Lessons from a HODLer fortunate enough to find Bitcoin after passing on the opportunity repeatedly since 2012.
I am one of those who was fortunate enough to find out about Bitcoin more than a decade ago before it gained mainstream attention. Sadly, I am also one of the morons who saw this opportunity, didn’t think too much of it at first and let it fly by.
In this little story, I’d like to share the path that led me to pass on investing in bitcoin three different times before eventually giving in and becoming a HODLer. So, here are the key lessons I learned along this journey that are worth sharing with anyone who is still doubting BTC.
THE INCEPTION
Given that I started my first full-time job in an online brokerage back in 2011, it should come as no surprise that I had a bunch of colleagues who were really into trading and super passionate about everything related to investments, technology and the progress of the financial world. It wasn’t long before I made a friend named Edgar.
We shared some interests, predominantly gaming and our long-standing nicotine addictions. Even though we worked in different departments and rarely had to collaborate for our jobs, we would still ping each other whenever it was time to head out and smoke a ciggy, gleefully chatting about life, the universe and everything else, as we dosed on nicotine and fresh air.
One day, sometime during 2012, I popped through one of these “smoke?” messages to Edgar when I noticed that his Skype status was some sort of gibberish that looked like a cat had been walking over his keyboard.
It looked something like this: “1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2.”
During our smoke session, I asked him, “Was it a cat, or did your account get hacked?” He denied both of these possibilities and then went into a long and complicated explanation about Bitcoin addresses and blockchains.
Edgar passionately explained what the whole Bitcoin thing is all about, and his excitement instantly got me extremely interested in the topic. Being in the investment industry, I was well aware of many online scams and fake dubious products such as e-gold, that seemed, at least at the surface level, to all be similar.
But, the more he told me about it, the more Bitcoin seemed like it might be much more than just some fly-by-night scheme; at the very least, it was worth a gamble.
My biggest problem was that 2012 was probably my worst year on record when it came to financial health, and while 3,730,218 public keys already existed on the Bitcoin network by then, I certainly didn’t have the spare cash to go gambling on some new and unproven technology promising to “revolutionize” the way we do money.
