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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hmm

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.

I worked for 6 months for a shitcoin Foundation. I saw how centralized and broken the whole thing was. So I decided to quit and I found the best Bitcoin only job I could hope for. Never looked back.

I first learned about Bitcoin in 2014, but it specifically took the Terra Luna meltdown for me to head down the rabbit hole and go all in on it, and to realize that ETH and the like are nothing more than highly accessible Ponzi schemes enabled by the global banking system. I understood how attractive it was for many ignorant people to "invest" in these shiny objects without the need to possess something like the US SEC's accredited investor status, even though most such people are unable to quantify the risks of their gambling because of the general lack of financial education.

Now I'm one step away from lump-summing the last of my altcoin holding into money that does not need to be "ultrasound money" to be truly sound. If by doing this it does not lift the family boat, it will almost certainly lift the boats of my children.

There were a lot of things that brought me to Bitcoin only.

But the key moment and eye opener was experiencing what happened with the STEEM token and platform. (I held a big bag of STEEM Tokens at that time)

There should be articles on the web with more details about that.

This Blockchain was based on DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake) I could delegate my “STEEM Power” ( a sub token or whatever. To get them, I had to lock the same amount of STEEM.)

The more STEEM Power someone had, the bigger was someone’s voice and power on that platform.

Important to know here is that everyone who held STEEM could convert them to STEEM Power. And because most people back then held their STEEM on exchanges like Binance, Huobi and Poloniex, that was a big threat. (But at that time I was too dumb to realise this)

Soooooo, then Justin Sun from TRON wanted to buy the STEEMIT Inc., a social platform build on the STEEMIT Blockchain. (This social platform was the only use case of that Blockchain) With this he bought the ninja-mined STEEM Tokens from the foundation as well. Which was a huge bag and so with a huge power on the platform.

Then a war between Justin SUN and the STEEM Community started.

The Community collected their STEEM Power together to do a fork and to lock all STEEM Tokens from Justin Sun that he freshly got from the acquisition. (Again I was curious that just a few could change the rules when a lot of STEEM was delegated to them)

Justin did not like that at all and got together with Binance, Huobi and Poloniex. In the end together with this exchanges he had more STEEM and so more Power to change the rules again and unlocked his Tokens again.

The last thing that the community could do here was to hard fork out.

So the HIVE Blockchain was created with their social platform Hive.io. (In general it was a copy of STEEM)

What happened to me here? Now I had STEEM Tokens and the same amount HIVE Tokens. I don’t know why, but I think at that time the HIVe token had almost the same value as the STEEM token at that time.

So my FIAT Value doubled as I had STEEM and HIVE tokens. I then dumbed my STEEM bag and put it in BTC.

I have to confess that I still have my HIVE Tokens (0€ invest) because I get staking rewards here which I then convert to BTC.

But when that happened I had some sleepless nights as my STEEM were locked and I needed time to unlock them and get them out.

Even that I got lucky in the end and had no financial losts here I started to think about it and how stupid that shit show was. And the fact that someone with a lot of money can come and destroy the whole thing and cause me sleepless nights.

Then I totally realised the value of proof of work and Bitcoin. After that I sold every shitcoin (except of my HIVE bag, which is a shitcoin too I know :) ) but since then I only buy Bitcoin and spend my time reading, listening and watching only Bitcoin related stuff.

Sorry for the long post. May be that I got something mixed up as some time past already when that happened and maybe I could not show in my writing how important that experience for me was, but this was a huuuuge thing towards Bitcoin for me :D

Have a nice day you wonderful plebs. <3

Realizing I was going to stay poor for the rest of my life, and I'm 23. All I know is hard work and saving but that isn't enough. Bitcoin has taught me lessons I would have never learned. I'm fiat broke but have bitcoin. I'm truly happy for once in my life. I've never owned anything of significance so owning bitcoin is insane... thanks for reading!! I'm stacking everyday

2022 Victim of HODLNAUGHT and Celsius, fully understood that no one can be trusted - now run a full node and LND lightning - connect to me https://amboss.space/node/038cdee6ebeb5bbb736f4a64b7687fdb70ea5bd8f5244be081b314e5e4f6e93852

First Terra Luna made me realize all the lies around the "ecosystem", or at least highly suspicious. I still didn't go Bitcoin only. Then I came back later to a group on Telegram, where someone suggested to buy Terra Luna, the new version. It really pissed me off, I argued, and then the person responsible for the group changed the conversation to try to make people forget what I was saying. It pissed me off too because my criticism was justified. I almost went Bitcoin only. Then I also saw people from Ethereum or other blockchains always criticizing Bitcoin but actually heavily reusing the code for some, or heavily relying on the innovation Bitcoin brought for the others. Generally the marketing goes something like we don't use a Merkle tree, we use a super duper version of Merkle trees, which makes Bitcoin obsolete. It pisses me off because psychologically it looks like a pathology where someone wants to kill the father, and morally it doesn't even acknowledged what Bitcoin brought.

So now I buy Bitcoin only... almost, I still think gold is a good tool for worst case scenarios. However the peace of mind with Bitcoin for robberies or travel is really great, and I don't need a paper to attest of the purity of the utxos I have, it is 24k by default.

Understanding PoW vs PoS

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.

