bitcoin.org site went live in 2008. white paper also published in 2008.

> Nakamoto stated that work on the writing of the code for bitcoin began in 2007. On 18 August 2008, he or a colleague registered the domain name bitcoin.org, and created a web site at that address. On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

A white paper was sent to a small group of people in 2008, yes. But the group that acted on that is a subset of those people, that consists of maybe Hal Finney, Craig White, whoever Satoshi is, and a couple others. It's an extraordinarily small group of people.

Well, AI mostly. Let's just say I thought it was interesting but not worth pursuing.

I just re-checked. It was actually 2009 sorry.

Prove it. There are other 2009 era bitcoiners here who can vouch if you were there. The community was known in 2009.

My x to doubt is because nobody claims to have “been in blockchain since 2008” it’s a give away that your talking trash. The Genesis block date was Jan 3rd 2009. You were talking to satoshi about Bitcoin pre launch?

Yeah - agree... also anyone throwing out a quick "Let's just say..." immediately makes me question the legitimacy of their claims. It's a handwave at best, but most often I've seen folks use it to cover up a bs claim by being incredibly vague, all while attempting to come off as cheeky and intelligent.

The community was not fully known back then (at least not in 2009, post-launch). It was possible to play around with the bitcoin wallet software back then, let it mine some coins from your desktop, and read the bitcointalk forum but not post on the forums or trade whatever you mined until it was worth a few bucks a bit later.

I was one of those people (might have been early 2010 for me though, can't quite remember when I first became aware of bitcoin, but it was pretty early). I remember seeing the post about bitcoin first being exchanged for pizza after I had a bitcoin wallet. I read the forums sometimes but never posted (which is odd, because I posted on a bunch of forums back then).

Of course if I had a time machine I would have been mining nonstop back then, instead of just briefly to play around with it, and held on to it until much later. I thought it was cool but at the time I thought if it was successful it just meant it would get up to roughly the same value as a US dollar, i.e. $1 for 1 bitcoin, and wouldn't go up much beyond that.

By the way, I held on to my coins for as long as I did in part because I was super paranoid about fucking up my transactions, so I get where the OP is coming from. For a casual user they probably don't want that stress. Hell, whenever I do a transaction to another wallet now that's more than $50 even today I check the address three or four times and still sweat a bit until I see it go through.

This largely matches my experience fwiw - I was in college in 2010 and didn’t have much money (and coins were harder to buy back then too, mining was still not super easy without a gpu rig).

I thought the tech was cool, but never owned any real amount and didn’t really have an understanding of why there might be long term value.

There was Bitcoin faucet which used to give out some free - I think that was how I got some tiny amount in my first wallet that I eventually lost when I wiped the laptop for sale.

Yeah I remember the faucets being around, and I want to say I must have collected some, but I don't recall any wallet that might have had them in there or where they might be stored if I even did. If I did I probably only did it once or twice, but that's like $200k+ worth of coins (in today's money, back then they were pretty much worthless) that's probably got recycled with an old desktop somewhere. Oops. But maybe I didn't bother either, I can't remember, it's so long ago now.

I can't of course. If I still had that wallet.. I'm not really a "true crypto believer" though.

I do have this from 2014:

Project Proposal: Data Rental using the Ethereum Blockchain, Spetember 2014

https://imgur.com/a/XLo2P3Z

If you know the history of Ethereum you'll know that is pretty early.

I was on the old "decentralization" Yahoo mailing list and the p2p mailing list back in the early 2000's too. If you can find an archive (which I can't!) you can check my background there.

What I object to is any doubt that today it is unsafe for anyone to self custody given the appropriate operational security. A hardware wallet is probably sufficient for nearly all cases of even non technical user. Where people go wrong these days is a) phished [education, instruct never never type those words into the computer…] b) tricked approvals [just don’t mess with eth until you know what you are doing. You will probably get scammed cos eth had a lot of scams.]

Self custody is a critical part of this ecosystem. It’s been the biggest mantra of the ecosystem, so I really don’t understand how you can think this is for a small segment. A vast majority of BTC and ETH is not on exchanges. It’s the entire point. What you are admitting to is saying “I was there at the start but I still don’t really get why…”

> "I was there at the start but I still don’t really get why…”

Where do you get that?

I understand the reasoning entirely. I disagree that it is important or that the security trade off is appropriate for almost anyone.

It’s the entire point. This is basically the entire purpose and meaning behind satoshis invention. It’s the first sentence on the first page of the white paper:

“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution“

Nah, who needs it???

I am aware of what Bitcoin is.

I'm saying (again!) that I don't think the trade-offs involved with self-custody are worth it.

So far all you've done is (a) attacked me personally, and (b) made some kind of circular argument that either I don't understand what Bitcoin is or restated your argument that it is important.

Ok, I get you think that. Just saying the same thing over and over again isn't actually a convincing argument.

I don't think that trade off is worthwhile because the risks associated with it outweigh the risk associated with it for almost anyone.