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[–] 114 points 9 months ago (22 children)

So, related story...

Back in 2011ish, I discovered SilkRoad. I'd heard about people ordering weed on the internet, and it sounded really convenient. I downloaded Tor, I trawled forums and #chans for onion links, and eventually, I found it. Aside from all of the sketchy shit (hard drugs, stolen credit card info, home vasectomy kits), it almost seemed too good to be true - I could order a whole pound for what I was paying for a couple of ounces.

There was one problem, though: payment. You couldn't use your debit card (obviously), and you couldn't just buy a prepaid visa and use that. No, they handled all payments in this weird new thing that I'd never heard of... Bitcoin. I did a bit of research, and it seemed like it would be kind of a hassle to set up a wallet and find an exchange and actually buy any Bitcoins, and even more of a hassle to sell any extra Bitcoins that I had left over. On top of that, the price kept bouncing around, so enough Bitcoin to buy a fat sack of weed today might buy a much smaller sack tomorrow.

So what did I do?

I gave up and kept buying weed from a dude. If I'd sucked it up and dealt with the hassle to buy weed by the quarter pound instead of the quarter ounce, the crumbs left in my Bitcoin wallet could have bought me a house.

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  • [–] 94 points 9 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Its extremely difficult to get a doctor to give you a vasectomy where i live unless you already have children

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  • [–] 55 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    I think a lot of people think that yet the people who did have bitcoin when they were a few bucks each sold it at $70, or $300, or $900, or $1700.... very few people have held on all this time.

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  • [–] 52 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    I sold when it hit $1000 the first time. Bought a new computer with the money. It crashed to like 600 right after. I thought I was a genius....

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  • [–] 25 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I’ve had about 275 BTC pass through my wallets throughout the years. I actually used it. My friend who was “too stupid” to use it still has 2 of them from the $10 BTC era.

    Never saw it as an investment, just something to help me get acid in the mail.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago

    No, you would have sold it for a hundred bucks. And if you didn't then you would have sold for two hundred. Or for three hundred...

    Not having bought it that day is just one step of the ladder you didn't climb. You would still need to not sell it every day since.

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago

    A friend of mine got addicted to heroin in highschool. He bought 200 btc when it crashed down to $2 in 2012, and shortly after, his parents sent him to rehab for a month, and hid his computer somewhere on the farm, never to be seen again.

    When it was worth around $10m we searched the entire premises, with no luck.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    Nah. Similar story:

    I did the part that you didn't. Left the excess in the silkroad account, the FBI bought the house.

    That, and you would have sold it a year later, or a year later, or a year later.

    Don't kick yourself too hard. I'd be in the 10 digit range if I could see the future and just didn't spend a couple hundred on the site for one of the orders.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Why do you need a home kit for a vasectomy? It just takes a scalpel, superglue, suturing kits, and some balls. /s though now I am remembering an infamous post of someone describing how she did her own orchiectomy (nsfl it was a horrible read)

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Back in 2009, I was there, saw the release of Bitcoing on Slashdot news. I had a computer on 24/7 because I was working on my thesis. Minin on CPU was feasible. I thought it could be a cool experiment to have a bit, just for fun. I never bothered with the hassle of actually running the miner on those very first days with the CPU and electricity I had from my uni for free.

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  • [–] 70 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    Super early on I mined probably 500+ bitcoin.

    And later in life sold them all at various points for maybe a total sum of $8k.

    So, yeah.

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  • [–] 50 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    This is what investing is though. No sane person would have bought Microsoft for peanuts in the early days and waited until today to have sold their first share. That's when people get greedy and lose everything.

    Bitcoin is very high risk, so your probably $7.8k profit should be seen as a huge win, regardless of what could have been.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Bitcoin isn't an investment though. Or at least, it wasn't supposed to be.

    People treat it like an investment because they don't understand how it actually works. Then Altcoins became a thing, which are essentially just Bitcoin clones but with extra steps.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    People treat it like an investment because they don't understand how it actually works.

    People treat it as an investment because it has historically grown in value at a rapid pace. It literally couldn't matter less "how it actually works." What matters is the likelihood that its value will increase.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Exactly my point. People treat it like an investment for precisely that reason. But that wasn't why it was created in the first place. Appreciating in value is a side-effect, not the main feature.

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  • [–] 43 points 9 months ago

    Guy who came first seeing this in 2026

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  • [–] 32 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    In 2012, one of my friends in Colorado had a Bitcoin mining rig that was making $200 worth of Bitcoin a month. But he was moving to California where energy prices were higher, so he offered to sell me the whole thing. He wanted just over $1,000 for it, which was too rich for my blood. At the time I thought "it might break even in 5 months, or it could start losing money if prices go down or if Bitcoin gets harder to mine. Too risky."

    I think Bitcoin was around $5 a piece at the time, so it would have been putting out 40 coins a month. Now logically I know that had I bought that mining rig from him, I certainly wouldn't have held everything it made and waited to sell until Bitcoin peaked. But every once in a while, like right now, I do the math and realize that thing was pumping out $13,731,278 a month at today's prices and just fucking hate my life.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Having also been in Colorado and being big into mining at the time, I can tell you that you would have sold when it hit the ATH of $1000, or definitely when MtGox happened and it halved almost overnight. I worked at Microcenter at the time and remember all the people returning GPUs after that crash. Everyone likes to think they would have held this whole time, but you'd have been a fucking greedy idiot if you had seen something so volatile, made 1000x returns and still said "Nah, I'm gonna hold"

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Yeah my biggest regret is that I know my personality of hardly ever completely cashing out of anything. If I ever trade stock options and have a call up big, I'll usually sell part of it and hold the rest till expiration.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Wish I had came in last instead of winning first place 😩

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I remember someone on Reddit gifting me 0.25BTC and I never redeemed it once I saw I had to create an account and a wallet. Just couldn't be bothered. That would be enough to pay off my house today.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Someone tipped me a tiny amount of some crypto coin on there, too. I did set up a wallet but then kinda forgot about it. Maybe I can pay off my place. Lol I remember it being one of the dumb ones, but tbh I thought they were all dumb. Still do, even if I did accidentally get rich lol.

    Oh wow, just checked it. It was about 0.15 BCH and yeah, it has gone up considerably since I got it. It was worth maybe a buck or two, apparently it's worth almost $80 USD today! That's like a downpayment on a stick of RAM!

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    the definition is apparently 15 years. only two years left until the ps4 and xbone are retro consoles.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago

    At the current price 25 Bitcoin would be equal to $1,593,450. At its peak a few months ago it would have been worth over $3 million. In fact it didn't take long after 2010 for the Bitcoin prize to be worth more than the cash prize.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Everything more powerful in hindsight. No one could have predicted the current pumping and dumping, which is the only thing inflating that.

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