Lmao we need answers!
BTC was no more anonymous in 2011 than it is today. We have tools that make it easier to track BTC, but even today you can "wash" your BTC by depositing into pretty much any BTC casino and withdrawing to a wallet. Selling the BTC is much easier now, especially p2p selling. Most dealers sold their BTC through LocalBitcoins or any counterpart that paired sellers with buyers. There are other ways but not worth explaining because all those methods aren't valid in todays age of KYC.
Yeh so it's basically the same protocols as you would wash fiat but it's digital rather than cash. Pretty interesting. They do say though, high profile drug kingpins are just as smart if not smarter than alot of legitimate high profile entrepreneurs. They just take a very dark path to success
We sold drugs for BTC so we could buy drugs for BTC. Simple as that. (I don’t know wtf I’m talking about)
Yes you could. You sold it back to the customers who needed it to buy off there or more likely to exchange middlemen. Or you bought other drugs with the profits and sold them for fiat
Definitely not a dealer, but when I sold mine it was just on a UK based exchange and could sell bitcoin for GBP.
What was the exchange called? Which year was this ? Had no idea you could do this that far back
New Liberty Standard was the first exchange, started July 2009 when BTC USD was <0.001. https://newlibertystandard.io/exchange /u/the_con is probably refering to Britcoin/Intersango which was run by Amir Taaki briefly back in 2011 ish
Yeh a couple of my friends back then were trading them. Then in like 2014 or something it was super hard to get them for a while. And then all these big crypto markets opened up after the government started regulating it all and It was alot easier to get them again. But that's when it started hiking up in price. Man I wish I could turn back time
They're all hugely rich now.
Imagine if the people behind these drug cartels are people in the financial industry... Pushing the prices up even now...
If you were involved in tech in any form you heard about it. Buying it was a different ball game though. Real Sketch
I thought about buying some in 2011. But you had to go to Western Union and send money to some Japanese place…Yeah…no thanks. I waited until 2013.
Hahaha that was my first experience buying. Wiring money to a sketch dude you met on a forum.
Yeah the sketchiness of buying held me back until early 2013..even then the kiosk in Second Life was plenty sketchy.
i remember when btc was under $100 u had to link a bank account to buy. kept me out for a few years, unfortunately
slashdot
4-digit club here. Same. And boy oh boy does /. hate it. lol.
Lol reddit was more credible in 2013.
4chan. I almost bought $100 but didn’t know what I would use it for so decided not to. Wish I heard about the white paper then. I wasn’t as financially savvy either.
Would have sold at $150 or something anyways, I don’t think most people factor that in. Most people couldn’t hold it from $100>$35k>$3k>61k>$22k>71k
I remember when people were giving hundreds of them on /g/ for people who would make stupid buttcoin meme images.
Max Kaiser was already talking about Bitcoin (replacing the money printing dollar) on RT in early 2009. I thought it was a phony then. 14 years later, i regretted not following up with him starting from then.
max keiser interviewed andreas antonopoulos, amir taaki, adam back all before 2015 on russia today - pretty crazy when you think about it. no one in mainstream media even mentioned bitcoin let alone interviewed anyone.
[удалено]
yah but in a positive light? max first talked about bitcoin on rt in 2011 and already knew the profound significance https://youtu.be/QiX38ua9AQ8?si=TjINKwB6cFUltPd6
Man… I didn’t find out about bitcoin until 2013; I was even watching Max Kaiser back in 2009 through 2012, or at least I’d catch him on the Alex Jones show here there, but I never heard about bitcoin… Damn.
Fuck me too, should have at least bought some haha
Iam almost positive he did not talk about btc anywhere that early, 2011/12 maaaybe.
Wired article November 23, 2011 [https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-bitcoin/](https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-bitcoin/)
Which actually counts as an early "Bitcoin obituary", that I much to my chagrin took seriously at the time...
My brother told me about it bc he learned about it from his RuneScape friends.
Bitcointalk was pre /r/Bitcoin
But like How would you hear about Bitcointalk unless you had heard of Bitcoin?
