Bought a small amount of bitcoin in late 2016 (around .1 BTC) after hearing preston talk about it on the investors podcast. Had heard of it prior but thought it was a scam but respected Preston so thought I was missing something. Didn't pay much attention to it until the run up of 2017, as I was busy merging my business with another business at that time. Thought the 2017 bull run was totally insane but bought a bit more around the 15k mark and bought a bunch of shitcoins too.

As someone who stacked gold and silver coins for years, I really connected with the idea of digital gold but also got sucked into all the stupid shitcoin narratives as well.

Bear market hit, which made a lot of sense to me. It reminded me of the biotech bubble in 2015. Little did I know these similar patterns I was seeing was a sign of easy money and a completely broken monetary system but alas I knew enough to know that the burst was going to be epic. So I started DCAing on the way down, eth a bit too but I would say I was 90% bitcoin and 10% eth at that time. I sold all the other shitcoins I owned for bitcoin.

A couple other things occurred in tradFi along the way that helped me connect the dots. There was the short vix trade blow up in feb 2018 and the repo spike in sept 2019 that gave me a couple more pieces to the "holy shit, shit is really broken" puzzle.

Then March 2020 hits and everything in the world changes, they lock down the world and print ungodly amounts of money. My businesses revenue dropped by almost 90% while all the assets I owned were going completely parabolic. My balance sheet was stronger than ever while my income statement was a mess as I had almost no money coming in.

This is really where I started to dig in, study more and try to understand what the hell is going on. It was sometime in 2020 as well that eth said they were going to start the process to move to proof of stake. At that point I sold my remaining eth for bitcoin and have been a daily dca bitcoin only maxi ever since.

Sold my business in early 2022, sold my condo in the city and moved to a small ski resort town and semi retired. Now I work the odd contract job and make some commission sales from my former business, hang out with my kids, stack sats, shitpost on twitter and hang out on SN.

(By the way, I think there is a valuable content opportunity in curating a bunch of cool bitcoin stories)

None of my friends owned Bitcoin and never met a person who told me anything about Bitcoin!

I used to read a lot of books (physical ones) but started to lose focus so I stopped then my brother told me about Listening to books on Audible instead and I thought its cool so I downloaded the app and I got 1 free credit ... so while I was scrolling through hundreds of books I came across one book that had a catchy title ... I checked the author and his background was in Economics so I was like "let me try to understand this thing" .... so I read the Bitcoin Standard ... then re-read it 3 more times....many years later I realised Saif and I are living in the same country and had the privilege to meet him in person a month ago

my entry was Bitcoin and my previous background (interested in fraud, con artists and human motivation) made it very clear from the beginning that Bitcoin is different from everything else but my curiosity lead me into wanting to understand what really is happening in shitcoin land (as an insider) and managed to see what is happening which is documented here:

I've heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from piracy sites, thought the government was gonna shut it down, then ignored it. I returned in 2017 due to mentions from a nocoiner buddy and the bull run hype, scalped some sats for dollars, then dumped it again.

My financial awakening was during the COVID lockdowns. The stimulus checks had me thinking about how to get involved in trading stocks. All the while, I've lamented the blatant overreaches of the government and thought everybody was doomed to get crushed beneath the despotic system we live in with no way out. I was a COVID doomer.

In January 2021, I found out about Melvin Capital's short squeeze. Though I wasn't involved, I cheered for the GameStoppers. Then, brokerages prohibited people from buying GME. After a few arguments with people who used the same exact line of thinking used to justify COVID mandates, I threw up my hands and said "Fuck this, I'm going full cryptard!"

I learned a little bit about Bitcoin and said, "That's cool and all, but I want more ways to make money," then I began to trade a bunch of shitcoins in search of dollar gains. As I went on, I found it odd that there were 10,000 cryptocurrencies (now 20,000!!) Ethereum's gas fees seemed to only get higher from gas wars during shitcoin minting, reaching the point of unusability. People kept telling me that Bitcoin is obsolete because the blocks were too small and it isn't capable of smart contracts. Oh, and I lost a hefty shitcoin airdrop in a yield farm from impermanent loss (basically the devs rugged). I found out that shitcoiners only profit from information asymmetry, whether they personally know the project team or hopped in the right Telegram chat in the right time, and that sounded like too much work. I was weary of the cynicism, usury and greed surrounding shitcoins, but I thought it was cool that there was a way to profit outside of fiat.

