• MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    So, related story…

    Back in 2011ish, I discovered SilkRoad. I’d heard about people ordering weed on the internet, and it sounded really convenient. I downloaded Tor, I trawled forums and #chans for onion links, and eventually, I found it. Aside from all of the sketchy shit (hard drugs, stolen credit card info, home vasectomy kits), it almost seemed too good to be true - I could order a whole pound for what I was paying for a couple of ounces.

    There was one problem, though: payment. You couldn’t use your debit card (obviously), and you couldn’t just buy a prepaid visa and use that. No, they handled all payments in this weird new thing that I’d never heard of… Bitcoin. I did a bit of research, and it seemed like it would be kind of a hassle to set up a wallet and find an exchange and actually buy any Bitcoins, and even more of a hassle to sell any extra Bitcoins that I had left over. On top of that, the price kept bouncing around, so enough Bitcoin to buy a fat sack of weed today might buy a much smaller sack tomorrow.

    So what did I do?

    I gave up and kept buying weed from a dude. If I’d sucked it up and dealt with the hassle to buy weed by the quarter pound instead of the quarter ounce, the crumbs left in my Bitcoin wallet could have bought me a house.

    • hayvan@piefed.world
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      7 hours ago

      Back in 2009, I was there, saw the release of Bitcoing on Slashdot news. I had a computer on 24/7 because I was working on my thesis. Minin on CPU was feasible. I thought it could be a cool experiment to have a bit, just for fun. I never bothered with the hassle of actually running the miner on those very first days with the CPU and electricity I had from my uni for free.

    • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
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      10 hours ago

      Nah. Similar story:

      I did the part that you didn’t. Left the excess in the silkroad account, the FBI bought the house.

      That, and you would have sold it a year later, or a year later, or a year later.

      Don’t kick yourself too hard. I’d be in the 10 digit range if I could see the future and just didn’t spend a couple hundred on the site for one of the orders.

    • nexguy@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      I think a lot of people think that yet the people who did have bitcoin when they were a few bucks each sold it at $70, or $300, or $900, or $1700… very few people have held on all this time.

    • AxExRx@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      A friend of mine got addicted to heroin in highschool. He bought 200 btc when it crashed down to $2 in 2012, and shortly after, his parents sent him to rehab for a month, and hid his computer somewhere on the farm, never to be seen again.

      When it was worth around $10m we searched the entire premises, with no luck.

    • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      15 hours ago

      No, you would have sold it for a hundred bucks. And if you didn’t then you would have sold for two hundred. Or for three hundred…

      Not having bought it that day is just one step of the ladder you didn’t climb. You would still need to not sell it every day since.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Why do you need a home kit for a vasectomy? It just takes a scalpel, superglue, suturing kits, and some balls. /s though now I am remembering an infamous post of someone describing how she did her own orchiectomy (nsfl it was a horrible read)