Yup. July 2010 slashdot.org article.

Of course I thought bitcoin was stupid, but having had an unfortunate incident as a poor kid trying to save money for college and gotten beat up and lost all my savings, and having had college degrees in astrophysics and math, I read the white paper and decided on the spot to start mining bitcoin. Got 4 blocks over the subsequent 12 hours before I had to be back at the hospital.

My hope was that maybe someday some kid somewhere could put money someplace where math instead of meat could defend it.

It’s no big deal if _you_ don’t understand Bitcoin…few people do.

But is a big deal if everyone else does understand bitcoin. A big big deal.

Plan accordingly.

Just about. But I’m a simple guy with narrow interests. I just ordered my first new vehicle of my life yesterday …and I have the dollars for it…no way I’m selling bitcoin for a vehicle. Never trade an appreciating asset for a depreciating one.

My secret insight to bitcoin longevity: resident salary increases fairly substantially every year (like 5% for me during a minimal inflation era)…then a decent bump for fellowship and a major bump for getting first real job and then substantially more every year until partner and then another healthy bump.

If you always make more money every year, it’s easy to hodl.

All the OG that quit their jobs or bought lots of stuff ended up where they started.

I’m fortunate in that I love being a radiologist and I’m really good at it. While I don’t _need_ to work, I want to enjoy life and still stack sats. So I stack what seem like tiny amounts of bitcoin for a rainy day. My $40/month coinbase auto buy in residency will pay for my first born’s college education.

While it may be required to reply, the response almost certainly doesn’t need to be informative. Lawyers will make bank on this easy to handle issue.

It amazes me how much I failed to grasp about Bitcoin for many years. We didn’t have Adam Back, Saifedean, Michael Saylor, or even Andreas back in the day. Being a resident left me little time too…thus I probably hold the record for being the slowest learner in Bitcoin.

I’m so glad I’m a nobody now in bitcoin. I used to be a somebody, in my spare time during residency. Bitcoin has grown beyond my wildest expectations. Hoping the next 13.5 years are as good as my first 13.5 years.

Sweet!

You should have seen my mining rig. It was a core 2 duo laptop. This was pre-gpu era. I stopped mining when I realized it would be a week before I mined another block.

Thankfully, it looks like I only used free sats to put my combination on the blockchain for ever. Back in the day, you could view an advertisement in exchange for a tiny amount of money…like 0.01 bitcoins.

Found it! https://mempool.space/address/1Combo78Edke1PrKEhYwwpGmEES9zBZmc3

Now that is vanity wallet if I’ve ever seen one. I did this once for a keypair to 1combo…it has 0.0028xxxx bitcoin on it to this day…and it’s my locker combination. I still have the lock, but not the private key.

I bet you dollars to donuts it’s just a sticker and the screen never changes :)

Wow, you’re loaded! Look at how much money that is! That’s gotta be like a billion sats!

https://youtu.be/Ia-mH6XuFcA?si=7X38m0MMOO0qklwd

Interesting podcast on a cryptographic proof of utxo set. The idea being one can prove validity of utxo set essentially instantly instead of downloading half a terabyte of bitcoin data.

Y’all are magicians in my book. Thank you for using your powers for good!

Fiat money can infinitely divide, it just never has. The opposite happens all the time. Even in developed countries. I think France did it in the 60s where it too 10 francs before such and such a date to equal a franc after such and such a date.

I doubt 1 sat will even equal a dollar (in purchasing power of today terms). But sat penny parity I expect to see in my lifetime…

Did you see Max hillebrand’s reply?

This is some seriously awesome tech. Homomorphic encryption lets signers and miners see input = output but not individual values of inputs and outputs. I wonder if it can show input - output = exact number (for miner fees)…

But this is crucial to solving the bitcoin fungibility problem. Which, imho, from a legal perspective, is the biggest elephant in the room…

Dr…missed that.

So…yeah, lol, I doubt he needed the general public hand waving intuitive view! I figured he was (like a lot of us here) a newbie pleb wondering how such a miracle could be possible (a lot of crypto stuff seems unbelievable!).

I was thinking about the bitcoin endgame. If money supply is expanding at 7% per year on average and results in 3% inflation, the. Eventually you’d expect bitcoin purchasing power to grow at about 4%. So, how much bitcoin will you need to retire someday? Well, how much income do you want per year? Multiply that by 25 (1 over 4%). If you want $1M income, you’d need $25M of bitcoin. That’s a huge retirement income and retirement usually comes after you’ve bought all the major things people buy…but it makes for nice round numbers.

This applies when bitcoin has come to steady state. I’m guessing that won’t happen even if bitcoin goes up 10x in price. But assuming it happens at 10x from now…that means $2.5M of bitcoin today could lead to a massive retirement income. If bitcoin could go up 100x, it would take $250,000 worth of bitcoin now to perhaps enjoy a retirement income higher than any annual income ever earned in fiat.

Eventually Bitcoin won’t always be the obvious best long term investment. Stocks should eventually regain their place as a better investment. But that might be 100x from now.