I just re-checked. It was actually 2009 sorry.
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?
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.
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.
I do have this from 2014:
Project Proposal: Data Rental using the Ethereum Blockchain, Spetember 2014
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.
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…”
> 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".
