Why I’m Not a Bitcoin Billionaire, by Reuben Godfrey

By Reuben Godfrey

For a nation that holds the maxim ‘if you’re not in, you can’t win’ so dearly, that believes in one-way property ladders and spawned Paddy Power, why has Bitcoin been so slow to gain traction in Ireland? We’re a nation that likes a punt and surely there has been no greater punt in recent memory that Bitcoin (BTC). As a long-time observer and supporter of BTC, I wanted to share my-own experiences up to now and finally put my FIAT where my trust is.

Hindsight is 20/20, they say.. if only I’d invested a couple of hundred on Bitcoin at the right time I’d be a billionaire by now. Well… millionaire anyway. I first heard about Bitcoin in early 2012 when a ‘coin’ was still valued only around 5.50 euro. I had been living abroad and I was dedicating my spare time to reading all I could about the recent Global financial melt-down. This will be a familiar internet-rabbit-hole to many readers.. Fanny and Freddy, sub-prime lending, institutional collapses, contagions. I read deeper and discovered evil corporations and clandestine meetings, missing gold, stolen gold, masonic plots and the New World Order. Scary stuff..

On the less colourful side, I began to understand how money is created and distributed and I had become fascinated with the possibilities afforded by the internet of a decentralised, borderless, currency that could exist solely in the virtual realm. I was rambling on about this over a beer with a journalist friend when he asked if I was talking about Bitcoin.. turns out an American friend of his was mining coins locally. I asked if he could arrange a meeting; he asked but the meeting was declined, unwilling to let others in to this secretive underworld. This would not be the first frustration and disconnect I would experience with this burgeoning platform.

“People don’t like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”
? Terry Pratchett, Making Money

While I understood the economic, and even philosophical, necessity for Bitcoin, I wasn’t technically proficient enough to begin mining myself.. any forums I went on to learn more were written in a dialect of Nerd-speak I found impenetrable and my naive questions were laughed off for my lack of technical nous. Alternately, I could find very few people in the community back then who ‘got’ the bigger picture and no-one in traditional business that would take me seriously at-all (”A what now? Sure that doesn’t make any sense at all”).

I began to lose enthusiasm.. I had got as far as setting-up a wallet and had even been given some coin to get me started but a combination of not knowing who to trust and a few early scare-stories about viruses and attacks led me to delete all trace of Bitcoin from my laptop.. It was around this time that I left Europe, moved to a bamboo hut and forgot about the financial revolution I had been so keen to witness.

By the time I was back in Europe and had begun to revisit Bitcoin I was already regretting my decision to abandon my wallet; the price per coin had risen to around 60 dollars. At this point, too, I was completely broke and, as the adage goes, I could not invest that which I could not afford to lose. It seemed to me that the massive growth was only beginning so I evangelised to anyone I knew with ears and an income to research this phenomenon for themselves and invest.

I wasn’t wrong, within eight months the price went close to 1000 dollars a coin. The price has fallen again since then with lots of peaks and troughs in the mean time – a new commodity/currency on the menu for traders will always be volitile – but currently the price sits at about $400, it was the best performing currency last year and has even outperformed gold recently.

So.. what now? Well, smug and self-satisfied as I might be with my ‘told-you-so’ swag, I really don’t want to be writing this same story in 2 year’s time. I plan to invest whatever I can now

because I don’t think Bitcoin is going away any time soon. In Davos this week there were posters in the airport  welcoming Satoshi and Blockchain was firmly on the agenda  . Clandestine meetings about a New World Order? Scary stuff indeed.

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