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> Back then, when things were starting out, the idea was to bank the unbanked, make money transfer seamless, cheap, and fast, and basically break up actors like PayPal et. al.

Yes, that was before Gregory Maxwell, Luke-jr, Adam Back et. Al hijacked the project with the help from "theymos". They derailed the whole project by doubling down on keeping the block size at 1mb, with the ulterior motive of providing their own private centralized layer 2 service (lightning) as a solution for scaling.

This was the biggest setback for the actual grassroots adoption of Bitcoin. They openly censured and banned any opposing opinions and alienated a lot of crypto enthusiasts including myself. I'll never forgive them for what they did.

It’s the algorithmically enforced scarcity coupled with “to the moon” culture. That’s all that’s going on. If it keeps going up I won’t be surprised. If it dumps down I won’t be surprised.

No floor and no ceiling — only a gambler would keep his net worth tied up to crypto. You did the right thing once you crossed a threshold to significantly change your financial status. Any other decision would have put yourself in a position vulnerable to outcomes of extreme regret.

The valuation is predicated on a market existing to provide exit liquidity. But where is that going to come from?

From new gamblers. There is some truth when BTC maxis say they’re still early.

Bitcoin was released almost 20 years ago. Early for who, the next generations?

There are cryptocurrencies like dogecoin and monero that have an infinite supply and a constant production of new coins, and they still see use. So I'm not certain that scarcity is the only motivating factor.

In fact, I would think that a growing money supply is good for driving real-world usage.

> I sold 100 BTC back in 2015, which cleared all my debts and landed my first apartment.

I think you should be less proud of that.

> I can't see the real value ... Sure, there are some very legit usage of crypto, like: Circumventing sanctions, Laundering money, Scams and transactions of illegal goods

Sounds like you understand exactly what the "real value" is:

If you buy and sell bitcoin, you're helping people launder money, protect gains from scamming people, circumvent sanctions, and trade in illegal goods. You are hurting people, possibly a lot of people.

> It is 2025, and I've yet to see shops here in Europe that actively take any crypto, or people that use it in their daily lives

That's because scamming people, selling illegal goods, money laundering, and helping people circumvent sanctions, is well, illegal in Europe.

i totally get this mindset

i think one of the big challenges of the 21st century is coming to terms with the fact that playing by the rules actually makes you poorer...

whereas speculative investment, like bitcoin, has yielded only winners. huge transfer of wealth from the rule-followers to the "but what if it moons..."-crowd and the "yeah i shouldn't do this, but..."-type of people.

this will surely have an evolutionary impact, since the now-wealthy bitcoiners (and others) will no doubt have plenty of reproductive success, thus arming their numerous progeny with a similar risk-taking mindset.

I started looking into bitcoin when it was at around $3, but never made a move to buy any. I have some regrets, but when I stop to think about it, I would clearly have sold everything when it reached $10 or something. So I haven't passed up the opportunity to make millions, I only passed up the opportunity to make a couple hundred bucks.

When I was active, most people I knew (that were active in crypto) sold most of their stuff prior to 2015-2017.

It was almost a rite of passage to make your exit-post once you reached your goal, or didn’t want the risk/stress. For most that included things like purchasing a home, car, paying off student loans, retiring your parents.

Most of the people I know that became rich off crypto, were those that went all in around 16/17/18. And many of those did buy/sell their way up. Or got lucky with meme coins etc.

I don’t know anyone that bought 1000 BTC in the very early days, and just held onto them with diamond hands. Nor do I know anyone that DCA’ed from 2012 up until today.

(Not that they don’t exist, probably a bunch of them)

This is the same attitude I have. There's no regret in not predicting the powerball numbers.

When you consider the actual price you would have bought in and the actual price you would have liquidated, those theoretical 10x-100x gains start looking more like 3-10x gains. And for small investments that's not going to make you a millionaire.

> But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life.

