Topic: Early adopters cleaning up fiat debts? (Read 2495 times)

People say shit like this. Maybe its true. I *did* find out about it a long time ago. In 2010 I heard about it, and made a hlaf hearted attempt to set up a client mining, but work got in the way. I read about it again and I bought $100 worth in Feb 2011, which got me 100BTC. Seemed like nice round number. The thing is you have no idea how much of a risk it was.

Take for instance the chart...



Looks familier eh! exponential growth and me buying at the top... I should bet the farm right?

There was nowhere other than silk road which took it. It was widely derided (check out comments on bitcoin stories on slashdot back then). $100 was a lot of money for me at the time. I was still struggling to clear debts accrued starting a business, I owed tens of thousands of $ in back taxes. It took some real fucking nuts to risk $100 on what was basically a total punt at the time. I was buying off strangers on paypal that I met through bitcoinmarket. I was shifting money through intermediaries I'd never heard of (I am in UK) to get dollars, and they were all taking a slice.

Maybe you are prescient, and knew for a fact it was going to return 6700% to date. You would have had to hold through $32 and the retreat back to $2.

I couldn't do, with hindsight its easy to see that would be the best course of action. Instead I had to take profits on the way. I'd be a fool not to right? I sold around half of them at 7. Why wouldn't I!? 600% profit in 40 months... but then beat myself up when it hit 15 within days. I sold half again at 28, total fluke, because I was kicking myself when it carried on going up....

Then the painful slide. I bought often on the way down, this time I was sure, I knew it was going up, and over the months I sunk several hundred more dollars into it. But it never stopped going down... I ended up with over 200 coins at one time worth half of what I had spent.

When the turnaround came it was nice, but I was always playing catchup, I was leveraged at bitcoinica, I was in the black again. I pulled the leveraged positions and left several hundred dollars sat on bitcoinica in lowball limit orders, to catch the downward spike. It never came. Instead the zhou-crew walked with my dollars. A painful reminder of the risks of this market.

The block reward halving approached. Every ounce of me said the dollar price must inveitably double, but I was $1500 deep. In an experiment that could stop at any time. People seem to forget that. So I held on and dare not risk buying more.

Sure enough it came, the price rose, slowly then faster. We hit $30 and stalled. I sold enough to pull out €1000. Still with all that has gone before, I beat myself up about that decision, when I know I should just be satisfied with the fact that I now have a few more coins than I started with and they cost me nothing. Now business is good and I'm not in so much debt, its not such a big deal to find money to put into BTC, but my holding is already worth several thousand dollars. AND IT COULD STILL GO TO ZERO.

That's reality, that's what you go through when you find out about this thing 2 years ago, and its the reality people will go through if they find out about it tomorrow.

To say, now, looking back, well I would have just put a big chunk of my savings into it back in '09. You are free to say that, but I am free to doubt it.

Credit is meaningless if you have cash. I'm not saying you shouldn't pay your bills, but once you have wealth, you non't need credit. Being a well-qualified buyer just makes you a target for the fraudsters.

Having a clean credit report has a value you can't (easily) measure in dollars.

In the USA, the interest rate on credit cards is only a maximum 24.99 percent. Bitcoin is growing much faster than that. Why would anyone want to pay off their debts? I suppose VISA/MC will have to match Bitcoin now and raise their interest rates to ten thousand percent.

Same thing. Time to face the new reality.

BUY BUY BUY.... $100 tonight!

Dear early adopters, please clean up your fiat debts (if any) - some people need to pay back their Bitcoin debt to me and it seems impossible to do that at this exchange rate 

Yes I know, it's crazy!  I wonder how much BTC were destroyed at the beginning when it was worth nothing...

You don't have some old drives laying around, which you could try some recovery tools? 

My first Bitcoin purchase was at $0.50 with coin pal.  I made a few other transactions before that with the faucet and some others, but I deleted the wallet (tx the coins out)

I have not had the money to put in like I wanted to, an lost a fair amount in the first drop from $30.

