Opportunities That Slip Through the Cracks... My Bitcoin Story!

Have you ever come across an opportunity that promised to be amazing, but for any number of reasons, you chose not to get involved?

Perhaps there was a cost to participate, and you didn't have the money. Perhaps you had a prior commitment. Perhaps it just didn't seem "sensible" at the time, so you skipped past it.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and there's a big difference between simply saying "I WISH I had bought Microsoft stock in the early days" and actually having been offered Microsoft stock in the early days and turned it down.

Lots of us wish we had invested in Bitcoin in the early days... but were we actually standing there with cash in hand but decided against it?

My own such story is that I was standing in our kitchen during the holidays in 2012, listening to my sister-in-law excitedly telling me about this new "Digital Internet Money" called "Bitcoin."

Although she was not at all a tech geek, she thought I might be interested since I was "into computers." She'd learned about it from a guy who'd helped her remove some malware from her computer... she pretty much only used her computer for Facebook and sending email.

Although I was skeptical, I did do due diligence and tried to research Bitcoin (remember, this was last 2012, folks!) online, but didn't come up with a whole lot.

However, I did my best to understand the whole "mining" thing (which was buried in layers of impenetrable techno-jargon in 2012) and struggled to understand the point of it. To be honest, I was far more interested in the idea of an alternative "off the books" currency than mining it.

Still, maybe there was something to it? Using your computer to solve complex math problems?

Of course, it turned out that this "mining" would require a specialized computer with a supercharged CPU which my home machine certainly didn't have. And I didn't really have the money to spend on something untested like that, and I didn't have the technical savvy to set it up, anyway.

But I thought I could at least try to BUY some Bitcoin, just for grins.

Of course, buying this "invisible money" was a bit trickier to understand and negotiate. The closest to an understandable way of doing so was a fairly new "gateway" called LocalBitcoins which put buyers and sellers together.

I figured I was willing to throw about $400 at the idea — mostly as a "throwaway investment" (HAH!) — which at the going rate of about $13-14 would have given me about 30 Bitcoin. The only reason I was even willing to take it that far was that this whole "blockchain" idea seemed to at least be cheat/fraud resistant. I liked that.

As it turned out, there were precisely two people listed as sellers of Bitcoin in the greater Seattle area. There were a couple more who were "willing to travel" for $2,000 or more, but I wasn't about to do that!

I pondered the whole thing for a couple of weeks and got very close to "go time!"

Alas, I got cold feet when the actual deal required me to drive some 40 miles to the outskirts of Seattle where I would meet this "broker" in a Starbucks where I would hand him $400 cash and he would give me a piece of paper (which I now understand was a "paper cold storage wallet") somehow proving my ownership of this digital money. It just seemed very "black market" and clandestine, so I decided against scheduling that final appointment.

At current prices (October 11, 2021) 30 Bitcoin is about US $1,725,000...

I didn't get actually get involved in Bitcoin till late 2016 when it was $700.

All I can really say is... Oh, well...

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

How about YOU? Do you have any investing "close calls" that you missed? Either with cryptos, or in conventional investing? How do you feel about it, in retrospect? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20211012 00:15 PDT
0366/1607