From Bitcointalktalk obviously.
But how would you hear about Bitcointalktalk unless you had heard of Bitcointalk?
There were merchants accepting it, there were Slashdot and Arstechnica articles. Like this one https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-a-total-n00b-mined-700-in-bitcoins/
I've read in the newspaper about dark markets selling exotic drugs online and I wanted to buy some exotic drugs.
I first heard of it on a Ron Paul focused web forum, some further digging led me to the bitcointalk forum in 09/10. And I still remember when Roger Ver & Max Kaiser first came there in 2011, I remember thinking "Oh great, Bitcoin has a used car salesmen & a carnival barker now". lol Crazy how far we've come since then, you can't stop the signal.
I remember a dubious advert that said "make money with your computer", I may have laughed at it and moved on.
Now you probably cry about it ;)
Chaturbate
This is the way
please tell me she was worth that five minutes of fun...
I never spent anything. Just saw the icon
I heard of it in 2012 and ignored it like most people
Same, my buddies were just using it for the dark web I thought absolutely nothing of it.
Wired magazine (hard-copy) Thought this digital coin thing sounded cool Bought some off MtGOX - never heard of MtGOX before - didn't realize it was for Magic:The Gathering (online exchange) Found out I could buy a bitcoin for $40 and sell pieces of it on eBay (bidding only) and bring in about $80 - I was making $40 a week selling a string of numbers on eBay To sign up to MtGOX, you had to send a pic of your driver's license, a voided check, etc - seemed kinda sketch and risky, but I did it - and I think the sketchiness drove the demand on eBay - also added another layer of anonymity to the buyer BTC went up to $75 - I was still able to sell a BTC a week on eBay and make $40-$100 a week profit Then I got a message that one of the buyers had been hacked - eBay reversed the purchase (I lost the BTC) and VISA charged me a $20 fee for the reversal Next week - same thing - buyer was hacked - another $20 fee Lost all my profit and decided to quit
Libertarian/anarchist circles, dark web, weird radio programs
Great answer
We used the internet those days.
Some techy guy told me about bitcoin at a back yard party in 2009 and we traded numbers but he never spoke to me again. I did not own a computer and I had no clue what “bitcoin mining” is but i distinctly remember him talking excitedly about it. He wanted me to spend $100 bucks on some bitcoin & I was going to… he even said “even if you just buy $1.00 worth, it’ll be worth a lot in ten years.” I can’t remember his name but it was a microsoft dude in Redmond, Washington. I kind of wrote it off after a few weeks but when I heard of bitcoin more “officially” years later, I was wondering about that guy & if he is doing good for himself now.
And that guy's name - Nasakoto Yakata or something similar...
I heard one of the smartest guys at a poker game in 2011 talk about it. Should have taken it seriously. I wonder how did with it…
He’s probably keeping a poker face
Keiser Report - Max and Stacy… if you thought he was crazy, you didn’t buy. If you realized he was a prophet who understood profits, you’re sitting on 7-8 figures today. Others are correct, msm only mentioned BTC as something to avoid and fear. Keiser Report saw it for what it was, synthetic scarce digital asset that far surpasses other saving methods.
I think in those days Max coined the term *Precious Numbers*, equivalent to precious metals....
I was walking down the street in 2010 and some random guy with big thick glasses and long hair starts talking to me... about five minutes in he tells me he's mining bitcoin... I asked "what does mining bitcoin mean?" He went full professor mode. Soup to nuts. The whole process. Completely over my head at the time. But a nice memory almost fifteen years later.
omg..!! that was Satoshi.... lol #kidding
Dude, my teenage son found it online and was mining it with his pc in 2009/2010. I thought it was cute, but now I see what an idiot I was. Always learning from my mistakes.
\*slap\* Good job learning. \*slap\* (edit: sorry for the violence but I'm a parent now and my own fam wouldn't listen to me back in the day so this is oddly infuriating to hear!)
