The overall feeling was similar to other bear markets - agony, despair, etc. However, many of us took to heart the rumors of bitcoin's demise. It seemed likely that bitcoin would, at best, remain something of a hobby for cypherpunks. OTOH, the despair was different. It was more about the loss of a dream, and less about the loss of money. Since BTC was so cheap, most people only had like a few grand invested, at most. Unlike Dec. 2017-18 when even the shoeshine boy lost $100K+.
You guys deserve respect for persevering through that. You pretty much blazed the trail that we could look back on for confirmation that Bitcoin would survive the worst.
just wanted to confirm what infofront posted about 2011 - 2012.
i started mining late(ish) 2011, at first using an existing ATI HD4850 on my gaming rig (my main distributed computing rigs, nvidias on folding@home, stayed on that), then dropping a couple grand on a rig built for BTC mining specifically. ATI HD6870 and HD5830s where the gotos at that point
it was more or less surreal as back then, for me it was just another experiment in distributed computing with a new kind of money storage theme, and distributed computing was very familiar to me from other projects.
price was ~$10 when i started. went up to ~35. YES! then the loooong decline to ~$2. but i kept mining to support the experiment then, and really did not expect any monetary gains. but guess where a large part of my current stack is from. yup, the $2 per coin mining days.
not that btc cant fail, but accumulation during the cheap coins day sure paid off for me. i intend to keep that strategy.
