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Comment by vocatus_gate | Hacker News Reader

Still remember when it was $7 per bitcoin and sort of a joke. Hard to believe it's worth over $1700 now.

I bought a bunch when it was around $9; probably $1,000 worth, just for fun. Then I spent most of it on stupid stuff like pizza, and had about $5 left.

A couple years later that $5 had grown to become worth $200, so I again spent it on a couple stupid things.

I would be mad, but it was in my MtGox account anyway.

That's what I do with all my BTC: MTGO cards, Steam games. My initial "investment" was ~$10 worth of Stellar when that was given away for free, and I currently have ~$30 spread between BTC and a couple alt-coins from that initial free $10. So it's all just play money to me.

It's amazing to think of the RoI you could have gotten for a few hours of computer time if you were mining early.

Of course, for every Bitcoin, there's a million stupid schemes that don't work out, and it's hard to tell them apart.

I mined 50BTC back in college. My harddrive died and I discarded it, thinking nothing of the ~$0.03 I was throwing away.

I wonder if in the future "bitcoin miners" might be a more literal name, for those digging through landfill looking for hard drives like the one you threw away.

It's already been done at least once: https://www.cnet.com/news/uk-man-tries-to-retrieve-7-5-milli...

I learned about Bitcoin at exactly the same time. I told my father about it and asked him if I could invest $100. I didn't press him on it though, but I'm sure I would have sold way before $1000+.

I bought in at sub-dollar prices. I could've bought a house if I didn't sell almost everything in the April 2013 bubble lol.

Still paid nicely for a lavish time in college though.

My friend told me to buy $1000 worth of it when it was around 60 cents a coin. I thought he sounded crazy.

$1000 => $2.8M

:'(

I believe it's just going to keep going higher: more and more (legitimate, blue-chip) institutions see the value in Bitcoin for moving currency around due to its near-zero transaction fees, rapid clearing, and the impossibility of chargebacks - and given there's a cap of 21m BTC it means deflation is going to keep going on, if not accelerating further. I do expect to see BTC reach $10k or $20k within 5 years, even if it crashes this year.

I don't know if BTC will reach $100k or even $1m - it depends on how the rest of the financial industry treats it - or if there's a mass ditching of BTC for ETH or possibly even a bank-controlled blockchain.

BTC has one hurdle coming up: the darknets - the original populizers of BTC - are switching to Monero due to its increased privacy protections.

"near-zero transaction fees"? I wish.. it currently costs ~$1 to have your transaction executed within 10-30 minutes (next block).

"rapid clearing" as well. Takes a while to wait for the recommended number of confirms.

Not compared to wire transfers or credit card clearing, which can take 3 and 30 days, respectively.

Yeah honestly, why do people keep saying this? Real life bitcoin transactions are much more expensive to users than credit card or ACH transfers.

I can move money for free between my bank accounts and the money is settled in three days. I can pay friends for free with venmo and it settles likewise.

Bitcoin needs to become significantly faster and cheaper, since there's nothing holding back the competition from getting more efficient from self-imposed limits.

>why do people keep saying this?

Because they're confusing theoretical transaction costs with reality. This isn't an insurmountable technical limitation; this is a political issue within the miner community.

That's still pretty great compared to wire transfers (~$15 fee, up to 72hrs). But I get your point; larger blocks can improve that greatly.

Maybe for the US, but in other western countries the fee is generally zero for individuals, or a few cents for businesses, and the time a few hours at most (often seconds).

In what western countries do you have wire transfers within hours? My experience in several EU countries is about two working days for transfers to be credited to the other person's account.

We must have different EU countries — though the EU is aiming for these systems to be available across the Eurozone by the end of the year (!) [1].

I know for certain it's very fast (around a minute, but the guaranteed time is <2 hours) for the UK, Denmark and Sweden. I think Norway and Finland have similar systems.

The British system is called Faster Payments: http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/about-us — I doubt the others have easily accessible information in English.

[1] https://www.nfcworld.com/2017/01/11/349411/european-central-...

> We must have different EU countries

Seems like it. France and Austria, in my case. If I pass a transfer in my French online banking system in the afternoon, my bank even tells me outright that it won't be processed until 8 o'clock the next morning (until which time I can undo it). It's then deducted from my account at that time, and the day after that the receiver sees the payment in their online banking as "you will be getting this money, but you don't have it yet, it's being processed".

> EU is aiming for these systems to be available

Well... it's "encouraging" providers to do it. Not holding my breath ;-)

On reflection, we might be talking about different things here. Can you use this Faster Payments service to transfer money to any bank account, like to a friend? It reads like this might only be meant for instantaneous payments to merchants. Those services exist elsewhere as well, yes.

Faster Payments is certainly used for transfers between individuals, like between friends and family. That website was mostly for the banks, sending money between friends is listed on a bank's site [0].

There's a mobile phone-base service, called PayM [1], which uses Faster Payments. I don't think it's used much, but the systems in Sweden (Swish) and Denmark (Mobilepay) are pretty much the same and are used a lot, probably the majority of payments to friends, and at least 25% of payments to small businesses.

[0] http://www.halifax.co.uk/onlinebankinghelp/fasterpayments.as...

[1] http://www.paym.co.uk/ or http://www.halifax.co.uk/aboutonline/things-you-can-do/pay-a...

I was mining when it was $4 per bitcoin... sold most at $32.

Most of us would have. I mean, 4->32 is great a return. A lot stories about people who didn't sell were those who had lost and then found their wallets. Pure luck.

I posted about this on an old forum when Bitcoins were super cheap.

The mods didn't like it and deleted my thread saying that the whole Bitcoin thing sounded a bit scammy :D

...and it still does.

Damn, some early adopters are certainly sitting on a ton of gold now

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