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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)
I have a theory that shitcoins became wildly successful right around the time all those tools for no-code websites became good. Back in the day, a professional looking site was a decent indicator of legitimacy, because it required effort to set up and run. All of a sudden you had the price of bitcoin go up wildly and all these other projects with cool names, technobabble whitepapers, and catchy websites claiming to be just like bitcoin except better at x,y or z.
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I am sure the proliferation of social media where you could pump your project via hype and word of mouth with little to no expense and then back it up with an easy to build professional looking website definitely added fuel to the fire.
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What a story, thank you for sharing!!
Great insight, I agree these stories can be valuable for newcomers and old timers alike
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Great post. We share a similar journey. BTW, I agree that curated bitcoin stories would be great. I for one always enjoy reading them.
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I have listened to a couple episodes of Stacking Sats by @kr where the guest tell the story of how they stacked x amount of sats through product, service or artistic offerings. I think Kevin would do a great job on a project like this.
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I have to listen! I'm a big fan of @kr to start with.
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Kevin has done such great work. He doesn't get as much attention as the big boys but his contributions to the community are invaluable.
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I think he's starting to get recognized. His podcast is great.
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