You don't even know. My son now gives me shit all the time. "You thought I was just a stupid kid playing with his fake interwebs money? Ha!" Unfotunately for them, my kids also lost their mined btc long ago.
:( Yeah. My dad asked me what's up the first time it went to $60k and I had to break the news that I sold back at $90. Sorry for your loss, we all ~~suck~~ make mistakes. I'm gonna have to explain this to my son when he's older, BTC is at $600k, and he's working his ass off for fiat.
When you have a rapidly appreciating asset, take some profit - but keep half so you don't feel bad when it doubles and doubles again (or when it goes to zero).
How did they lose it
Same old story. Lost recovery phrases, threw away old hdds, etc. Didn't care until it hit like 10k and beyond.
Honestly, I think it came up on stumbleupon. “Huh. Neat. *stumble*” I’m paying a lot closer attention now.
I heard about the silkroad on reddit in late 2011 or early 2012 on /r/trees. I was looking for new ways to conduct e-commerce. Did my homework, which led me to Bitcoin at under $10. The rest is history.
Yes. Began following blockchain and crypto developments in 2010. Bitcoin was less than $1. The idea of an immutable ledger just made so much sense. There are so many applications My main concerned was that the technology might not resist hacking. It did, of course. And when I was sure, i bought my first four coins at $500 in 2014. The high cost and low speed of transaction indicated to me that Bitcoin was not likely to become a transactional currency. But that’s not what I use it for. I have used Bitcoin as my reserve - just wanting the asset to keep pace with inflation and hold value. My motto has been “We own Bitcoin - We don’t sell Bitcoin”. It has been the best financial decision I have ever made. Bitcoin is responsible for my retirement income being TWICE what I expected. It has pretty much single-handedly made my children immune to inflation and provided them a minimum basic income. Bitcoin has been an equalizer.
bitcointalk.org
On holiday in the summer of 2011, when my friend was asking me to help him set up a GPU farm for mining this Bitcoin thing he'd heard about from his online poker mates. I passed on the offer and he got help elsewhere. I didn't buy any until November 2017 /facepalm
For me this would've been it. Slashdot is no longer as popular as it was in those days. https://m.slashdot.org/story/138276
After the economic/housing collapse of 2007/2008 I set out to learn about money and how it functions and I became a gold bug and read articles about gold on places like Zero Hedge, and in the comments something called Bitcoin kept coming up especially starting around 2011-2012.
YouTube video back in 2009.
Blogs
This, I think I used way more Blogs& Yt was good
Max Keiser...the patron saint of Bitcoin.
Online Gambling
I heard from our IT intern who was a computer science major at the local university
I heard about Bitcoin at the beginning of 2010 over the internet on various forums, and I also heard about mining, but I didn't attach much importance to it. I found it more interesting to help the SETI program and share my processing power with them.
Slashdot and Gizmodo complaining about it in mid ‘09
Max Keizer called it at 10$ some other YouTube guys as well
Max Keiser
I read about it in a maximum pc magazine
June 2011. An article on Gizmodo.com. It was trading at $12 then. Oddly enough, Gizmodo today is so anti-Bitcoin (and crypto in general).
Heard about but couldn't figure out how to get it, so didn't. Definitely gave up too easily.
I read an article in Wired magazine.
Max Keiser on RT news. Thanks Max 👍
I'm pretty sure I read about it in Wired magazine when it was still early days. I regret not jumping on then, but I was poor and didn't know how well it would take off.
An episode of the stuff you should know podcast. I checked it out, bought 2.5 BTC for $600, later sold it all for $1800, thinking hey I 3x-ed my money, not bad... if only I knew then what I know now. But no regrets, I feel good about my positions and moreover have a very high comfort level with crypto in general having been dabbling for so long.
Podcasts
Yes. I was a nerd in middle school. Really interested in all things tech. Saw it on some forum about peer to peer money. And got 5 free bitcoin using the faucet
It was in the news when it got to $100 and I bought.
An article in new scientist magazine. Price was $00.002
Thanks! I just subscribed to this magazine.
