204
I was first told about Bitcoin while sitting in a friend’s dorm room around 2010.
You might be thinking right now... “this guy got in early. This guy mined in the glory days. This guy is a Bitcoin millionaire.”
Not so; quite the contrary. I held off for ten years.
I had several anarchistic friends back in the college days, some of whom were using gaming PC’s to mine on university power. They didn’t care about the future of money, or the politics of Bitcoin; they just wanted to burn some of someone else's money for shits and giggles.
Those same friends would upgrade, ditch, and/or burn out their computers in a year. Several forget their private keys or lost their hard drives, and become classic "landfill millionaires." I'm sure more than a few of them are kicking themselves about what they left behind.
I knew early of the potential for a digitized currency standard, one kept intentionally separate from private enterprise and government interference alike: I saw the writing on the wall the moment clever eBay merchants figured out they could sell items and gold for popular MMORPG’s in those spaces, but I didn't understand its meaning...
If people were willing to pay dollars for gold and items in Diablo 2, EverQuest and World of Warcraft, they would certainly be willing to pay for something like Bitcoin. The market already existed; it just hadn't been properly attuned to the value of a truly intangible asset.
The above, highly pixelated image is the item stats sheet for the unique ring, "The Stone of Jordan."
Back in the internet's bygone era of telephone modems and 200ms average pings, this was first intangible internet good ever purchased that I can personally attest to.
A kid at school spending cash dollar money on a Stone of Jordan for his character in the Blizzard Entertainment action-RPG Diablo 2. When you're eleven years old, your allowance isn't too huge; that kid spent FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS on a RING... in a VIDEO GAME!!!
Admittedly petty compared to today's microtransactive gaming space, but in the year 2000, that was a lot of money to spend on something you'd never touch. Bethesda Softworks wouldn't sell Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion players a set of horse armor for $4.99 for almost another five years.
The Stone of Jordan is an infamous item in the Diablo 2 community, and certainly worthy of a trivia entry on its fandom wiki page. Back then, the item was used as a kind of currency on Battle.Net between high level Diablo players to trade for what essentially amounted to completely broken (and often totally duplicated to hell) pieces of gear, weapons and equipment for grinding "Hell" difficulty bosses. Digital rings as digital 'premium' currency traded between pseudonymous player characters entirely online... in the year 2000.
I watched as a lazy, snot-nosed brat spent his lunch money on a ring in a video game. And, somehow, I didn't foresee that the world's first 'digital gold' would be worth money.
I can't say for certain why I doubted so much... but, at the time, I simply didn’t believe the hype for Bitcoin. I had seen the signs and played ALL the games; I knew Steve Bannon was running WoW gold farms out of China in 2008. I knew that REAL people were paying real dollars to get gold delivered to their WoW characters. It didn't matter that it violated the terms of service set by Activision-Blizzard; what mattered was that people were paying dollars and euros and pounds for gold coins in the World of Warcraft.
How could I not already see that there were exchange rates between digital "gold" and FIAT money long before the first Genesis block was minted by Satoshi Nakamoto?
In spite of Bitcoin’s magnificent ascent, there is and continues to be no such thing as a “get rich quick” scheme. Based on my own research and a few recorded interviews, few of the early Bitcoin miners expected to get rich: make a ripple, hurt the U.S. dollar, erode a little central government control and maybe prove that a centralized currency with a feels-based-backing could be a dangerous road to keep travelling on down... getting rich ended up being a side-effect of having the political beliefs of a stoic libertarian in 2011. Who could have predicted that?
All of the above is, perhaps, just nostalgic wax about what the world was like back then; how anyone with the cultural knowledge of the internet could have ridden this boat and seen that change coming...
It should be noted, however, that this is NOT FOMO; I'm not upset I missed out, quite the contrary.
I feared the volatility of Bitcoin and much other cryptocurrencies, and I was hesitant to trade my dollars for crypto because dollar value was something I could understand. I had long known of Bitcoin's existence, but it would be a decade before I would understand Bitcoin's significance. I made my choices in that context alone, and because of that context, I held off on getting involved. The first and greatest way to avoid FOMO is to forgive your past self for not being able to predict the future.
But given the above knowledge set... it is reasonable to pause, and ask oneself, "how did I not see this coming?"
Any kid who grew up playing computer RPG's knows the value of a good item. That's a concept, a kind of emotional attachment, that culturally has no equal in the 20th century. How do you explain to a person born in 1920-1940 the value of a Stone of Jordan inside the space of Diablo 2, if they have absolutely no frame of reference for what the fuck you're talking about?
Many people, smarter and brighter than me, will continue to miss the writing on the wall... sometimes, we just have to point a flashlight and explain some shit. Eventually, they just might understand. Asking grandma to play Diablo 2 in 2000 seemed like a tall order, just like how investing in Bitcoin in 2011 seemed like a tall order to me... at the time.
Perhaps I just needed someone to shine a light on the wall and explain some things to me about what I was seeing. Eventually, someone did.
Thank you for your time, and HODL! This mid-May market dip has been vicious. If you got liquidated in a long call on margin... I'm sorry.
Until next time. Stay curious, friends...