It doesn't sound like a mistake to me at all. You paid off debts and invested in something that has delivered value to you for almost 15 years now. A mistake would have been to spend it on blow and hookers.

no a true mistake would have been to delete the hard drive that the wallet was stored on so you wouldn't even had the benefit of paying off anything or buying any hookers and blow.

no no no, that's the second most true mistake.

the truest of all true mistakes, was having never bought bitcoin in the first place.

There's a British guy who threw away a hard drive that if recovered would be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, and has been engaged in a weird legal battle with the council to try to dig through years of rubbish to find it.

I followed around the same time and came to the same conclusions, except I didn't buy or mine any because I 1) hugely underestimated how much that illegal activity was worth. 2) didn't appreciate the potential scale of the pump n dump

Saying an investment will at some point drop in value is not hard, saying exactly when and how high it’ll get first is.

-my biggest learning from the first half of the 2020s

It’s just a slower, more expensive, distributed database.

People can claim all they wish that it’s trustless, that we miss the bigger picture, but many have said again and again, the value of any currency is as high as the trust that it will remain valuable tomorrow.

“Nerds” can believe in its value as much as they want, but as long as it doesn’t penetrate daily life it will remain just an asset for hedging against traditional financial systems at best, and most commonly a money laundering scheme.

There are very few unbanked people in western countries, and so its natural that it would be unusual to come across those use cases there. There are in fact services that will act as a glue between the bitcoin ecosystem and "fiat", such as bitrefill which allows you to buy gift cards for many different stores using bitcoin. However for most people and every day payments there isn't really a compelling reason to try to use bitcoin. In fact, if you have both bitcoin and national currency, with rising prices it makes more sense to hold onto the bitcoin and spend the national currency.

There certainly have been some countries where stablecoins have gained in popularity. They are a little easier to use than bitcoin and prices are more stable. It tends to be in places where governments are not heavily enforcing against their use, while at the same time the local currency has been unstable, such as in Argentina.

The downside with stablecoins is that they rely on trusted entities to maintain the peg, whereas bitcoin enforces its own scarcity and trades at its own value.

I don't really think its responsible to go around telling people that bitcoin will gain in value, but there are certainly many people who believe this to be the case, and the pool is growing. I think the key value for this community is that we have something which is easier to transfer globally than a hard asset like gold, while being independent from particular jurisdictions such as the US, EU or China.

And yes I see the lack of awareness in bitcoin community about the extent to which it has become the defacto standard for internet scammers, who trick vulnerable people into depositing their life savings into a bitcoin ATM using various methods. You can see many examples of this on kitboga's youtube channel. At least, he has been able to work with some bitcoin exchanges to fight back against this in a small way.

Are you from Argentina? Crypto is used for the same reasons as in every other country. If someone gets paid their salary in crypto is not because the peso is weak, is simply to be avoid paying taxes for being outside the system.

> There certainly have been some countries where stablecoins have gained in popularity. They are a little easier to use than bitcoin and prices are more stable. It tends to be in places where governments are not heavily enforcing against their use, while at the same time the local currency has been unstable, such as in Argentina.

Yes, I think this really is a use case even if it's not one that flatters the prejudices of American bitcoiners. People from non-US countries want access to shadow-dollars, yet the US has built a large and intrusive industry based on keeping them out.

> There are very few unbanked people in western countries, and so its natural that it would be unusual to come across those use cases there.

In the US it is 6% of adults [1] overall. It is 23% of adults with family incomes below $25k. It's 14% for Black adults and 11% for Hispanic adults.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2024-economic-we...

Thanks for sharing your story. I too frequently think back on "what could have been." Back in 2013, I bought and sold a bitcoin, and every time I see a crypto headline I remember my mistake of spending it.

Maybe we should not be so hard on ourselves. Afterall, we still have a heartbeat. Did we truly make a mistake, or did we narrowly avoid getting consumed by avarice?

It was NOT a mistake. Do you consider not buying the winning lottery ticket a mistake? No. You don't know which ticket is going to win in advance, and buying a random ticket is ill-advised because the odds are against it being the winning one.