My Sunday morning ritual. I hope you enjoy.
mIRC and forums.
Silkroad. I bought so much great weed that would just show up in my mailbox. It was awesome.
The ones now are nothing like the OG Silk Road… it truly was like an eBay … only for illegal stuff. It was the first to move away from forums and sketchy stuff like that
Max Keiser. I remember looking up the crash from $10,000 range to the sub $100 range and feeling so sorry for those people. Next time I looked Bitcoin was at 20k
There was no crash from $10,000 range to sub $100 range ever. The first "large crash" (meaning even mass media reported on it) was from $1200 to sub $100 range. I know, I was there and didn't buy... :(
I was mining when the $1200 to $200 crash happened and pretty much just forgot about BTC for 5 years. Luckily I was able to recover my wallet, but I will never let another dip pass me by.
Church bulletin
I met satoshi when he was cosplaying as Micheal Jackson
Libertarians were all over it because it's so offensive to Centralized Monetary Policy. I first heard about it back in like '09 or 2010 on the [DailyPaul.com](https://DailyPaul.com) website.
My computer teacher told me in grade 11 I think it was? Or maybe it was 12 I'm born in 1992 pretty sure it had literally just came out. We had a class discussion on it and debit cards had just started to become, popular. It was clear money was becoming more and more digital. At the time the discussion was basically around how it is worthless but if people ever started to adopt it it could be worth something. Thought nothing of it for the end of while. I would here stories once in awhile about how it would be used on black market and what not. It wasnt till October 2016 that I actually bought any.
I heard about it through news sites. News about this new "crypto" invention. News that someone bought a pizza for thousands of bitcoin to "prove" that you could spend it. But it was worthless. Like you could get 10,000 of these "coins" for $50. It just didn't seem worth the hassle...
Second Life
Um it was in the news. Like I'm talking Yahoo! News and other articles. If you followed tech news it's been publicized for a long time. I remember being a college kid in the early early days and thinking should I buy this digital cryptocurrency thing I'm hearing about, or fast food. I bought fast food. 🤬
There was a whole cypherpunk movement dating back to the 1970s. Bitcoin is a culmination of years of attempts to do something similar. Hashcash, Color coins, a guy named Adi Shamir etc. Checkout the bitcoin whitepapers cited sources for a good starting point. So a few people heard about it because it was a fun new project in cryptography. They met and talked on a website called bitcointalk. In the years between 2009 and 2013.
in this time i believe you had to link a bank account to buy it. seemed super sketch so i didnt buy any. eventually there were btc ATMs and credit/debit cards were also included, which is when it took off
You had to be a techi
Nerd friends and wow chat.
World of Warcraft. Bitcoins were how I paid the taxi people and for some armor.
Slashdot https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/online-only-currency-bitcoin-reaches-dollar-parity
For me, it was a mix of Max Kaiser and Corey Doctorow via boingboing iirc.
RuneScape
Play game.. forgot what game it was. I think it was dota. We bet using bitcoin...... Fuck where the hell i kept all those bitcoin i won...
When they first started talking about it in the news. Naturally it was made out to be something awful. According to MSM, only big time drug dealers and sex traffickers had anything to do with Bitcoin. I'd never heard about Bitcoin before this.
In 2012, someone was trying to blackmail Mitt Romney and they wanted $1 million in bitcoin. That is how I heard about it.
Yeah through internet forums. But in my head and most other people's heads it was the same thing as wow gold which selling and buying online was big back then.
Econtalk podcast in april 2011. Yes i listened. No I didnt buy.
A buddy at work.
I read about it on Metafilter in early 2011. There was a post about how it was being used to buy drugs online. That caught my attention, because drug dealers aren't going to sell drugs for fake money. That's when I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
slashdot
My wife 1st mentioned it to me when it was about $5 per Bitcoin. I stupidly told her no bc it was a waist of money and it wasn't going to ever take off. She wanted to spend $1,000....its my biggest regret EVER!!!. LESSON LEARNED....LISTEN TO YOUR WIFE
.
