....I don't know if you are into computer programming or computer related stuffs because I understand that Bitcoin resonate more with people like that given its technical nature.
I would not characterize myself as much of a techie.. and sometimes the techies get caught up into shitcoins because they find the shitcoins to be more flexible in their programmability.. .. so I am not sure if techies get bitcoin earlier than others, even though they likely have a lot of advantages in terms of understanding ways to protect their stash.. but even some techies can get caught up in their own tech and screw things up which seems to have contributed to how Luke Dasher had ended up losing around 200 BTC last year.
odohu has a point; it was my interest in computers and related tech, specifically distributed computing projects like folding@home and SETI@home, that gave me a head start in bitcoin.
ie back in the day (say 2011/2012), many peeps 1st experience with btc was buying from an exchange (mtgox maybe..) which takes a lot faith and trust in that exchange especially when sending kyc docs or btc to.
so for the 1st few years my coins were basically mined with GPUs (and later fpga) directly.. no exchange used. that alone gives a bit of a head start.. so when btc began gaining value some of us already had some that we had just hodled as really there wasnt much else to do with btc back then..
There's really no way that I can disagree with your assessment that you personally came into bitcoin from more of a techie kind of angle than the way that I ended up coming into bitcoin, and it seems that I pushed back a little harder on Odohu's assertion partially because he seemed to be assuming that the tech-minded folks had advantages in terms of their both getting into bitcoin early and that they would have more readily understood bitcoin in a better kind of way that gave them conviction to mostly HODL rather than overly selling too many coins too soon.
So I think that part of my pushback would still be to suggest that even if there may be some directional correction in that kind of an assumption in terms of some of the difficulties that some non-techies might have had in terms of acquiring BTC, but even when I got into bitcoin, there were other exchanges besides MtGox, and I recall that MtGox was still the BIGgest of the then existing exchanges, but it was already having pretty big problems for its users to be able to get value out, and so they could send dollars and/or bitcoin, and dollars were always having trouble getting out in terms of some of those off-shore exchanges at that time, but there were even a whole hell of a lot of people having troubles getting their bitcoins off, so I was surely disinclined to go through any kind of MtGox path.. because also at that time, Coinbase was in the USA for pretty decently reasonable fees (even with purchasing limits), and I am pretty sure that Circle and Uphold were other fairly early options to get dollars on exchanges, and surely local bitcoins was pretty available as an alternative - even though maybe fees were a bit high (if we might call 5% to be high).
Of course, prior to 2013 then Coinbase would not have had been an option.. so maybe that would have been more difficult for me to want to get started because it seems that some of my earliest prerequisites involved making sure that I had ways to both get in and to get out... even though sometimes those kinds of perceptions can be misleading in terms of the drying up of channels could end up happening quite quickly.
I still don't consider myself to be very techie at all, but maybe there also needs to be a sense of adventurousness in order to get into something like bitcoin in late 2013 and early 2014, and I still tie my level of interest back to a kind of place that I was at with my overall investment portfolio.. It was getting BIG enough but at the same time, I was starting to feel quit uncomfortable with some aspects in which I was perceiving it to be too dollar dependent. everything in my holdings had various dollar denominated correlations.. including property related assets. .. so I had time to both look into bitcoin but also to spend a couple to a few hours a day looking further.. I had other things going on at that time too, and as many of us likely realize that there can be barriers for anyone to get into any kind of thing that they do not necessarily feel that they understand and maybe even more exacerbated when they are also considering that if they get into something new (like bitcoin) then they are likely going to be better off if they at least have some kind of a minimum amount of budget of time that they can spend to study it and to ongoingly study it.. which was something that I felt that I had or that I was willing to allocate time for such learnenings.
Another thing that kind of happened with my finances right before I was looking into bitcoin, and I have not really talked about this very much, but something like September, October, November 2013, I had already had a kind of decently sized budget that I could employ for investing because of some then transitions that I was going through, and in that regard, I had already dedicated some of that extra capital to a variety of investments during that pre-bitcoin time, and so when I started to read up upon bitcoin in about mid-November 2013.. it struck me as something that was hitting a lot of the diversification that I thought that I was looking for to complement what was left of my then budget. and so I established a 6 month budget for myself and extended another 6 month, but part of the kicker was that by the time that we got to September October November 2014, the various assets that I had bought in late 2013 went over their 1 year investment period which caused me to fold those investments into bitcoin as they had already sufficiently matured, and I did not give any shits if they were in profits or not in profits, since by then I had almost been in bitcoin for a year, and so those assets sufficiently maturing gave me further budget (and or ammunition at the end of 2014) that within the passage of 2014 I had come to the conclusion that they would get folded into BTC once they matured passed their 1 year period since I had bought them.
