The Early Adopters

The people who took Bitcoin seriously in 2010 and 2011 were not, for the most part, gamblers looking for a quick profit.

They were cypherpunks who had been waiting for exactly this for twenty years. Libertarians who believed in hard money and distrusted central banks. Software engineers who read the whitepaper and understood immediately what Satoshi had actually solved. A few economists who recognised the monetary properties.

They were dismissed as cranks, idealists, and criminals by association. Their friends and families thought they’d joined a cult. The mainstream financial press barely noticed them.

What they saw — clearly, in 2010 and 2011 — was this: for the first time in human history, a form of money existed whose supply rules could not be changed by any government, institution, or individual. The implications of that took years for the mainstream to process. The early adopters were simply faster at following the logic.

Not all of them held. Many sold at $10, $100, $1,000 — at prices that felt like extraordinary gains at the time. Some lost their coins to exchange hacks. Some lost their seed phrases. Some lost their nerve in the crashes.

The ones who held through everything — the crashes, the ridicule, the regulatory threats, the exchange collapses — did so not because they were lucky but because they’d done the intellectual work of understanding what they held.

Conviction is the only thing that survives a 90% drawdown.

Tomorrow: Mt. Gox — the exchange that held most of the world’s Bitcoin.

— The Daily Bit