Replying to Avatar Dr. Bitcoin, MD

Cents.

There was a brief time when my laptop provided roughly somewhere between 1/64th and 1/256th of the network hash power.

Bitcoin had no value at that time. Difficulty rapidly increased and I never mined another block after my first two or three days mining.

When a market opened for bitcoin, I bought some to help kick start the market, but it was rather expensive and I was a poor resident.

The funny thing about the earliest miners I know: many are not rich. We were stupid and used the money to either make life tolerable (like buying a car) or to try to start another venture (mostly mining). Nobody realized the bitcoin couldn’t be spent on anything better than bitcoin in the long run. But this is how the market works.

I’m grateful for those who decided to retire early…they’re forced sellers!
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Jake Woodhouse 11mo ago

Amazing insight. Thanks for sharing

There will have only been a tiny fraction of the global population that was close to Bitcoin at that time

I wonder: what few things you knew, and researched, that took your life to that point

Fascinating

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Dr. Bitcoin, MD 11mo ago

Easy: I got the shit kicked out of me and had all my money stolen at a pivotal time in life. I was maybe 12 or 13. I had $300 saved up and it was my intention to use savings to get out of a shitty situation and make it to college.

Losing that money was a tough pill to swallow. Fast forward 20+ years and I read a slashdot article on Bitcoin. And then immediately I read the white paper, which is rather informal and easy to read compared to my undergrad training in astrophysics and math. I was running Bitcoin software within minutes. Only learned I had to select generate from a menu like a day or so later (the burden of being busy is that stupid things happen frequently).

It was a desire to provide a safe place for others to store money that can’t be stolen that lead me to mine. I was fortunate to have the right technical background to understand how bitcoin could work but not so much education so as to see ways that it might not work…Goldilocks zone for heart and head education pre-bitcoin.

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Jake Woodhouse 11mo ago

Brilliant. What a journey

I love how seemingly unrelated things combing to create decisions and then outcomes

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Dr. Bitcoin, MD 11mo ago

While I didn’t understand it at the time, the longer I live the more clearly I see God’s hand in my life.

Enumerating such blessings becomes a difficult task when things that seemed to be simply completely bad end up being pivotal blessings.