Bitcoin allowed me to reflect on my personal history through a new lens.

I had a fortunate childhood upbringing. I travelled a little and thought the world was a place that rewarded hard work and a strong work ethic; Western free market capitalism was a beacon to the world. I watched society and the government grind down my father and our family; robbing him of his savings, his dignity and finally his life. His hope for a better tomorrow, patience and low time preference was his undoing.

I felt called to a life of service and entered the military, seeing the world from a different perspective to that of growing up. I worked hard, saved and had a measure of security. But I have seen the dark side of human nature and it is a wake up call… but what to do?

In the last 10 years my life has collapsed and I am on the same course as my father. My body is broken and still I put it on ragged edge to earn minimum wage every day… just like him. But at least now there is BTC.

Bitcoin is the absolute best hope humanity has at restoring the law of the farm; patience and saving for a brighter future. The politicians, short term business decisions, corrupt foreign aid policies and exploitative rent seeking have destroyed the world and trapped 95% of its inhabitants.

My insight from childhood has been watching a broken system happen in real time and then see it come for me.

i blame my punk music upbringing on why i gravitated towards bitcoin.

Not fitting in makes you question what you're not fitting into.

My dad, though if he was still around he would probably be skeptical of bitcoin. He was naturally skeptical of everything. He always went against the grain. In a family/neighborhood of Roosevelt worshipping Italian immigrants, he was a Republican. He almost got disowned by his in laws for supporting Nixon over Kennedy. He was naturally distrustful of the government, regardless of party. When the U.S. removed silver from coins, he hoarded the old stuff.

I just really really like the idea of things being permanent.

Your body ages and decays eventually. Less and less physical items are made to last. And even those that are made to last, rarely have "forever" in mind. Software degrades - most of what you had on your 2005 computer is worthless now. Media like photos videos, digitized writing might keep up if someone cares.

Having Bitcoin might maybe be forever. At least hopefully the 24 words + BIP might outlast me.

I gravitate towards Bitcoin for 2 reasons: Video games and Being good with money.

See, being good with money means to be frugal, patient, to wait for what you really want instead of throwing it away as soon as you have it. The debt obsessed are irresponsible who can never make it anywhere in life.

So as a saver, when you see the debt obsessed are actually rewarded with bailouts and the savers are actually punished with purchasing power devaluation, when the price of things you're saving up for run away from you and only the debt obsessed have the chance to get those things, you get a little grumpy.

Yeah this video I found decades after that feeling set in, describes it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kukKpqd_B2c

I was looking for a tool to jujitsu against that devaluation mechanism and I thought that tool was gold and silver. Surely, if the debt obsessed rely on bailouts, and both debt and bailouts make my assets more valuable then gold and silver are the way to go. Turns out to not be the case lmao. It turns out that counter-party risk is a plague and those assets are stuck in a coffin made of it.

So then there's video games. I actually think the idea of a money you can transfer between video games would be cool. Imagine, you take your runescape gold with you into your next adventure. Makes starting from 0 in a new MMO less daunting I think right? The actual problem with this, is runescape gold is actually worthless lmao. So yeah, thinking of Bitcoin as video game money, helped my less developed self back then to get pretty excited about it.

Questioning everything and thinking I have purpose/greatness in me using bitcoin as a tool has enforced that gave me the answers to those thoughts with it came selflessness, humbleness, gratitude and thankfulness if I had to do it all over again to get where I am in life I'd do it step by step

My parents taught me to think for myself and question everything, even things we take for granted. Also, just as importantly, they never impeded my natural curiosity to learn about how the world works.

At a very young age I was already expressing interest in learning about financial markets and investments, having seen how hard my parents worked to give me and my brother a better life than the ones they had growing up in other countries. They encouraged me to explore that, opening up custodial accounts for me and taking me to the library every weekend to check out new financial books and autobiographies.

I'm beyond grateful for this in hindsight. While my parents didn't have the same interests as I did/do, they fully supported and affirmed mine without judgment or criticism.

That helped me build confidence in my ability to pull and synthesize information and form my own opinions on things. Many years later, I had my own opinions on the state of the economy, politics, and the world, and that's how I went searching for an answer to the questions I had and found BTC.

I owe my parents so much.

Great question!!

I've been always interested into tech stuff even if I had a completely different path in my initial carreer. Eventually everything corverged again towards technology and I figured out bitcoin in the same period, both in technological and political/social terms.

