My mate suggested me to get into bitcoin in the end of 2012, though it seemed too "niché" back then and I didn't take his advice, forgot about it totally. Had pretty busy life in general that time so had no time to really think it over. In late 2013, just before the Mt.Gox fiasco, I stumbled randomly on a bitcoin article, which grew some interest in me. Didn't buy any yet though, just started keeping an eye on the price and where it could go. Found this forum too, but came here only to read without an user. Then came the big Gox pump, when it really got my interest. Started buying around $600 down to $200's, got my stack pretty big and was planning to firmly HODL. In 2015, real life problems hit me straight in the face and had to sell almost everything (the amount was in 3 digits), leaving me just with 1BTC, which I sold in 2016 as I had lost faith in many things, didn't keep up with the price much anymore either.
Got my shit together and got back in the game in September 2017 after the summer pump, bitcoin came all over the news then as well. Had almost forgotten about it completely, guess I was still missing my precious coins from 2015. Started buying alts at first, with some minor trading back and forth and made pretty good profits with them.
I was still more into alts when I started being more active here and registered this account, JJG was actually the one who kicked some sense into me and suggested I'd stop the alt nonsense. Been accumulating slowly since then, won't make the same mistakes like in the past. Now I'd move back with my parents before I sold my coins
I appreciate the recognition; however, during times like these, it is difficult for anyone to feel smart - even while the alt coins seem to be faring worse than bitcoin.
Even though frequently information shared on forums are merely springboards to assist our own thinking (hopefully in the right direction), internet personas can go all over the place in their thinking and what information they are pumping. - so you have to kind of take each internet persona (even if they have built up some credibility) with a decent grain of salt.
I actually give some credit to an internet persona who was spouting out all kinds of bullish bitcoin information in late 2013 to sparking me into my taking action. In September/October 2013, I was switching around some of my investment mechanisms, which actually caused me to look into gold, PMs and also index funds. Bitcoin was on my radar as something that I would look into later, so I made a few investments into index funds, and began a kind of dollar cost averaging plan to continue to invest into those index funds in the coming years, and I just could NOT get myself into gold, so when the guy was spouting off about how BTC had made him more than 10x when the price went from $20 to more than $200, yet the correction back down to $75 and then currently in about the $600s, had caused him about 30x, which caused me to consider diverting the amount that I was dollar cost averaging into index funds into BTC, instead.
Anyhow, the guy who got me started became jaded about bitcoin in about early 2015, and was buying into a lot of the flippening arguments, the various superiority of other coins arguments and including spouting out the so many ways that bitcoin supposedly sucked. So it got to be a bit much for me to tolerate in terms of interacting with his ongoing spouting out of nonsense. I never really thought that he was much of a genius because he had merely gotten lucky by accumulating a decent stash of bitcoin below $20, and surely he made mistakes along the way, but sometimes the extremes in the strategy and getting caught up in the nonsense spouting off lines of the alt coin pumpers might allow for some getting rich (if you get lucky), but tends to cause a lot of stress because 1) the talking points are changing so often and even frequently self-contradictory and 2) there seems to be a decent need to keep moving around your investment and your strategy, including adopting some kind of lame framework that attempts to justify diversification in other coins, when bitcoin already sufficiently adds up to sufficient diversification - especially if you can realize that you are diversifying against various other traditional investments - not within crypto based on baloney misinformation about dumbass pump and dump projects that don't really add much if any differentiation from traditional investments.
No matter what our individual investment strategy(ies), currently, there seems to be some trying times ahead, at least in the next week or so... perhaps longer... hopefully we are going to spring out of this before the end of the year, otherwise the longer winter period might end up becoming true for bitcoin causing difficulties getting out, even within the next 6-12 months... which means that the 2014 scenario ends up being more true than the 2013 scenario... ... which seems more likely during extra dipping times like these (especially this past week).