The best antidote to this kind of thinking is to realise you would have been tempted to sell so may times over the last decade, that there's close to zero chance that you'd still be holding it today.

To make a lot of money with bitcoin you either need to have been a true believer for a ridiculously long period of time, or find the password to an old wallet you'd forgotten about.

BTC is a (roughly) net-zero enterprise, every dollar taken out of the system comes from someone else putting a dollar in. Sure, if you had a crystal ball you could have made millions, but if everyone else ALSO had that same crystal ball you couldn't, since traders are mostly just shuffling money between themselves anyway.

There's no point kicking yourself over not foreseeing a far-fetched future scenario, if you were at a casino and a roulette spin landed on 12 - would you feel bad for not betting on that happening, despite having no good information it would land on that?

A lot of the stock market is built on this model too surely?

I get some of it works off dividends etc, but so much is sentiment driven and also based off of someone else making a loss.

I take comfort in thinking that it wasn’t for early buyers/sellers, there wouldn’t really have been any traction.

And crypto today is extremely accessible and safe, compared to 10+ years ago. The first crypto I bought, was by paying some random seller on a forum with PayPal, and hoping that the deal was legit.

It wasn't a mistake. In 2013, as in every year, there were plenty of speculative things you could have invested in without having any reasonable way of knowing if they would turn out to make a lot or lose a lot.

There are probably 75 year olds today regretting that they didn't spend an extra $0.12 in 1962 when they were at the comic book store to pick up an extra copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 to preserve. That was the first appearance of Spider Man and and a copy of that in near NM+ condition ("A very well-preserved collectible with several minor manufacturing or handling defects") sold at auction in 2021 for $3.6 million.

I did buy an extra copy of X-Men #137 (the death of Jean Grey) for $0.75 in 1980 and promptly bagged it. If I could actually find it and it actually is still in mint condition it might sell for around $400. From $0.75 then to $400 now is 15% a year growth.

But that $0.75 would have been better invested in Apple stock. That would be around $1600 now which is 18% a year growth. But in 1980 there were other exciting tech companies to invest in and most did not grow like Apple, so it is pointless to consider not buying Apple stock instead of X-Men #137 a mistake.

Nor would it have been a mistake to just put the money in an S&P 500 index fund. That would only have earned about 11% a year over the subsequent 45 years.

I worked with some crypto kids back in 2013. One retired in his twenties after 2017 or so. I know this as his instagram account became nothing but travel photos that never stopped coming year after year. Another colleague announced his retirement at 27 one day. He must have had 20 million in the bank. I still think it’s dumb that people got rich that way, but being dumb luck rich is certainly a thing. I don’t hold it against them. Interestingly I knew a lot of others that talked about crypto all the time but they’re still working to this day.

The thing is, there were so many coins popping up and all this talk about coins surpassing BTC that it’s easy to look at BTC today and think that was the only choice. But people were speculating on a lot of soon to be dead coins.

There are stock plays you could make today that could make any of us rich off dumb luck.

> And of course just a storage of value.

See also gold.

At some point it did make sense as a currency because of its hard-to-fake nature, but once governments became stronger and regulations and documentation became more strict, gold was not needed anymore. (And gold has all sorts of downsides [1] too.)

But there seems to be some 'nostalgic valuations' for it, and Bitcoin now has the same psychological appeal.

[1] https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...

Trading is soulless, yet it gives some deep philosophical lessons about regrets, future... You never know if a positive outcome is too early or too late. So you just take what you got and move on.

About crypto early narrative.. there's some lesson here, nothing means nothing, things get twisted, blended, rebranded .. they wanted to replace the world, they're not part of it, as yet another asset. Sad, cynical but nothing surprising IMO.

That said there might be an offspring of all the distributed blockchain VMS that will emerge a new layer replacing the economic and information exchange in the future (I still believe this a bit).

