I never went "sideways". From the beginning (2012) I was bitcoin only. Even that I mined for few years and some pools were offering merged mining of some shitcoins with BTC, I dumped them directly in the pool, not even withdraw to an external wallet and then swap them for BTC.

The bcash story was fun indeed, a lot of distraction. I swap my freshly BCH into BTC after 2 weeks they fork the chain. I wanted to do it in the first day, but weren't available the tools to do that swap. Also you had to do it wisely, not to reveal your BTC keys etc, was quite dangerous. And after that you have to effectively move your old stash of BTC to a new wallet to be sure nobody could trace them based on the BCH swap.

Between 2012 and 2018 I wasn't so toxic maxi, but after that episode with bcashers I went full against anything that is not Bitcoin. Being a Bitcoin maxi is how you keep your integrity.

The fact that there are bitcoin specific wallets in which you can store your keys and transact in all sorts of interesting ways. I'm not in this for the investment, but a lot of alts always act like that's the point of this thing

Something about Saylor when he was talking with Lex Fridman, explaining bitcoin as digital energy and all that, made me look closer at the math of it all.

From there to full-on astronaut with a gun meme when I realized why there's so many shitcoins, "Wait, they're all scams? ... Always have been"

Now just DCA, spread the word, and upgrade the world, and prepare for the coming super intelligent AI that'll probably be here by Christmas at this rate.

I haven't been around so long. What did it for me was watching Chamath and his buddies laugh about dumping their Solana: https://cryptonews.com/news/crypto-traders-shocked-that-solana-whales-can-dump-their-cheaply-bought-sol-too.htm

I think understanding the proof of work concept and embracing bitcoin-only are one and the same thing. It's the trickiest part to understand and also the one that binds the whole thing together to make it real money. I was re watching this vid the other day as I wanted to share with some friends, and there is this very telling phrase at min 5:22 "If you don't have human effort on both sides of the equation, you don't have a real equation, it's a social equation" and they show some images with gold miners. Bitcoin is money for the same reason that gold could be used as money for several thousand years. That's the basic difference with fiat and the proof of stake, it's just a social convention and as such can be changed at will and not anchored to reality, physical reality. I also remember one day a tweet, maybe by @dergigi where it said "bitcoin is not backed by anything, bitcoin is the thing" and it was an aha moment where I understood that money cannot just be an abstraction or a convention between participants, it has to be something that cannot be changed by opinions or majorities.

Marty’s Bents podcast.

I remember I had huge bags of all the crap but I remember Matt Odell going on a rant about exchange tokens like BNB and KCS (KuCoin’s coin) and how at any time they can push a button and turn your funds off. After My walk I went home and dumped all my shitcoins, stablecoins, closed my accounts and only focused on Bitcoin.

Being asked to write about a new altcoin at work. When I submitted for editing one of my teammates said “oh I thought that project had already rugged!”

And then when I couldn’t sell a shitcoin due to liquidity issues.

I listened to many podcasts and several were made by Bitcoin-only folks. I learned more and more about the differences between Bitcoin and everything else. The decision to be Bitcoin-only was easy once I learned enough.

As someone that is distrustful of the state, my interest in Bitcoin grew the more I learned about it. Bitcoin is a revolution that will change the world and challenge the current power systems. Crypto in general involves other stuff: centralization, trust, core teams, pre-mines, greed, scams, etc. I'm simply not interested in that.

Hmm

I came to bitcoin just before the first altcoins were created in 2011, stupidly thinking when they arrived that altcoins would be the death of bitcoin because they'd compete and be better since they'd learn from bitcoin's open-sourced mistakes. - Thankfully it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Proof of Work competitors simply couldn't steal bitcoin's miners away from it and I was very relieved and stacked more.

Proof of Stake never scared me in any way; it was always just a (poor) re-creation of fiat, never well decentralized, so I stayed away from all of those coins too. I was a maxi by default, not seeing any competition for years and years.

