Circa 2007, PayPal, Liberty Reserve, Solid Trust Pay and Moneybookers were some of the digital currency services available to the common man in some of the major economies. India wasn’t far behind, and there were a handful of shady exchangers for some of these services.
Using these services was the only way for most people trying to transfer money globally. You could sell INR for Liberty Reserve if you wanted to undertake forex trading on a MetaTrader based platform or for that matter participate in scammy HYIPs (High-Yield Investment Programs).
As an outlier, I was trying different things to become a self-employed individual. I also enjoyed the small profits I was making trading a few currency pairs. But, one fine morning in 2007 my email accounts, Liberty Reserve and a LiteForex trading account were hacked!
I had a dial-up internet connection at the time with an uptime of just 50% at best! Owing to the consistent downtime, I often relied on local cyber-cafes to check my emails, which led to the one-time account hacking incident. I lost ALL of money, and it was a LOT for it's time!
This incident made me very afraid of anything remotely close to the words, ‘digital currency’ and holding money on the Internet.
This was my first experience with digital currencies and Bitcoin hadn’t been invented yet!
Bitcoin: Magic Internet Money!
Circa 2009, a friend and I collaborated on a wordpress based technology blog. One fine day he suggested that I run this unique software which uses my computer’s processing power to solve mathematical puzzles.
He had stumbled into Bitcoin on a blackhat forum and was messing with it on his computer and asked me to try it out. I was curious, so we installed the software one day on my laptop. This software was supposed to utilize my laptop’s processing power, and add to the computing power of a larger network to achieve certain specific results. If it works, it might create Bitcoins I was told!
I had no idea how or what made it work. But it was the age of curiosity, and we tried out most softwares we could get our hands on! So, I allowed him to set it up and within minutes of running it, my laptop came to a halt! It started overheating resulting in a BSOD later in the day. Luckily I managed to fix it up and few weeks later, got myself a new desktop.
My friend at the time moved cities and was setting up a Bitcoin mining rig. Seeing as he was hyped over it, I decided to give it another shot. But the CPU based miner slowed down my computer. I was unsure about tweaking any of the settings and my friend was off the grid. Ergo, I refused to run it anymore and removed it completely.
It was the first quarter of 2010, and $1 value of bitcoin was an overestimation. No one at the time expected Bitcoin to become a global phenomena, let alone hold any real world value. It wasn’t a store of value as it has become today.
Look where we are today!
Priorities
My priorities at the time was simple: Travel!
Motorcycling was my way of life and I travelled a fair bit! At home, I was busy teaching myself to build websites using wordpress, search engine optimization, digital advertising and taking up freelance projects to fund my life! I had no time for embracing something so radical and couldn’t be bothered with it. I had no extra money to invest in any hardware so I let it be!
I hadn’t given it more than a couple of hours worth of attention on two different occasions at the time. I know what you are thinking at this point! What an Idiot!
We are now at $16000/BTC at press time! There was a small opportunity cost to get into Bitcoin at an early stage. But I paid for it through my fear, ignorance and differing priorities. This is how I missed the boat on Bitcoin!
Nearly missed it!
But luckily, it found me again and again. In 2011, I stumbled across a few threads on Bitcoin on, ‘BlackHatWorld.’ It seemed to generate some buzz within certain circles and I found a few posts about mining Bitcoin. But even at the time it seemed to be very radical and I couldn't comprehend its real world utility, so I passed up on it again as I didn't have the time nor funds for investing in a miner.
Sometimes you can't see things that's right in front of you!
Another few years passed and I finally jumped in on the bandwagon by starting to HODL it a little bit, and I haven't looked back since!
So, Let's Talk!
Did you stumble across Bitcoin in it's early days and miss the boat? If Yes, What happened?
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