I have been able to live more comfortably because of Bitcoin.  Some from the referral programs, and did decent with exchange arbitrage this time last year.

I feel better about loosing money to a fellow Bitcoin user than some hedge fund bankster.

Maybe, but even if you are correct, as long as they hold for 2 years (like the 2011 survivors) it will pay out tenfold.

This run up is going to turn even more people off than in 2011.  I feel bad for anyone in Cyprus who bought bitcoins as protection against 10% loss to their savings account, because odds are that when this thing finally turns they'll have lost significantly more than that.

I got in, in mid march... But didn't buy until april or may 2011. (can't remember exactly, first bitcoin was something like 5 or 6$)
I WISH I had gotten in, back in 2010 and done some mining to earn a few blocks.

On the bubble I made out like a (very poor) bandit.. Actually was selling some bitcoins to buy something real quick, the night the bubble burst... sold two for around ~30$ on virwox then a few minutes later the market crashed XD

I don't really consider myself an early adopter though... at least I didn't until I saw 65$ bitcoins..
I still have a vain hope that the price goes back down to 20$ :p

It seems most people consider Early Adopters to be people who could meaningfully CPU mine (which means 2009 through what - mid-2010?). Personally, I'd be content calling anyone in before April 2011 an Early Adopter. There were only a few thousand users at that point, right (?), which is nothing by the standards of something that we expect to achieve some global mindshare.

The first huge wave started in May 2011, I believe, so I think it's reasonably fair to call anyone before that an early adopter. So I'd guess I'd be a "First Waver" (Spring/Summer 2011).

The current time-period (Q1 2013), probably qualifies as a Second Wave.

Hopefully the 2nd half of 2013 will be the Investor/VC Wave.

I think it's a good idea to pay off real world debts with bitcoin, especially if it's a mortgage.  The current euphoria about bitcoin's price is great.  I must say I'm very surprised as we're pushing $66 and beyond.  Bear in mind that last week we saw bitcoin fall almost 25% within an hour because of v0.8 bug fears.  It was temporary and we quickly saw new highs, but like in the real world there are black swans out there for bitcoin too.

I have a significant student loan with an interest rate of 1.5%.  However, the fiat this debt is tied to is losing purchasing power at far greater than 1.5% per year and seems likely to continue doing so.  In short, my debt is shrinking with time in real terms.

Also, my bitcoins are appreciating (year by year) and that seems very unlikely to change anytime soon.

So why should I clear my fiat debt with Bitcoin credit?

Also, what qualifies as an early adopter these days?  Is there some date/rate cut-off or something more vague?  Given that such a definition is very much by community consensus it may make for an interesting poll (I'd say "informative poll" were this not an oxymoron).

Most early adopters may have already been done with their bitcoin holdings in the 2011 crash, you can have a look at the days destroyed chart, the February/March numbers are sufficiently high, but nowhere near the 2011 level yet, despite the time factor being considerably larger.

I think it's a natural market progression. People who buy in low will sell higher. People who buy in high will sell even higher.

Sure, the pace of acceleration may lessen eventually, but it doesn't have to be a bubble. If bitcoin has a future as a currency, it can simply just continue to appreciate.

Agreed!

I'm just jealous I did not know about this in 2009 as my opinion then would not be any different to that which it is now and I would have poured a large chunk of my savings into it.

I in fact wrote a sci-fi series on a very similar topic. A part of which revolved around governments mining resources in virtual worlds - like MMORPGs - against which the main virtual currency was based, like the gold standard. But specifically the rate at which one could mine was limited to match that of a daily world inflation rate so as to create a stable economy.

So you can imagine my reaction when I read about bitcoin - the key point here being that the network adjusted the difficulty based on the gross hashrate. Absolute genius.

Mind you I feel very luck for finding out about it now.

Perhaps I'll get my series published one day.

FTFY

(Actually, it was two pizzas)

Yes, the guy who bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC can now buy a pizza store. 
Careful first one(s) out get the best prices.