It seems the same as gold to me, gold having a nonzero physical value isn't meaningful when its price is so out of whack with that.

I think bitcoin has a culture that fortified itself against wild price swings and has lots of people on HODL / to the moon. It's their long term plan, they're not selling it just like you probably aren't selling your retirement account.

I'm not really convinced the stock market is that different to be honest. It's good that it gives companies a way to raise money with some basis in who people think will do well. But from my perspective as an individual with a 401k I'm just buying and holding. One day you look at your retirement account and it's a lot more than you ever put in, you didn't do any work beyond putting it in and I guess paying whoever runs the index fund or whatever. What are we doing here except pooling our money with the richest folks and watching money concentrate, holding until we retire and hoping it doesn't all come crashing down?

> But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life.

"You’re never happy with the amount you traded."

See "The Laws of Trading" by Agustin Lebron. One review discussing this topic is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-o...

> Crypto in general, but stablecoins more so, just feels like another asset

If it draws any interest away from residential real estate market its utility for reducing problems caused by wealth inequality is immense.

Any tool that draws the capital of the rich away from the brick and mortar economy where the poor have to compete with them to survive is worth tons for society.

I fear the opposite is the case - many rich whales pump up prices in the real world, having sold their crypto to the masses coming in late.

For every whale that cashes out there are some that hodl. Otherwise price wouldn't get this high. Price getting higher and higher means that bitcoin is sucking out dollars from other places. Masses have very little influence over the bitcoin price over recent years. This cycle they seem to have none.

The security is the value. It's a truth engine. A 60 minute old block would be almost impossible to tamper with.

Bitcoin isn't a particularly well-designed cryptocurrency, even in terms of security. You could use pretty much any blockchain for the timestamp application.

Was that all your Bitcoin? If so, why sell it all given it had already accumulated value?

Not a criticism, more just trying to understand the rationale.

Needed cash, nothing more. Laid off / downturn in the industry I worked in, and separated, so a double whammy financially speaking.

Thanks. That makes perfect sense.

Don't feel bad. I sold my coins and now I'm glad I don't have the headache of securing it now.

> But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life.

Maybe a tiresome pedantic response, but this is only a "mistake" to the same extent that it was a mistake for [everyone in the world who had the required funds] not to buy 100 BTC in 2015. If you can overcome the cognitive biases (endowment effect, loss aversion, etc.), the fact that you previously owned the 100 BTC has no real bearing on the situation, beyond transaction fees and a couple hours max saved by holding (doing nothing) vs. buying.

It was also a mistake for me to not buy a lottery ticket with the numbers 4 11 17 25 41 51.

There's a slow drip feed of stories of people who did buy BTC and have lost it, either to human error, lack of backups, crime, or failure of institutions. Remember MtGox collapse in 2014? The whole fad was obviously over by then, wasn't it?

We're going to have another 2008-style bubble collapse eventually. But it's not clear what the radius of effect will be.

In my view, the value, ( as it was in 2015 too btw) is digital extortion and money laundering.

Some are happy to take a hair-cut to get their money clean. The wider crypto-currency community is happy to make money off the back off essentially providing money-laundering-as-a-service.

> "Fast and cheap payments" have been fixed using regular fiat and banking services. I daily transfer and pay for stuff without any charges.

Could it be that bitcoin forced banks to compete?

No, because the systems pre-date bitcoin.

Chip & Pin launched in 2003

Contactless payments launched 2007. ( Yes, these pre-date Apple Pay, etc, by quite a long time )

Faster Payments System launched 2008 ( After a decade of planning )

Bitcoin launched 2009.

Honestly, if you had held all of your BTC until today you would be an idiot.

Just because it made it to $120,000 doesn't mean that it was predictable or even an rational. Given that Bitcoin _still_ doesn't have a use case beyond buying drugs means the bottom could fall out at any time.

There is no rebar in this structure.

bitcoin has little use case in buying drugs anymore

Fair enough, Bitcoin's sole use case now is buying Monero.