Currently Bitcoin is price of 29K that still much lower than the expected price which still serves as an opportunity for investors.
I would suggest not to get your expectations up too high. Sure, it is good to consider upside scenarios, but we also should consider both downside and flat scenarios, and it seems to be an unhealthy perspective to consider $29k as if it was "overly suppressed" or some other kind of sentiment like that, even if there might be some truth to it.
Sure, we might be arguing somewhat about semantics because I am likely of a pretty similar conclusion to you in regards to the BTC price being low in light of historical context and in terms of the 200-week moving average, but that does not cause me to take for granted that the next likely step is UP rather than down or sideways.
So surely another way of framing any question regarding where we are at versus where we might be going is to attempt to put bitcoin in a kind of framework while still considering UP as one of the possible directions, but even if you might assign higher odds to up rather than down or sideways, that does not even mean that the higher odds will happen.
So let's say that you assign your odds as follows: 40% up / 28% down and / 32% sideways.. so even if you assign the highest of odds to UPpity, you cannot assume those others to be zero or even lower than they actually are.
Sure, you might come up with different numbers than me.. and sure let's give it a timeframe of within the next year, so we should have both time and price... so what are you going to do? Are you going to refuse to assign values to the other possible scenarios or just talk about them as if they are zero just because they are lower than what you believe to be the more likely scenario? whether you are correct or not, that's likely even another question.
but even some techies can get caught up in their own tech and screw things up which seems to have contributed to how Luke Dasher had ended up losing around 200 BTC last year.
Wow this is a mistake someone will rue for a long time. 200 BTC is such a big number. I will not be able to forgive myself if anything close to that happen to me.
One of the ironies in the situation seems to be a bit of a surprise from some folks in regards to the number of BTC that Luke had when he was seeming to continuously pleading poverty, and I am not even suggesting that he was misleading anyone since he is a kind of well known developer who has contributed quite a bit... and so sure, maybe there going to be some seeming contradictions in some situations when some facts might come to be known that seem to conflict with other previously asserted (or maybe previously assumed) facts.
How did this actually happen? Maybe I can learn one or two thing from it.
There are probably some forum threads on the topic.. it seems that I might even be following some of them.. .but I had not seen anything posted recently..
I did a quick google search on the topic, and if you are interested in more then at least this article will give you something to springboard off of..
https://decrypt.co/118231/bitcoin-core-dev-loses-at-least-3-6-million-btc-to-hack Some have blamed him for being too arrogant in terms of some of the more basic wallets would have likely given him better security than his own seemingly make-shift systems... and surely he is not being criticized in regards to his technical skills prowess, but there have been assertions that there is some value in terms of various open-source systems receiving more scrutiny than some systems that we might create for ourselves and then not be able to adequately see their vulnerabilities well enough in order to protect ourselves from such vulnerabilities.
odohu has a point; it was my interest in computers and related tech, specifically distributed computing projects like folding@home and SETI@home, that gave me a head start in bitcoin.
so for the 1st few years my coins were basically mined with GPUs (and later fpga) directly.. no exchange used. that alone gives a bit of a head start.. so when btc began gaining value some of us already had some that we had just hodled as really there wasnt much else to do with btc back then..
Glad you confirmed my observation. Your name alone sound techie... pardon me as no offense was intended. People like us that are not deep into computer related stuffs still struggle to make sense of the technical aspect of Bitcoin. We tend to hide when the deep things like entropy, nodes, hash etc are being discussed. Conversely, for someone that is already into programing, Bitcoin will be like home-coming. Well, I guess I will put coding as a future plan... probably when I get some financial stability and get off 9/5 system that is making one work like elephant while eating like ant.
Personally, I have doubts about any kind of rush to necessarily learn things that you might not have the time and/or energies to learn, and sure if you have some chances to learn more technical aspects of bitcoin, then surely there is nothing wrong with that.... but I would not necessarily conclude that it is healthy to get too focused on the trees and thereby end up losing sight of the forest - because their are a whole lot of angles to bitcoin and there are a whole lot of people who still can value greatly from bitcoin without learning how to code or whatever you might speculate to be some kind of a technical barrier and/or handicap that you might have.
Sometimes, I do look to some of the techies to help me to figure out some of the issues, and there frequently be people who have knowledge in one direction who will attempt to lord it over you, and there were several of us who ended up NOT buying into the various techie BIG blocker arguments in 2016/2017/2018 and still sometimes brought up more recently, so there can be value in terms of engaging in critical thinking and sometimes being able to identify when someone is trying to lord your lack of knowledge over you. and sure sometimes I am way out of my league when I make some posts in some of the more techie threads of the forum, and sure sometimes I will still attempt to read some of those threads because sometimes there still can be some useful information that I understand and some technical people do have better ways of framing matters than others and they are not necessarily trying to trick you.