Have shared this story before. Won't let me copy the link for some reason so here is the copy/paste:

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)

Saylor got me, I didn’t realise how crazy absolute scarcity was, and how it’s never really existed before, also how it allows you to truely own it unlike everything else which is a IOU until we don’t like you

When all my offhand attack ideas had already been thought about and debunked.

It clicked somewhere around the 7th or 8th Andreas Antonopoulos video during a binge watching session back in 2018.

Had many moments, good and bad, it's a journey...

I think the moment I became a maxi was when I started playing with lightning in early 2019 until then I had Bcash and BSV and after trying ⚡I was convinced the Bcash fud was false. I feel bit sorry for the people who traded their Bitcoin for my BCH&BSV.

I had a friend that was crowed funding fund for the medical treatment of her mom, he lives in an authoritarian country and my bank system and his are very disconnected ( I would have lost about 7% of what I was sending thanks to fees).

I asked him if I could pay him in Bitcoin, he said yes. 40 mins later he had the money.

It would have taken at least 1 day for the money to clear on the traditional system. so yeah that was my "this is serious" moment.

as a note about 2 months later, one of the government owned banks, one of the few that allowed for using dollars got... "hacked" and a bunch of people got basically robbed of their funds.

Read the Bitcoin paper.

It was a process for me more than a moment. I first heard about bitcoin back in 2015 from my friend. He said that bitcoin is the future of money and told me to look into it. I did a quick search on google, saw that it costs a whopping $200+ to get 1 bitcoin, and quickly dismissed it. Back then, I thought that money had to be issued and controlled by the government, and this "digital money" would never work, because it's not regulated, and would eventually go to zero. I would occasionally check on the bitcoin price over the years, saw that it not only not gone to zero, but kept going higher and higher; then I would think that it was a scam and would still eventually go to zero.

I guess the phrase "you get bitcoin at the price you deserve" is really true. I ended up finally giving up on the notion that bitcoin will die, and decided to buy some in May 2020 when it was at $8k-$9k. I initially bought some bitcoin on Kraken and thought of it as an investment that I could flip back into fiat gains, still without understanding what bitcoin really is. Of course I left all my bitcoin on Kraken and would trade them occasionally, thinking I'm smart and could make gains doing so. And of course, I dabbled into shitcoins, buying this coin and that coin, trying to trade them to make a fiat profit. I'm glad I only lost a relative small portion of my money by foolishly trading in and out of bitcoin and also trading shitcoins. I had an account in BlockFi earning "yield", without understanding that I was the yield. I even bought myself 6 video cards, and the necessary hardware to build an Eth mining rig. The building process was very fun though, as I did it with my kids; but the now me despises the old me for helping to contribute to the biggest shitcoin's hashrate.

But in mid 2021, I got covid and had to be locked in my home for 10 days. During those 10 days, I read Mastering Bitcoin, which helped me gain a basic understanding of how bitcoin works. I also read The Bitcoin Standard, and it taught me what money is and why bitcoin is a good money, while fiat is trash. I learned that money does not have to be issued by government and most money throughout history were actually adopted from the ground up. I learned about Austrian economics and started to study it. I started to watch hours and hours of Saylor youtube videos, listening to bitcoin podcasts, and reading more bitcoin books. Most importantly, I learned that bitcoin is the best money ever created / discovered by mankind.

I sold all shitcoins in my Kraken account into bitcoin, got myself a Ledger, and withdrew all my bitcoin into cold storage. I withdrew all my coins on BlockFi in late 2021, less than 1 year before they went tits up (lucked out on the timing). I also sold all my other investments, took all my savings, and put them all into bitcoin. By then, I started listening to and reading about Matt Odell stuff: Rabbit Hole Recap, Citadel Dispatch, odell.xyz, werunbtc.com. I learned and realized the importance of privacy and the role privacy plays when trying to achieve sovereignty. So I started coinjoining my stack, started to use only non-KYC methods to obtain bitcoin, replaced my Ledger with a Cold Card, switched to use Sparrow as my main wallet, started to run a full node, and started to experiment with running a lightning node.

I began attending my local BitDevs meetup in the beginning of this year and have been going to every one. It's great to talk to other bitcoiners in person, and at the same time, stay updated and discuss about new projects in the space.

I would say the whole process from starting to buy bitcoin to actually understanding what it is took about 1.5-2 years. I'm still learning more about bitcoin everyday and there remains many books / articles / guides to read, many podcasts to listen to. I don't think this learning journey ever ends, because the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know, and the more I'm humbled by the amount of knowledge touched by bitcoin.

My journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole continues...

Governments gonna print a quadrillion dollars.

When I read the bitcoin standard, specifically the part about hard currency always defeating soft currency.