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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to go 100% crypto since 2012. Been putting pretty much every penny I can into it since then. Of course Theres been ups and downs.

One time I got hacked by downloading a RAT off a torrent for a virtual machine and lost 10,000 ETH, now worth like $20,000,000.00 so that was annoying.

Then of course just the price swings, I'm down nearly $2million since the high point, so is that "lost"?

Never was stupid enough to buy an NFT, even though I TRIED to convince myself. That was just such a stupid time to be in crypto and I'm glad those people lost all that money. Morons.

Now I'm 100% XMR and BCH, they are the ONLY cruptoCURRENCIES that work and are needed, literally everything else in the space is a scam to take your money.

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I bought bitcoin for a few dollars. When it was around $1500 and I was a broke college student I sold.

I'm not even upset, I have negative feelings towards crypto in general and that was a part of reason for selling. Everyone I know who is into crypto was always excited NOT to pay taxes. Plus, there is just so much scams and fraud in the space. I'm all in index funds now.

I do know a guy who became a millionaire because of BTC.

I've been into Bitcoin since 2012 also, so people sometimes think I'm rich hahaha. I don't think my net worth ever surpassed $200k.

I'll NEVER understand people. If you knew about BTC why not buy and hold it?

Around 2012-13 a lot of us would talk fervently about how BTC would take over. We all wanted to have at least 21 BTC to be "in the club". I like to think we all kept our promise to each other and are still in the club :)

I knew about bitcoin before 2012. I had a friend try to convince me to mine some with my beefy desktop, since “its the future”. I thought it sounded like a dumb ponzi scheme. It might still be a dumb ponzi scheme but i fucked up bad on thay one.

You can still buy Bitcoin today!

Big difference between mining coins that in hindsight reached whst $20k in value each and buying the coins lol

Ha, yeah I remember in high school looking into Bitcoin, thought it was cool.

Then I realized it would never be useful as a currency due to the Bitcoin cap making it deflationary.

I still don't disagree, and most of Bitcoin is speculation and fraud, but the correlation of Bitcoin being deflationary is that the value will only go up.

So, Doink.

I've known about it since 2009 or 2010, I'm not quite sure anymore. When it was still fractions of a cent per.

My read on it at the time was that it was an ideological project from a pseudo-right tech libertarian sphere that I have always despised. At that point you could not yet use it to buy illegal porn and drugs on the internet, but the people who were into bitcoin were SO EXCITED that you soon would be able to.

I figured it would never be useful. I was right about all of that, I think? I didn't predict that people would get rich from it despite these things though. I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything for me.

It's not that simple...

How do you know how long to hold?

I bought a bunch of bitcoin for under $100 each and sold them for ~$1000 each at one point.

Should I have held them longer? Sure, but how could anyone really know that? How do you resist the urge to realize the >10x gain in a short term?

After it went up to ~1200 it crashed down to 200-300 for years before it recovered and skyrocketed to new heights.

If you had bought bitcoin for something low like say $100, are you telling me you would really have resisted selling it when it hit $1000? or $2000? How about when it hit $10,000 or $25,000 or even $50,000? Knowing that it could come crashing down at any second as well.

The peak was nearly 70K, and now it's only about half that.

So simply holding isn't a complete strategy.

1. Until USD inevitably collapses under the weight of its own indebtedness and fraud.

2. Yes, you made a mistake. Use the "Rake Method" many of us have preached for a decade. No guessing needed, profit taking can even be automated. It's all very simple.

3. Yes, a great buying opportunity.

4. Yes, I bought a lot around $150's. Using the rake method you can't go wrong. If it's more cash than I need I buy gold. Easy. Angin, the research is already done, and we have a solution to your issues, the rake method.

>No guessing needed, profit taking can even be automated. It's all very simple.

I assume you have a net worth > $100M right? as it's so easy.

I heard about it 2009/2010 and didn't buy it then because it just seemed like some scammy way to make money. When I learned more about its use and effects as a currency, I became interested and bought some, but its use as a legitimate currency just won't happen. In practice, it's just a scammy way to make money, always has been. The most useful thing about crypto was that you could convert it to USD for a profit, but the days of ez money have passed.

Interesting experience but I use Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash actually, every day almost.

Not sure why in 2023 people keep saying it "doesn't work". Why say that? BCH just works and always has since 2009.

> BCH just works and always has since 2009.

BCH didn’t exist in 2009

BCH was BTC in 2009, iirc

No, BTC was BTC in 2009, and BCH was created as a fork of BTC years later.

What part of the world do you live in? Just curious, I travel very often but have yet to see any convenient way to spend bitcoin everyday.

I remember buying a few BTC at around the $20 mark, think I sold around $100. Seemed like a nerd's fever dream at that time :) I even got my CPU mining in a pool back before the GPU kernels were around and the ASICs came out. Crazy times!

"If you know of an ethically dubious way to profit, why not do it?"

You've come to the right place

We knew about casinos even longer. It doesn't compel us to go all-in on zero. And from the technical point of view bitcoin was maybe an interesting idea for the few early ears, and then it was clear that it failed for any legitimate use. It was true 10 years ago and still true today.

Plenty of legitimate uses exist today. It didn't go mainstream and replace your debit/visa card.

Nope. The only actually working use case for bitcoins (and all other tokens too) is law avoidance. For that, sure, it is great. Transferring sums across borders without complying with AML laws and without declaring them (so law avoidance), receiving salary in tokens and not paying taxes (law avoidance), paying bribes (law avoidance), buying forbidden shit (law avoidance) and the list goes on. None of those are legit use cases. And for legit ones bitcoin is simply not competitive due to atrocious performance and user experience. PS: before you say Lightning - that is not a bitcoin, but a new centralized system which completely reneges on the decentralization promise and is still shitty, with idiotic channels and rules about them.

Well, life happens and you can't know the future. I was poor as fuck in 2012. I had just moved back to the US after spending all my money on a couchsurfing adventure in another country. I was living in a house with my girlfriend who didn't tell me I wasn't supposed to live there until I had actually flew to Tacoma, a city halfway across the country from everyone I knew. I got a job working at a gas station and I imported nootropics from China to sell on a couple of message boards. This guy offered to buy $100 of noopept with Bitcoin so I accepted. I had heard of Bitcoin from Silk Road and thought it was a really cool concept. I lost some bitcoins in an exchange hack/inside job? Bitfloor. Traded on BTC-E and actually came out ahead on that. Didn't sell in the 2013 bullrun. Got bored of crypto and sold almost all of it in 2016, just before the next bullrun. Got into stocks and lost money there. Played around with some defi stuff in 2020. Cashed out some profits on that next bullrun. Lost $20k on Anchor. I think I still have like $50k left of crypto. Need to check into that. Got .65btc, 11 eth, 1000 atom, 3000 polygon, and small amounts of other random stuff. It's funny how I'm not even a whole coiner anymore. I think when I got into crypto BTC was almost $10

Crypto is going to be worth so little next year you may as well sell it all and buy back. Btc is about to collapse

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