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.

The Ethereum merge in September 2022

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

A few things contributed to me becoming BTC only:

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)

For me it was actually the Bankless Podcast. I was a fan of the "crypto"-space in general. I felt that bitcoin was archaic and energy wasteful compared to the smart contract capability and proof of stake cryptos. I was a big fan of ethereum with all the hype around the Merge, but really thought that Cardano was the better technology.

I bought a Ledger and subscribed to the Bankless Podcast and newsletter. They wrote what seemed like daily (or multiple per day) emails that instructed you on what ethereum layer-2 was potentially going to have an airdrop and where to move your Eth to best have the possibility of getting the airdropped tokens.

Every night I'd read through those emails and move Eth around to various L2's. Fortunately I was doing all this during the bear market so hadn't gotten rekt'd on the way down.

It always bugged me a bit that the Bankless guys were so pro-Eth and anti almost everything else. They only really talked about bitcoin in the context of what ethereum did better or to make guesses about when the "flippening" would happen. Solana was the only other L1 that they promoted for some reason. Cardano was an afterthought.

I can't remember how I decided to listen to one, but I found a bitcoin podcast, which happened to be one of the early episodes of Cafe Bitcoin. That got me down the bitcoin rabbit hole. After a few episodes of that, several of Livera, and a host of others, I became bitcoin only.

Trying to participate in all the L2 "give aways" on Bankless was also extremely stressful. I didn't realize how-so until I stopped doing it. Previously, if I skipped a day of following their instructions, I'd get anxiety about how I should be doing x, y, or z to improve my chances of getting an airdropped token...once the pressure to do that was off, life improved a ton!

I sold all my shitcoins and went bitcoin only. I now cringe anytime I hear someone talk about "crypto" or "blockchain" or the horrible energy use of bitcoin FUD.

The more I learn about the creation and early days of Ethereum, I realize how scammy the entire shitcoin sphere is.

Back in 2017 I did get a little bit of BCH in the fork too. I had absolutely no idea any of the politics about the fork and only knew that I had this additional token that I miraculously got for free and someone actually wanted to buy! I sold that and bought more BTC (which I stupidly sold during the run up in the next bull market).

The final straw, which was happening around the time I was unsubscribing from Bankless and blocking all the emails I'd still get from them, was Celsius going bankrupt. I had some stablecoins on their for what they assured me was a very safe yield. None of that anymore, BTC only.

The Ledger is in the drawer. Coldcard, Passport, Jade, and Seedsigner are my mainstays now. I am also buying, holding, and using bitcoin. I am not holding bitcoin for a future conversion to USD but for future spending as bitcoin.

Tried trading various things a bit on and off. And after losing a like 3% of my stack, I found that I just like didnt have the stomach for it. Part of me wanted to keep going but part of me didnt care. I already had a good amount of resources. Then I thought I settled down when I was holding mostly bitcoin and a bit of litecoin for a bit and then we went through one of those cataclysmic moments where everything goes down. And I had a formative realization moment like "why the fuck did I not just hold bitcoin. Why am I holding this bs made up coin all this shit could disappear tomorrow"

Cause see thats the thing about the alt coiners logic. They always tell you "it will go up more cause right now its so unknown" but no one thinks about the other side of that, that its so unknown that you can easily see how it can just fade out and descend back in to nothingness. Then I sold my litecoin and decided to only hold bitcoin. This was like 6 years ago I think.

Bitcoin had a good chance of staying. But any one of the zillion alt coins isnt guaranteed. But also what if someone makes yourcoin 2.0? Theres just too many ways for it to go wrong. Selling my litecoin honestly was a big moment for me that im really proud of, because looking back it was the right decision. I dont even know if litecoin went up by more or less but I still think its really just like dust in the wind.

See my problem is this. I have used bitcoin before. And I know it actually GETS used daily 24/7 365. Ive never used litecoin (other than to self custody it or test my own ability to send it). And sure I could, but it seems like everyone who uses litecoin does it more performatively. As in the bulk of bitcoin transactions were being done by users who were choosing to use bitcoin because it actually was making practical sense. The litecoin users seemed to predominantly just be hobbyists and enthusiasts/eccentrics. The blanket term I use to describe this group is "fans". And I noticed this pattern pervade almost every alt coin, where the majority of participants seemed to be essentially spectators and fans rather than "real users". And many of the alt coiners shared this commonality of not self custodying their own coins, and having never actually sent a transaction of their chosen alt coin. Of course, despite this they had no shame in going on and on about random technical attributes of their coin of choice, even though evidently having no understanding of how it worked and lacked the ability to verify any such notions as they had never even used the token.

I mined BTC around the first halving, have some left, that I'll HODL, I never bothered to look into any other coins, as it was a free-time project and not a lifestyle. This probably means that I have some bcash etc. if those forks happened when I had my BTC on wallets that I still have the keys for. I have thought about if I should investigate that and sell it for BTC, but given the low value of those forkcoins, it hasn't been of any priority, I more or less consider it lost. I don't know if there are KYC-free ways to exchange them now, but when the EU's cryptocurrency regulation goes into effect, there won't be. Possibly peer-to-peer, but that would require finding someone who wants them, and, as I already said, not much value, so I probably won't bother.

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

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

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

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.