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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then PhD). I remember navigating on a demo site and being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch".

I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to see these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Let's clean up and time for lunch".

Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.

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just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch today?

Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?

Or reading an article about AI being overhyped?

Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about to find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.

GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it seemed 'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention I'm looking for investors?

That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back in the TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made a few years ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt anyone is going to buy a level editor" :-P.

I, too, mined some bitcoins when it first appeared. My computer at the time was housed in a case of plywood that I'd made. I wonder if my crappy computer from over 20 years ago has at least a Bitcoin in it? Well, time for qat now. Will dig it out later.

1900s grandfather: I buried a sack of gold coins in my backyard.

2000s grandfather: The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is probably in the pile of junk inside the garage.

> The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is probably in the pile of junk inside the garage

It's funny because it's true: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55658942

Maybe "true" isn't the best word to use. There are too many stories like this for them all to be true. Great story though.

At that time you even had bitcoin faucets that gave you 0.5-1-5 btc to play around. Or you could just run a miner on your gpu and get 50btc if you ran it for a few days or so - a ton of people probably have those on some partition on an old laptop or sth.

Yes, but we know where those coins are now: in circulation. And we have a good grasp how many that is and how many could possibly on on those shelved laptops. It is literally how every coin in circulation was minted as there is no central party, only your peer devices.

LMAO. I have about 150 Bitcoins sitting on an old hard drive at the bottom of the local dump. I guess someone would try to dig them up if it ever hits a million, but doubtful they could recover them much less unlock them.

Oh my. Same here. I mined quite a few bitcoins on a friend’s PC a long time ago. Then we tried to do something with them but you couldn’t even buy a beer. So we forgot about the bitcoins and the disk is probably on a trash heap somewhere now.

Time to get the IBN 5100 and go back in time.

What a pity (

Reminds me of the all-time classic (now) HN discussion on Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 as I got older I realized that, you can never ever hope to choose what will be successful or important, and that is true down to the most seemingly small action you can make. The world is simply too complex and interdependent for that.

I only mined around 1 BT when they were "worth" about £5 and then lost the wallet because I ran out of floppies for my transfer of data from old to new PC or I forgot about it (which is more likely).

I thought the www looked a bit mad and disorganized when I first telnetted to it via the US from UK.

Time for lunch.

I too am similarly gifted. Back in the usenet days a group I was on received its first spam. There was some discussion about whether this type of thing would get out of control. I confidently proclaimed that there was no way spam would ever be more than a minor nuisance.

My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined by vandalism. It didn't occur to me that there may be way more people who undo vandalism than there are vandals.

Or when I first heard about Twitter. My immediate reaction was: "I'm unusually open to wacky Web 2.0 ideas, but even I have to admit you can't say anything of substance in just 140 characters." And indeed, looking up some random tweets seemed to confirm this suspicion. Interestingly, this wasn't just my reaction. A lot of us "tech enthusiasts" had this opinion about Twitter.

> My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined

There are people who think that today, despite well-known existence proofs we have to the contrary.

I mean a lot of internet places have been destroyed by vandalism and upkeep costs, what were seeing us just survivorship bias and survival of the fittest.

In other words, existence proofs that such systems won't automatically be ruined.

I'd disagree, they require a massive amount of moderation and clean up to keep running. The default state is ruined and only by herculean effort is it usable by others.

It's like a park in a high drug use area. Quite often they are ruined, and only by massive expenditure of effort are is it even near safe.

Even if your reply made sense as a response (it doesn't), I've been involved with multiple wikis, and your claims aren't true.

Wanna have lunch sometime?

any recent of dem visions?

Let me tell you about my grand scheme, circa 1991 or thereabouts, of downloading small images from BBSes and embedding them inline with the text.

Yeah I remember using NCSA mosaic to browse the early web and thinking “what’s the point of this we already have FTP and archie”.

How about lunch sometimes?

Its 1992. A friend of mine has asked me to meet with someone, to discuss the idea of 'selling things through the web'. I didn't like the idea - "this is not what the Internet is for... and the web is too esoteric, difficult to set up and use, TCP/IP WinSock blahblah", and I dismiss the thing entirely on an ideological basis. That friend goes on to participate in something that later became .. Amazon.

Its 1994. I turn on the modem back at an ISP I've just built, in a place called Los Feliz. After a few months of putting out the fires, I decide "this ISP thing is balls", and I leave. The guy I built the first data center for, goes on to be worth 300 million buckaroonies.

Its 1996. An associate has flown us to San Francisco for the day, to meet a guy who has been trying to get his auction site launched for the past year. We have lunch, we discuss the whole concept of 'online auctions', I dismiss it as being unviable "because latency" and legal jurisdiction. Okay, a few years later, I buy a synthesizer on EBay. I still have it, to remind me of myopia.

Its 1997. I get hired to make a bookmark-management site, called "Storease". I build it, but I don't like it. People will find things, then add their URL to our site, and collect "Storease". "This will be too expensive to scale properly unless someone comes up with data-centers as a commodity..." Something about this rubs me up the wrong way. Could've been delicious, though.

Its 2010. I buy a few bitcoins, for 30 cents each, and keep them around long enough to make .. 300 bucks. I'm proud of myself for selling 10 bitcoins and making 300 bucks.

This stuff happens. Its a difficult thing for technologically inclined ideologues to see the woods for the trees.

Its 2023. I am still ignoring crypto. All my friends are millionaires. I'm just glad to have a new version of JUCE to play with ...

Similar. Just along for the ride. It's still rewarding and can last a long time in good health. Hope you're enjoying it too!

Thanks. I wish the same for you.

In the end, all we have is memories of it all. Pretty much all of my good times couldn't have been bought - they had to be experienced.

One day I'll write a book about it all. Maybe that'll make me rich, lol ..

- I thought Google was too expensive at its IPO.

- "Cloud" seemed like marketing nonsense to me.

- I still think bitcoin is a scam.

On the plus side I did end up working for some tech companies that did very well. No complaints.

It's really hard (read as impossible) to predict the future. Efficient markets and all that. If it was clear that Google would go where it went then it'd be priced even higher. Even if you knew that "selling things online is the future" in 1992 it's not always clear how to act on that knowledge. You could have gone bust with pets.com or something.

Fast forward to today. What is today's Google? What is today's "cloud"? What is today's bitcoin? Someone is saying something about something, someone is right, many are wrong.

Honestly, this is like I am reading my bio.

I had several of these along the way (including having a proposal to create a company but I was too busy courting a girl - they sold it for around 100M€ and split in in three :))

I work in high tech (bleeding edge) and spend my time automating my home and writing open source (when not working). My wife, from time to time, mentions how much I could do and my son cannot understand why I do not want to go further up the company pyramid. But I am happy, I have all the money I need and can now sit in front of my screen answering to HN while keeping an eye on the dinner I am cooking.

So yeah, lots of lost opportunities but the partying was wild :)

And yeah, I am still ignoring bitcoins when the guys in my team are making money (but live on an emotional rollercoaster :))

Sounds fake. This ain’t Reddit.

No. It was that easy to mine bitcoins back then and just throw them away. Interesting but worthless at the time.

Yep. Needless to say I have a few regrets after haphazardly losing USB sticks from back in those days.

You all sound fake.

FAKE.

FAAAAAAKE.

/head explodes/

From your profile it looks like you are even older than me.

I find it strange that you did not go through similar stories - tech in the 90s was rather eventful. Maybe you were at the wrong place?

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