January of 2018. I simply looked at it as an investment opportunity. I saw myself as being clever since the price had dropped from 19k to 15k. Then I gradually learned about bitcoin during the two years it took me to break even.

2012 - I found the tech incredible interesting but I forgot to hodl

And what you did from 2009 until 2021? You lived on another planet? Or you did shitcoining? It's a serious question: why did you ignored bitcoin all these 14years?

I was stacking gold and silver prior to finding Bitcoin.

In late 2016 I bought a small amount because I had heard Preston mention Bitcoin a couple times on his value investing podcast and had heard people compare it to digital gold. Price was around $900 or so at the time but I only bought $100 worth because I thought it was likely going to zero. Didn't buy again until the crazy run up in late 2017 and bought a bunch of shitcoins as well looking for the "next bitcoin". I knew 2017 was a bubble so I had a plan to buy a full coin when price dropped back to 1500 or 2k (wherever the crazy parabolic move started). I DCAd a bit on the way down but never got my full coin. Spent the next couple years casually observing the market and hodling, occasionally buying small amounts here and there.

In Feb 2018 there was the inverse vix trade blowup that caught my attention and I realized that wall street had been artificially suppressing volatility for years. I had gotten rekt in a vol trade some years before, which was the main reason I decided to never be a trader again and only invest for the long term. That was my first clue.

In Aug/Sept 2019 the repo market seized up and rates spiked to 8% or something overnight. I didn't really understand the dynamics of what had occurred at the time but I understood the fed rushed in to provide liquidity to the market and that we were likely headed for some version of Japanification and QE infinity. This was my next clue. I sold my shitcoins for bitcoin (except eth, I was getting there but was still ignorant enough to believe all the stupid narratives). I stopped stacking gold (I knew they were suppressing price with paper gold) but I still hold. I bought a second property (townhome in a resort town) and started to DCA into Bitcoin more while studying more.

March 2020 hits and shit hits the fan. I am looking at buying a third property (also in small resort town) and DCAing into bitcoin but the communist republic of Canada locks everything down and my small business revenue drops 90% instantly. Batten down the hatches. I don't buy the property (too bad, it's worth 50% more now) and don't buy as much bitcoin as I would like. Our business has 3 months worth of runway and personally I have 6. We cut costs in the business to almost nothing, drain savings to nothing and take on every feasible project we can find that we can complete ourselves without needing to pay employees. It sucks, really sucks. I worked my ass off every day of the pandemic lockdowns for about 1/2 the income I was taking home before. But somehow we make it work. I am stacking as much as I can at this time but don't have a ton of free cashflow so mostly stacking by selling some stocks that had gone up in price and converting that to bitcoin. Also sold my eth when they announced the move to proof of stake (I was smart enough to know by know that PoS was at best a replica of existing system, at worst a scam). The pandemic, fiscal, governmental, and social response to it has turned me into a daily DCA, twitter shitposting, full on Bitcoin maxi.

January 2022. Business has survived but revenue is still down 30% from pre pandemic. I am exhausted, frustrated, and increasingly concerned about raising my kids in the city. We execute a plan that has been in the works for around 6 months, sell the business to my business partner, sell the property in the city and move to our property in the small resort town. I semi-retire (work part time contract jobs, just enough to pay our now small monthly expenses), play with my kids and dog, stack sats, shitpost on twitter and enjoy life.

That's my short story!