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15 years ago today, the global banking system collapsed. And the savings of everyday people were raided to save it. Satoshi created Bitcoin so it would never happen again. - Hexbear
hexbear.netI wish more people knew about Bitcoin's connection to the bank bailouts. Bitcoin
unfortunately does not have the best brand ambassadors. This week is a great
opportunity to tell your friends about it, because it matters. The 2008 bank
bailouts were a major motivator behind the creation of Bitcoin. The first block
ever mined even contains a reference to it: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on
brink of second bailout for banks. During the bank bailouts, the government just
printed a bunch of money and gave it to the banks, around 700 billion USD. They
did this because it was politically expedient, well really because they had to
or the whole damned system would collapse. And the 99% ended up paying for the
mistakes of the 1%. All of us were made to pay for the mistakes of a very small,
incredibly powerful and wealthy segment of society who made reckless investment
decisions. People lost their homes, their jobs, their livelyhoods, their
savings, and yet not a single one of those bankers went to jail. Instead, they
took the bailout money and gave themselves extravagant bonuses. Yet the problem
is not new, throughout history, every nation that has ever failed, has had their
currency end in hyperinflation. The temptation to print money is too strong.
Perhaps it is something that should not be entrusted to politicians or even
humans at all. Satoshi, in his wisdom, created a system by which no new money
could ever be printed. No corruptible, tempted authority could use it to turn on
the money printer and rob entire generations of their wealth or force them to
pay for wars they did not support. He made a currency which cannot be corrupted
and cannot be hacked, with 99.9% uptime, with instant transfers across borders.
It is neutral technology open to anybody with a phone or a computer and access
to the internet. Which is much less than you need to open a bank account.
Bitcoin doesn't care about your credit history, or whether or not you can
provide a reliable mailing address. Bitcoin doesn't close on weekends and will
never charge you exorbitant fees to use your own money. You never have to wait
days for a payment to clear. Bitcoin puts you in charge of your money and nobody
else. And it makes sure nobody can print away its value. But then a bunch of
people came along selling get-rich-quick schemes based on crypto technology, and
everybody goes "crypto bad". Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn't stick
around to get rich off it, he didn't use it for celebrity, he just made Bitcoin
and disappeared. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.
It wouldn’t be a cult without proselytizing, would it? 
I miss the good ol’ days of bitcoin. Back when people weren’t wasting gigawatts of power mining this shit inside of warehouses full of vastly overpriced GPUs. All the way back when Bitcoin was widely ridiculed and you’d be called a rube for thinking of it as a sound investment. Back when techbros were begging people to spend it on actual goods and services to legitimize it as a currency.
Most importantly, back when you could use it to buy cool, illegal shit online like LSD. As far as I’m concerned, that was the only worthwhile reason for bitcoin exist at all, and it can’t even do that anymore because of how inflated the price is.
somebody once offered me 20 bitcoins in exchange for my username on irc
i turned him down because Bitcoin was worthless
The most I ever had at once was one entire bitcoin. I got it back when it was at $300 and used it to buy weed for the first few times in my life.
It must suck to think about the what-ifs in situations like these, especially yours with 20 entire bitcoins. How early on was that, btw? By worthless, do you mean all the way back when they were worth maybe a few cents to a couple dollars?
Regardless, when you really think about it, it doesn’t even matter. Say you took the 20 bitcoins. They would initially just be some kind of novelty to you, and you’d store it on your PC and not think about it for a while. But one day you’d find out your Bitcoins that were worth a couple dollars before are now worth $20 each. Wow, amazing! Better cash out before this bubble bursts. Just got lucky and made a few hundred bucks!
There is just no conceivable scenario where any sane person continues to hold onto them until they’re a millionaire.
yeah it’s crazy to think about it… at one point that would’ve been worth over 100k
at the time it was offered Bitcoin was worth around $.05
I honestly never thought it would be worth more than that
but when i think about it i don’t get bothered too much because i imagine i probably would’ve lost them before they were worth anything substantial since i used to format my computer several times a year without ever backing anything up, and beyond that, if i had them and they were worth $100 or something I likely would’ve sold them all at that low price and then I’d really be kicking myself
Can’t do it anymore because Bitcoin transactions are all public and police can easily trace who’s buying what. Use Monero and you can still buy drugs online.
I’ve never been too concerned about the traceability of bitcoin because I always got it by paying in cash, they wouldn’t be able to connect the wallet to my identity.
But also because the police aren’t going to launch an investigation into one person buying personal consumption amount of drugs online. Well, not unless they already knew your identity and were already coming after you, but in that case you’d be fucked regardless of which cryptocurrency you used. The traceability is something only dealers and people who buy in bulk need to worry about.
Once you bust one vendor or market, it’s pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it’s on chain it’s there forever; don’t make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.
(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)
No one uses GPUs to mine Bitcoin specifically; GPU mining was on its last legs in 2012 when FPGA mining started up, and by 2014 it was totally dead because ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, aka custom mining chips) came onto the scene. The GPUs are for altcoins now.
Source: Was a miner back then; got out in like 2014, after wasting most of my bitcoin buying ASICs that showed up too late to make back what they cost. (But on the bright side, I’d still be an awful smug techbro lib if I’d retired off my bitcoin gains, so in many ways this outcome is better lol)
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Back during the early days of bitcoin, it was really the only major cryptocurrency. There didn’t yet exist this kind of incentive to waste an entire small country’s worth of energy and resources to mine the cryptocurrencies that exist now.
I never got into it as I was into drugs. A friend of mine did, and spent most of his Bitcoin (that he mined for free on bog standard PCs at his work, because you could do that then) on drugs. He opened an old laptop a few years back and found 2 BTC though, and spent them on a small warehouse in Athens to live in! I can’t begrudge him that in the slightest!