In early 2017, before the block size war, there was an explosion of many interesting shitcoins attached to a project I wanted to see come to life, like decentralized versions of youtube, cloud storage, browsing, search, metaverse, and IoT. They made me drool over their promised projects, but their crapcoins were so obviously shoehorned in for the developer's personal gain that I was suspicious. So that year I read up on how money actually works and came to understand what makes bitcoin truly special.

I did get a chance to play with a few alts that year, but never stopped being a maximalist for even a second; they were like toys that were easily discarded, never a decent store of value.

Then came the block size war; anything I didn't already know about bitcoin's superior monetary features was learned in spades watching the daily battles and upgrading my node. By the time we were activating UASF I was toxic enough to set the atmosphere on fire. Definitely lost a good chunk of crypto buddies back then.

I've dialed back the toxicity since then, but the resolve remains. You're not exactly dead to me if you choose to hold altcoins, but I'll feel sorry for you and certainly won't trust your judgement on anything financial in nature.

Jack Mallers, Ryan Gentry, and Dhruv Bansal in 2021 helped me understand all the things that could be built on Bitcoin.

Prior to that, the “digital gold” meme was so pervasive that it limited my imagination to only things that gold could accomplish.

Once I began seeing the Lightning builders who were working on all the new things Bitcoin could do, it became my full focus.

The fact that Lightning was so overlooked by crypto folks in 2021, and still is to some degree, pushed me to pursue Lightning work even further.

For me as I came late to the "crypto" game at the beginning of 2019, I think I went full Bitcoin one year and a half later, only after I realized that the ethos of Eth (the only other coin I ever owned), was far from what I came in originally. No cypherpunk, no libertarinism, no freedom here. Just pump, dump and silly used cases who could maybe and only improve the world at the margin...or not at all.

If the messenger is rotten, you can be sure that his message is too. You can see this in every aspect of your life. Climate change hysteria, covid panic, wokism...every time the agenda is held by socialists/marxists/anticapitalists ideologists. The ethos of the spokenperson and communty is largely enough to raise a big red flag without even studying the subject in depth...

I was doing research into everything I could and discovered that there really isn’t any “culture” anywhere else. Bitcoiners have a vision and work together to achieve it. There are many other coins but if you’re into whatever coin, you’re likely not a maximalist and not involved beyond speculating on price. Nobody is a Cardano maximalist. There are no bcash podcasts. Nobody puts their life savings into doge. All of these guys are crypto generalists.

Bitcoiners are all in and putting in the work to see it happen.

I started studying 'Programming Bitcoin' with a bunch of friends, that made me appreciate and understand Bitcoin 🙏🏽

The Ethereum merge in September 2022

I simply got tired of the flavor of the week, the crypto silliness, the nonsensical "use cases", the hype, and the disregard for security, sovereignty, privacy, and commerce. Bitcoin is the only the serious project, the only one left standing when the dust clears. The signal amongst the noise.

I got into the space early 2019, went "bitcoin only" through the exchange casino's. Messed with a few shitcoins early but saw the value prop of bitcoin being alot higher and more certain. Went from dabbling in crypto to toxic maxi in a year.....

long-term all of these altcoins are going to zero against Bitcoin... but sometimes people need to see it with their own eyes (or pockets) to better understand:

https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1162793957379706886 (A.D. 2019)

I learned about the utility of bitcoin in multiple economic sectors and noticed that the utility of alts are to...dump them for fiat or do shadow banking with liquidity pools. Their utility would pretty much never leave the exchanges and DEXes they were listed on. Also, like I mentioned a few days ago, it was Samson Mow's tweet about VTPS: https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113

https://stacker.news/items/182244

My loser 2017-2018 crypto trading career lol

bought around 33M sat for $1300 in 2017... traded it for all sorts of dumb shit... NEO, Digibyte, some straight up scam called creditbit I think? some other awful ICO scam crap.

Bitcoin crushed every shitcoin by like 5X'ing from where I bought, my shitcoins bled nearly all value in USD and BTC. Worthless scams. I saw my $1300 of btc would have sold for idk like 7-8K at the top, and the heavy bag of garbage I accumulated was worth like $350.