I always had very maximalist relationship to truth. Hated to see hypocricy, dishonesty and unfairness. Im from post-commie country too so stories from my grandparents and parents as well as books and movies and documentaries made me ralealize current democracy has oh so many similarities to communism.

"For the greater good, for the society" - they all say

In middle school I got book about cryptography from my IT teacher and Im sure this helped me understand the unbreakability of Bitcoin.

Im also naturaly very disagreeable, open minded and curious. A perfect mix to be into Bitcoin.

My earliest childhood regret happened at the mall. My mom dropped me and my sister off at the entrance of an arcade. The entrance looked like a big dinosaur head, and to get into the arcade you had to enter the dinosaurs mouth. I refused to enter out of fear and sat at a bench for an hour ( I was five or six years old and afraid). My mom finished her shopping held my hand and together we entered the (monsters) mouth. The inside was the funnest dinosaur themed arcade with candy and prizes and everyone laughing and having the best time that I'd ever seen. At that point I wanted to stay, but we had to go. I realized that I let irrational fear get in the way between me and a genuinely good time.

The rest of my childhood was spent running around outside with a group of close neighborhood friends. We would ride our scooter and bikes further than what our parents allowed and on dangerous paths that we knew we probably shouldn't.

Don't fear personal responsibility or freedom, freaks. "Fear is the mind killer"

My parents taught me a vety low time preference. Mother had a mid-sized company, my father was mathematician. Saving, investing, studying, culture, sport - anything was embedded in this manner of forming Your character like a steady evolution on the basis of total selfsovereignty

My childhood didn't lead me to Bitcoin. I was so fortunate that's all.

They gave me the illusion that we can become anything. Then I watched wealthy families produce children who have neither property, nor children, nor optimism, nor even interest in the future.

In my early teens I really wanted to save up money to buy a body board. I think it was around $200 at the time. To get there I used to skip my lunch & save my $1 or $2 lunch money.

So I guess I've always been a saver. Bitcoin works well for people that can save for longer periods of time

High school - started skateboarding and listening to Wu-Tang.

TL;DR - learning skateboard tricks is proof of work (practice and bruised shin bones)

bitcoin is punk - @aantonop

Growing up in a small eastern European country in the late 20th and early 21st century, I observed the country's economic and political transition. In the 1990s, when I was a kid, my country underwent a period of rapid change, transitioning from a socialist regime to a market-oriented economy. During this time, the country faced economic instability, high inflation, and currency devaluation.

These economic challenges, along with my interest in technology, led me to explore alternative financial systems and digital currencies. As the internet became more accessible, I started learning about Bitcoin, which emerged in 2009 and I found 2 years later in 2011. The idea of a decentralized, digital currency that can't be controlled/debased by the government and which could potentially provide financial stability and privacy in a transitioning economy like ours intrigued me.

Throughout my teenage years, I followed the development of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology behind it. Even though, there weren't many quality articles, suitable literature or anything else than the Satoshi whitepaper (at least to my knowledge back then), I somehow blindly felt it as a potential solution to some of the economic challenges I witnessed. Over time, I may have become an early adopter, by:

My journey into Bitcoin might have been influenced by the mixture of the unique economic and political circumstances in my country during that period plus my curiosity about technology and financial innovation.

Looking back on it, while my dad is probably more liberal than I am nowadays...he was a pretty hard core libertarian in the way he did things. He tried to be self-sovereign in things he did, and was very into DIY tech from the 90s (I have distinct memories of an incredible nest of wires under the computer table...it was epic). Set me up to be very attracted to bitcoin and freedom tech in general when it finally crossed me.

#298046_

I read a lot of medieval knight genre fiction growing up and idolized those with a strong sense morality and justice. This made the equality and morality aspect of bitcoin hit hard and led to a fast conviction time.

I vaguely recall a friend talking about it in computer programming 2010. Damn if I would have listened. But I used it on and off, and got back into it with the introduction of Nostr.

The war in Iraq after 9/11, and prior to it, the devaluation of our currency by 50% in 1994,, and the ensuing austerity measures have primed me for bitcoin.

When i hat about bitcoin for the first time in 2011, I'm ready, even though I don't get most of this novel tech. For me, it's enough to know that it's immune to governments' influence, so I hang on and research the subject. It took me actually a couple of years for the penny to drop.

Bitcoin has rescued me from a nihilistic path. It's shown me an alternative and brighter future that I could contribute to build, even with my modest and very limited means.

Silk Road brought me to bitcoin as a kid