A few months of this and then I finally found some signal. Some anon posted a link to Michael Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money. Learning the history of money cast a different light on all of the doodoo tokens I was trading--there wasn't any real reason for them to exist other than to make exit liquidity out of others. He touched upon how politics and culture run downstream from economics, which essentially is the exchange of information. That planted the seed of the idea that bad money can lead to the multitudinous fuckeries I've witnessed my entire life (Iraq War, Great Financial Crisis, the IMF, World Bank, and BCEAO plundering countries overseas, bread-and-circus media dialect catalyzing the culture war). More importantly, his series taught me how fiat works. Fiat is a Ponzi scheme, an unsustainable linear economy, as I partially realized during 2020. Too bad Maloney is an HBAR bull, yuck! (The Bitcoin Standard is a higher signal version to Maloney's series, anyway.) Shortly after, I discovered Trader University (now Bitcoin University), where Matt Kratter explained the fundamentals of Bitcoin and why it is important to people. His militant, unrelenting fudbusting got my gears turning and had me questioning what I had known at the time about Bitcoin and "crypto." Most of all, the final deathblow to my shitcoinery was Samson Mow's tweet about value transacted per second, displaying how the oBsOLeTe Bitcoin blows every fuck out of the newer tokens: https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113 The shitcoins were either trying to catch up to bitcoin or scam people. As soon as I saw that tweet, I traded every alt for bitcoin and never looked back. After that, I took an interest in macro, learned what I needed to know, then decided to focus on what people are building on Bitcoin and how people are using it. Today, I'm at Stacker News.

What I've learned is that these parallel systems being created testify to the tenacity of the human spirit and that Bitcoin isn't really about getting rich, it's a reclamation of dignity. My doomerism turned into hope as I saw that a life free of tyranny is possible. Turns out that computers can help free us all, so long as we don't fall in the traps of censorship-prone middleware we've been inundated with. There will be no SkyNet. I give a big and hearty thanks to everyone who is hijacking the infrastructure to create a better life

That is almost exactly what I experienced as well, only difference is that I started by mining ETH. Then after I mining quite a bit, I started trading, which got me into DeFi, Staking, IT, Networking, running nodes, etc. Then around the time of the ETH merge, I became quite aware of the hardness of Bitcoin.

Somehow, can't remember how, I ran into the article (not the book) The Bullish Case For Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati. That got me very interested, and I then started looking for the best book I could find. Based on some research, I figure that book was The Bitcoin Standard. I read The Bitcoin Standard. That was a revelation, I loved it. Then I went further down the rabbit hole with podcasts and bitcoin twitter. Bitcoiners are my people.

touchpoint 1. 2013 i was a college nerd, was asked by roommates to help with silk road. [told them they were crazy and how it was probably a scam]

touchpoint 2 2017 seeing it in the news and hearing about a blocksize war. [bought some corn and some shitcoins. thinking i was smart to diversify. hindsight is 2020]

Learned about the history of money, learned about TCP/IP and the battles that went on surrounding it.

realized there was only one thing worth holding, and i cant stop stakin.

In a nutshell, in 2012 i bought bitcoin, I didn’t understand Bitcoin, I bought Litecoin, lost some of both 😄 left the space, got back in, bought shitcoins, bought bitcoin again, finally understood that bitcoin is superior, now I’m reading as much as I can. A very odd journey but also an incredible learning process. 🙏

For me, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork was formative. It showed that there are threats to Bitcoin around every corner, even within the Bitcoin community itself. Since then I find the maximalist viewpoint to be a good default viewpoint when looking at competing projects and ideas.

TLDR;

Ignore Bitcoin for years. Buy Bitcoin. Buy shitcoins. Fuck around and find out. Read more into Bitcoin. Lightbulb. DCA

You know how they say you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink?

Well when exactly I found or heard about Bitcoin was less important than the deep curiosity that I've always had. When I found it, I went down the rabbit hole with eyes wide. It only took a few days to see that it was interesting but only after months and years has it proven to be resilient against many of the proposed threats I had read about. The key was to withhold judgement and let my curiosity guide me to understand and verify as much as I could. Bitcoin holds up well to this approach.

Class of 2021. Money printing didn’t make sense. Love the fixed supply, true decentralization, and humanitarian impacts!

I read the news about the first Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver, there was no way to buy BTC back in the day so I sent some FIAT to a relative living in Vancouver. My journey started from there.

So 2009-2021 you were living under a rock?