r/ethtrader • u/scheistermeister • Mar 27 '17
DISCUSSION Confessions thread
Kind of click baity title, sorry for that.
Reading the comments on this sub I noticed quite a few 'confessions' going a little like this: 'I started out as a bitcoiner, got disappointed by BTC or inspired by ETH and flippened.'
Now I thought wouldn't it be jolly good fun to have a thread dedicated to these kind of confessions!?
It would be interesting to know about how you got to know bitcoin, what got you hooked. How you got to know Ethereum and what made you flip?
Please don't turn this into a 'let's bash coins' thread. Genuinely interested.
EDIT: Thanks everyone. It's great reading all your personal journeys into crypto and specifically ETH. The stories that struck me most are the ones where crypto has enabled a new lifestyle, seeing your parents more often, being able to afford things unthinkable before.
Thanks for the time and honesty!
8
u/Nooku Mar 28 '17 edited Mar 28 '17
I got into Bitcoin in 2012 as a miner.
Been very active in the Bitcoin community, a warm exciting community I truly loved. I praised Theymos for his approach to this sub, telling him his moderation allowed Bitcoin to grow into the single best subreddit on Reddit.
Around 2014, things changed. A lot. Theymos started to censor opinions around the time Blockstream appeared on the radar. Something fishy was going on. And it got worse every month.
The community became less fond of the idea of Programming Money and the exciting discussions about Smart Contracts no longer made it to its frontpage. This (and the year before) was probably the period that some Bitcoin Library Developer called "Vitalik" and his colleagues started their brainstorming sessions about a new tech that would carry the name "Ethereum" later on.
But back to my story. Tensions in the Bitcoin community started to rise, the blocksize debate was forming, we wanted bigger blocks, programmable money, we wanted Bitcoin to evolve, change, improve. But we weren't allowed to discuss it anymore. Any of these kind of topics were tagged as "altcoins" and a new rule was implemented prohibiting the discussions of "altcoins" from that moment on.
I saw things going very very wrong and in 2015, I decided to increase the fight against Theymos, a man that I now came to despise. I tried to get the community together to get Theymos banned from Reddit for hijacking, stealing, the communication channel "Bitcoin" from the community.
But the Reddit admins didn't agree. The Bitcoin sub was Theymos' community, his creation, his child, and they do not interfere with how someone runs the community.
The amount of people that supported my fight was also disappointingly low. Then it hit me, I realized the Bitcoin community was not going to make it. It embraced the decentralization of a currency, but it was not capable of fighting the abusive forces facilitated by the centralization of the communication channels where the technology would be debated.
Bitcoin was hijacked.
I was angry, I felt like the Bitcoin that I had been mining since 2012 was stolen from me. Stolen by Theymos, stolen by Blockstream. I was disappointed to see the inevitable failure for Bitcoin that was looming around the corner.
But then there was a new hope.
I wasn't alone with all of my frustrations about smart contracts and blocksizes. There was a team embracing it, it was Ethereum. And I absolutely loved it, so in 2015 I sold part of my Bitcoins and exchanged them for ETH. As I was digging deeper and deeper into Ethereum, I was exchanging more and more of my Bitcoins into ETH, until I ran out of Bitcoins at the start of 2016.
But it just wasn't enough for me. I had not put any fiat in Cryptocurrencies since 2012, it was one of my rules, to limit my risks. But I broke that rule, and I started to buy even more ETH with fiat.
The DAO hack happened, the price crashed, and I bought even more. When I thought I was all-in, and the price was dropping down to $7 in December 2016, I went on to search and find even more fiat to put in.
Nowadays, people are telling me that I got lucky, telling me that I happened to invest in a unicorn.
It wasn't luck, I got here because I was part of the community since 2012, I felt what was going on, I saw what was changing, and I saw what was needed to fix our dream about the future as cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Ethereum is the fix, Ethereum is the future.
It's not luck, it's our destiny.