4 ms·
I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and wou
by jamal-kumar 2y ago
I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.
- rqtwteye 2y agoMe and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.
- paulpauper 2y agothis is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there
- geor9e 2y agoThat's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.
- i_am_a_squirrel 2y agolol
- gosub100 2y ago/r/neckbeardNests
- kevindamm 2y agobut what do you do for heating now?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- immibis 2y agomine bitcoins - on the NASL
- paulpauper 2y agohow much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway
- hunter-gatherer 2y agoThis was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.
- milesvp 2y agoThis is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.
- gosub100 2y agoI never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.
- digging 2y agoThere's almost no way to make really good decisions with crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on unfounded faith, like everyone else.
- 2y ago
- jajko 2y agoA very healthy life perspective, one you can't just get without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.
- Fraterkes 2y agoI don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?
- paulpauper 2y agomoney leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.
- retrac 2y agoThe story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.
- akira2501 2y agoIf you win the lottery put it in a living trust. If you don't have experience managing large sums of cash the likelihood of you navigating that challenge correctly is basically zero.
- johnrob 2y agoLiving a healthy life requires discipline and a certain amount of humility. Both of those traits are hard to maintain after a financial windfall IMO.
- copperx 2y agoElon Musk is living proof of this.
- getlawgdon 2y agoI feel compelled to ask: what side of that outcome do you think Musk exemplifies?
- 2y ago
- juliangoldsmith 2y agoThe BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.
- paulpauper 2y agodusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- teekert 2y agoReminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories. In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity. Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken. -> thanx Chat.
- namaria 2y agoHas the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.
- teekert 2y agoHmm, to me the worlds draw me in as soon as my eyes hit the paper, I love the world building, the detailed description, it make the whole reading experience so much richer for me. It's like Peter F Hamilton, his stories are insane in length but you almost feel like you experienced the book, and what it is like to live in that world.
- namaria 2y agoI find hard to dive into contrived realities. A good story with hints of a larger complicated world in which it happens is in my opinion much more enjoyable than painstakingly describing everything.
- teekert 2y agoI do have that with fantasy, but with scifi I always feel like “Yeah if we progress enough this could become reality one day…”
- Elizabeth0147 2y ago[dead]