A shocking fact to me is, how easy it has been to convince people that:
- Monero is now in the situation where Bitcoin was in 2010
- Monero fixes Bitcoin's worst flaw, lack of privacy.
People who have never owned Bitcoin are flocking into Monero starting about now. I am helping them by accepting fiat as payment.
How is Monero like Bitcoin in 2010?
were you around at that time or is that from third party sources?
Feels nothing like it to me, (Cryptonote itself, a somewhat different story) Not sure how much of that is attributed to the fact the concept of p2p decentralized crypto cash is already embedded into our consciousness however.
I had my first impression about Bitcoin in 2009, about 15 seconds reading of a link I passed by. "Interesting idea, but something technical = does not apply to me".
In late 2010, Bitcoin was a general topic of intense tabletalk in our investment community. Some people bought in, the majority felt that silver still had plenty of upside left (it did, until mid-2011).
I skipped because of the illiquidity. I have always been presented with lots of investment ideas by my friends and I had learned to raise the minimum to $15k, to be able to manage the "portfolio of strange money-making schemes" properly. Bitcoin market would have risen tens of % if I invested $15k to scoop up
BTC60k or so.
In January 2011, we held an hour-long public debate from the topic: "Silver and Bitcoin - which one is the basis for the monetary system of the future". As the founder of Silverbank, I was advocating silver. I won by popular vote (lol).
I made the decision to invest in Bitcoin sometime in the spring. But the price was "too high" (=$1, up 300% in just a few months). Wanted to wait until it calmed down. It didn't, instead went to $32. I was following the rise keenly, although with no holdings. When it tipped over, I strongly advocated people to sell at $25, either half or full holdings, since it would come down a lot and they could buy back cheaper.
They in turn asked me to buy back at $10. I said that in my understanding, it would go all the way to $5 before resuming uptrend. When that was reached months later, I was ready to buy.
**
What makes Monero like Bitcoin in 2010, are the following things:
- something truly new
- very much talk, discussion and debate in the circles that are in the forefront of technical and economic developments
- totally outside the mainstream thinking and adoption, but holds clear promise to go there
- ridiculously small market cap ($5M)
- rich people cannot get in despite interest, due to illiquidity
- difficult to buy (only
BTC at present)
- difficult to use (then most hold
BTC at Gox, similarly now)
- fanatical community doing what it takes to make it big
- sense of belonging to the community
The majority of people are not sensitive to energies, but the energy of Monero now is same as Bitcoin then. Currently Bitcoin's energy is foul, it has been so much raped by ruthless regulators, stolen by exchange owners and governments, is steered by a foundation that we don't know if it is trying to represent Bitcoin's best interests or not (with western governments, the good thing is we already know the answer and the truth makes us free).