...My story is absolutely boring compared to OP's, but I thought I'd just share it. I was not an early adopter or a believer in it from the start--bitcoin kind of won me over as time passed. Aside from not keeping my early purchases, I've no regrets about getting into crypto. I don't write about my feelings on bitcoin and crypto much, but I'm a true supporter now.
Your story is not boring at all. Is just an honest story and thank you very much for sharing it. Maybe this will encourage other members to this same.
They maybe think, just like you, that they have a boring story and nothing to say, but this is not true as we see.
Every member of this forum has his own BTC and Bitcointalk forum story and I will be very happy to read all of them. Merits are waiting for the best stories!!!
...Our paths don't cross much on the forum, but I was familiar with your name and never realized you'd been into bitcoin for so long...
This is true we haven't interacted together on the forum but maybe it would change in the future, I hope so. I am in Bitcoin almost from the start and after my first contact with BTC, I knew it would be something which would change the world. I just knew is the missing part of the internet. This is so funny that back in 2011 nobody wanted to listen about BTC and everybody had the exact same opinion as yours that this is a scam. This shows me clearly that from the start there were two groups of people. The first one the believers like me which after the first look at BTC, knew that this is something big, despite didn't understand the tech behind it fully also and had a lot of questions about it. Second group disbelievers which from the start treat BTC as a scam because there is too much fraud in the internet world. Some of them during the time get to know BTC better and joined the believers' club forces. Just like you @The Pharmacist.
...I started earning dust through faucets (there was one called Land of Bitcoins IIRC)...
Of course, I have used both of these faucets and even Freebitco.in I use to this day and have plenty of refs there, thanks to my signature. Today is not working so good because everybody already is familiar with this faucet, but back then I got hundreds of them every week. That was the time when I realized how strong such a signature is and how good ref links works on the forums. TBH back then faucets were paying a lot more like dust. I knew faucets which paid 0.5BTC just for signing up
. I like sometimes take a look at my BTC wallets history and my old transactions. Just yesterday I remind myself looking at my old transactions that I have won 3.5BTC in
https://peerbet.org/. That was a raffle service back then where you put provably fair bets against each other. If I would only hold to this money it would be whooping 80.000$ if sold on ATH. I remember, I sold it only for 900$ and that was luckily my last transaction at Mr.Gox because the next day was hacked.
...I have Off-Topic on ignore since I never post there and from what I've heard it's a mess...
Exactly, despite there are more posts as in meta this section is a mess and a pure spam contest with no real activity. Even if somebody post there something never follow it further.
No real activity and real committed readers of that section. I would have nothing against off-topic but activity in this thread just died there.