Dejected, I carried on with my life. logged out until bitcoin tapped like 30K years later. Open up the exchange wallet, and there's my coins, market value $138. Had I just held that initial 33M sat, it would have been worth 100x that.

Bitcoin only from there on. VERY briefly ETH for a quick minute as I was trying to trade it to accumulate more bitcoin but got super wrecked on some low leverage long trades (3x...) I made back in the May 12 - 19 2021 crash. lmao, more than two years ago now and I still remember that week so vividly. ughhhhh. my ass too stubborn to set a stop loss and I lose thousands of dollars. ouch, not the end of the world tho

I stopped trading haha

For me it was listening to the Bloomberg podcast

I just started with Bitcoin ... never knew a thing on Altcoins ... but went as an insider into one of the Alt projects just to understand and see for myself how the manipulation is being executed

True decentralization and no controller

A few things contributed to me becoming BTC only:

• Learning the difference between the Bitcoin fair launch and the Altcoin Premines
• Learning the difference between Distributed Proof of Work Mining & Proof of Stake
• Reading about the Blocksize Wars and contrasting with the DAO Hack.
• Reading "Only the Strong Survive" by Allen Farrington & Big Al, which helped me work out that everything on the Altcoin chains is vapourware. Among other things. Peace.

NgU tech working as intended.

Losing money to shipcoins and custodians.

Realizing the value prop for the sector is decentralized Proof of Work then learning that sidechains and scaling protocols are possible with bitcoin... I love Lightning Rootstock and welcome drivechains and rollups in the future. The only other chain I am remotely interested in is Filecoin because IPFS is amazing. Filecoin should migrate to rootstock or merge mine BTC PoW rather than rely on their bandaid taproot txn anchor solution (remorachain fix)

Antonopoulos gets the most credit for making me focus on Bitcoin. And the guests on What Bitcoin Did podcast did a lot.

Still it took until very recently for me to become Bitcoin-only. Finally was able to dump staked ETH this spring.

What do you mean finally? Some of us figured it out quickly.

A few scams that I lost money on during 2017, confirmed in the years following that they're all scams. Touch the stove kind of thing.

Thankful for it, and the people that were normalizing being bitcoin only online. I wasn't getting any of that normalization in person, I went to all the meetups I could find in Dallas. Now there's endless bitcoin only meetups, never been easier to stick to it.

Touched the stove. Always got burnt. Hell even trading Bitcoin burnt me. Hodling is the best.

i was from the start. there were practically no altcoins when i first got started. i dont know why i havent jumped ship yet.

I'm not bitcoin-only But I like Bitcoin's unchanging monetary policy. and no owner

Satoshis - STACK SATS

I still haven't turned Bitcoin-only yet. Technically 3% of my holdings are shitcoins. I stacked LOTS of discounted sats back in 2021/2022 by GPU mining and I still have some shitcoins which I keep as lottery tickets for more sats in the future if they spike. Recently this happened as I used to be 93% Bitcoin. I don't feel the need to get rid of my shitcoins yet, if they go to zero I don't care, if they get me more sats in the future then I'm happy.

I do have one shitcoin which I didn't get from GPU mining, I bought some when I cared about Bitcoin + this shitcoin back in late 2018. I never bothered to sell it and still don't see a benefit to selling it even though it has only lost against Bitcoin in the past 5 years.

I'm pretty close to being Bitcoin-only, I only care about Bitcoin, I spend my time thinking about and discussing Bitcoin, I'm trying to get a job at a Bitcoin-only company, I'm working on open source Bitcoin projects... but I just don't feel any need to sell my remaining 3% of shitcoins.

Toxic maxis on clubhouse

• Tornado Cash shutdown and devs put in jail.
• FTX fiasco.
• LUNA/TerraUST.

They were just the first 1%, the next 99% that finally got me to Bitcoin-only was... studying.

The moment you study Bitcoin, you change as person, and nothing else (specially crypto/shitcoins) makes sense.