Topic: My Story: Why Bitcoin Will Gain Traction Faster than We Think (The Five Stages o (Read 2603 times)

This obsession with other people getting rid of their stash has to stop. Having some savings is a very sensible choice. It gives options that people without money don't have. Green is not your color, gentlemen.

People have to buy and sell bitcoins if they want to speculate on alt coins, so that should help to counter the problems caused by hoarders.

Then again if it isn't traded them is no reason to be holding there needs to be a healthy balance and a reason for Bitcoin without traders and people who buy things for Bitcoin it would be totally useless to everyone and therefore holding because a useless act.

Hoarding, or saving, for shorter or longer time is the only purpose of money. There is no alternative use for it. Holding the money is the point. If nobody wants to hold it, it is not money.

That explain.

I live paycheck to paycheck.

where do you guys get the idea that people don't hoard currency? have you never heard of a savings account at a bank? everyone hoards currency,unless you're broke and living paycheck to paycheck and have to spend it all.

Exactly, even tho bitcoin is believed to be created for adoption and common use, i would definetly like to see it in the future more like a store of value, and as privilege.
What we all hope is bigger price, so that seams like a logical way to go then, and not wide spread transactions.

yet it is done with every currency on earth..

I stumbled upon Bitcoin in the year it was launched, briefly mined them on CPU power.
First tought: Neat!! But Banksters will kill this because it is capable of undermining their monopoly and power.

Long before BTC came on the scene I was convinced that our fiat money systems are simply unsustainable, and that banks ar a far cry from the thrustworthy institutions they would like to appear as. This is the kindest way I can clarify my view on banking & money.

Just after I discovered Bitcoin my life took a dramatic change, I chose a very different line of work which took me a couple of years to establisch myself in: wet contracting. Since 2010 I live on an operational tugboat and seldom step ashore. Learned things like navigating, geosurvey and operating cranes.

By the end of 2012 my career allowed time for some non work related stuff, like Bitcoin. By that time CPU mining was long gone, ASIC mining gear trickled into the network surpassing GPU farm efficiency. Bitcoin traded @ +-$30. I was ready to get in.

January 2013 I ordered mining gear @ BFL, by november 2013 it was still unclear when the gear would get shipped so I "upgraded" my order to a hosted mining contract. This order status remains "processing" up until today, that is 19 months after my initial order, almost 9 months after my "upgrade".  

I decided to buy some coins instead of investing further in BFL vaporware, bought coins @ $72 and after last december/january ATH some more @ €325 (may 15).
If I would have bought coins @ the time of the BFL order, that investment of nearly $3K would have been >$60K today w/o short term trading...

Today I have like 1K € @ Paymium (I know it's a "no go" to keep money @ an exchange but I do trust and like the way Paymium is complying with regulations) and a modest stash (<100) BTC's (all in cold storage).

I keep some fiat ready to buy extra BTC's should it flash-crash, any surplus fiat money (surplus is every € that exceeds my security savings treshold) is converted into BTC, I buy them by halves to keep fiat savings levelled sharp to a safe and comfortable minimum. My savings are divided like 10% in € and 90% in BTC @ today's $620/BTC  

I saw the enormous potential of BTC (more precise: the blockchain tech) immediatly but never ever expected that adoption would go this amazingly fast.

Should bitcoin reach $3K within the next 4 years (hopefully not too overly entousiastic expectations) then my life would again take a dramatic change for the better....

* Edited for typo's

The first time I know about bitcoins was in early 2013 and after some reading in bitcointalk and other websites I was immediately involved in it.
Unlukily I bought some btc during the bubble burst of March/April 2013 and did so many awful trading that I want to forget it.

I initially dismissed bitcoin as something that would never be actively traded because it was like fiat (not backed by gold or some other commodity) but even worse, because you didn't need it to pay your taxes. At best, some computer nerds might do a transaction just for fun but I predicted it would never get beyond that. When I learned that it was actively traded on MtGox, and the price had been steadily increasing over something like a year, I realized my prediction was wrong. And it can be exciting to be proven wrong; it means I'm about to learn something new! That was certainly a moment of epiphany for me.


I first bought some bitcoin in 2011 and what pushed me over the edge was reading about Gavin. I hadn't heard of him before but here was a Princeton-educated, apparently level headed, very un-crazy-sounding person who had decided to dedicate himself full time to its development. If he had done something crazy like rename it Fuck-The-Fed-Coin and get the FBI chasing him like another colorful character in alternative currency land, then my skepticism probably would have won out.

I saw a mention or two of bitcoin in early 2011 and dismissed it because I just assumed it had to be another thing like flooz, eGold, beenz, facebook-credits, etc... When I saw yet another mention (I think Slashdot's story about it hitting parity with the dollar), I read up on it and hit curiosity/epiphany/enthusiasm simultaneously (that day). The needle has been pegged on all three of those ever since.

I've been waiting four years to get in since I hear of bitcoins the first time 

I think it depends on what type of person you are. Your stages are completely wrong for me. I was curious right from the start and I never dismissed bitcoin because mining was sort of free, I had nothing to loose. I actually became enthusiastic before being skeptical. I started to read more because I was interested, and the more I know about bitcoin, the more I realise the difficulties and vulnerability.


I was into bitcoin the first day I heard about it and there was no one I know who have heard of it. As I said, adoption speed varies from person to person.

It probably took me more than a year and a half of hearing it being advertised/discussed on a nearly daily basis (Free Talk Live) for me to actually become serious enough to actually look into it further (here - didn't know this placed existed til then) and then find ways to purchase them about 16 months ago. Even though I've always been a libertarian type, my computer capabilities were limited to using the internet and drafting powerpoint and word documents. I'm more of an outdoor and weight lifting type by my nature so that's why it likely took so long for me to get past the dismissal stage into the curiosity stage which quickly led to fullblown excitement. I'm not gonna lie, the pricing had something to do w/ my interest but then it got me to research everything else that is great about Bitcoin. And, now I'm a fixture over here, like I had been and still am to a lesser extent, over on the Ron Paul forums.

But hoarding gold or silver is commonplace, so is bitcoin more like a commodity or a fiat currency?

I first read this idea from Risto, who (I paraphrase) said that it takes about 18 months form the time you first hear about bitcoin until you finally are ready to jump in.

I have to agree wholeheartedly. The waves we are seeing in adoption are first planted as seeds in people's minds about 18 months prior.

Yeah, someone needs to explain why holding bitcoin is called "hoarding" and seen as a negative, but apparently holding gold and silver (and other stores of value like real estate, stock, art, etc.) is called "saving" or "investing" and seen as a positive.  

I guess Tim Draper is considered a high net worth "hoarder" then.  So are the Winklevii for that matter.

Maybe we should work on changing hoarding for saving. It's not a bad thing, it makes a lot of sense to have resources at your disposal and it makes little sense not to given the option.

I took me one year to go through all of the stages - what an idiot I was