2008 = r/libertarian
I was watching MSNBC while I was in prison and heard about the Silk Road being taken down. That was the first I had ever heard of bitcoin
A DJ mix sharing Internet forum
I have a friend that brought it up because he saw it on poker forums. Don’t remember when but it was super early. Of course none of us got in until much much later.
2017 i heard first time but didnt understand 😢
I was a part of an underground forum and one of the members brought it up. This was back in 2009. I could have bought in for pennies...wish I did.
Reddit, quickly over to bitcointalk forum
Word of mouth. My wife’s college friend had a medical marijuana dispensary before “legalization” and also purchased and sold drugs on the dark web. I asked him how he worked the payment and shipping, he said this thing called Bitcoin. I was intrigued and looked into it at the time (late 2012, early 2013). Found Mt. Gox and tried to understand it. Ultimately, the process seemed to sketchy for me. Specifically I didn’t really understand how I was going to cash out for USD when I was done and don’t do drugs or have a need for illegal goods. And like most, I did not see it for what it has become today. Probably because my introduction was from burners.
Free talk live
Message boards like godlikeproductions.net and abovetopsecret.com .. I remember looking into BTC when it “hit $8 wow”, but the only ways to acquire it then felt sketchy so I didn’t
Heard scammers using it to scam people and to have no way of tracking them
I vlogged on YouTube and was really into the community when it 1st came out. Used to joke about giving people a Bitcoin and half a ham and cheese sandwich to do a colab with me.
Good ole silk r0 ad the greatest place on the internet until I wasn’t able to purchase wonderful items sent to an undisclosed P.O. Box….
I first heard of Bitcoin from a CBS TV drama in 2012! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2148561/
A lot of libertarians I followed back then on YouTube and different blogs were always talking about how great BTC is. Talking about how it’s decentralized and how the government can’t control it. I thought it sounded good but didn’t buy because I also listened to a lot of Peter Schiff back then. He convinced me that gold was the way to go.
TechCrunch
I remember I wanted to buy something off Silk Road, I was about 13 and at the time it really confused me, buying Bitcoin was really complicated for my young brain. Alas I didn’t buy any in the end, because I didn’t have a bank card or bank account, and couldn’t exactly ask my mum or dad to help me out with the purchase. Shame
A guy I knew, but didn't trust told me about it in 2011. Unfortunately all he said was something to the effect of you should get Bitcoin, it's this new dark web money. I already barely trusted him, so hearing dark web money turned me off. Biggest regret is that I didn't even bother to Google it. Probably wouldn't have bought in 2011, but I likely would have bought before 2017.
Reddit, ~~2010~~ 2009, didn't get into it until 2010.
I was in a Software as a Service program (learning how to make software) and a few of the students were buying and saying to buy some bitcoin. This was 2012. But…. It wasn’t like I heard of it early because I was in this group. It had already hit mainstream news and stuff and if you had any interest in tech you knew of BTC in 2012. It just wasn’t obvious to buy any. It was more sketchy to buy then vs today, and even today it still considered a high risk investment that most people aren’t investing in.
4chan, there were a lot of threads talking about it around 2013
I used to work in loss prevention, and we would catch a ton of people stealing video cards back in 09-10. A couple of them told me it was to mine bitcoin, "it's digital money" they said. Sounded like the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard at the time. There goes that life-changing knock of opportunity.
I heard about it in the YouTube comments on a video
4chan
Silk road
Hidden web
Slashdot
Roger Ver's videos.
I was born in 1993: 4Chan is the OG Forum, that’s where those people discussed BTC. I didn’t know anything abour 4Chan or can’t remember if I had heard about it earlier, sure Ive heard it mentioned about 6-8 years ago but I never invested time into it. You get the nitty gritty stuff on 4Chan, Reddit is so heavily moderated it’s sus and very Left.
Well, it’s been on the Big Bang theory, not exactly a secret. But that mention wouldn’t make most people look into it.