Hacker News Reader

I’ll admit it has been deeply entertaining watching the crypto community speed-run 200 years of “finding out the hard way why modern financial regulations exist” and “how to recognize a blisteringly obvious ponzi scheme” in the span of 15 years.

I say this as someone who got his first 0.05 btc for signing up for a newsletter in 2009 or 2010.

View on HN

0.05? You probably misremember the amount. For reference, in 2010 the Bitcoin faucet gave away 5 BTC just for visiting a web page. A decent incentive for subscribing to a newsletter, more involved than visiting a web page, would have to have been higher than 5 BTC.

I must be misremembering the year then! It was 0.05 because I thought it was 5 then found the old hard drive last year and managed to recover it from an ancient bitcoin client. I don’t remember the details but I had to let it sync (downloading data?) for days before I could make a transaction to an exchange and sell.

In about the same time frame someone offered me 16,000 BTC for a mediocre graphics card I put on a listing. (I turned it down.)

Someone has to post it: that'd be worth $736,592,000 today if you'd kept it all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com