I came across Bitcoin in 2011 when Paypal freezed my business Paypal account and a mid-5-figure amount for ‘at least 6 months’ for selling Absinthe which is perfectly legal in Europe and more than a year ago they audited my shop and approved it manually. I had to hire a lawyer to get my money out without waiting their insane 6 months, their revenge was cancelling my private account and my girlfirends’ too and giving me a lifetime ban without notification, but I tried to activate it again and writing to support even after 10 years, no chance.

Well, Bitcoin didn’t work well back then (and doesn’t until today in my opinion), but despite the fact I was selling my stuff with some other credit card and bank processing, I stayed in Bitcoin for years. Until the block size wars went insane and I proposed to solve it by doubling the block size every halving but have been laughed at by several Bitcoiners I respected until then. But I was pretty sure, I can’t be the only one to think a fixed variable for the space available for transactions and searched for other proposals… Until I came accross Monero in 2016.

Until then I was a Bitcoin maximalist, since pretty much all coins had some kind of scams built in and I started searching for the scam in Monero… And I’m doing it until today!

Was into mining and saw Monero on the charts, but thought it was just some random coin until I saw videos about it (probably Mental Outlaw as well)

I saw people complaining in a github issue that a privacy open source project didn’t accept monero for donations.

As I did my research, I discovered it was my kind of crazy.

Me in 2009: university level education on cryptography, but poor student. Discover Bitcoin, but think it can’t work to replace money. Great idea, but who would want all their money and transactions visible for the world? Obvious zero knowledge proofs are needed. But I’ll buy some when I have money. Started solo mining, but didn’t have a good GPU, so gave up before mining anything.

2010-2014: slowly have some money, but damn these price fluctuations. Also afraid it would get banned or criminalized. My draw dropped to the floor as Bitcoin claimed to $1000, but I refused to buy at all time highs, even though every week there was a new ATH.

2015-2016: ok, seems stable, let me buy some bitcoin. But I invest most money in stocks. Also afraid of choosing the wrong shitcoin, so only buy Bitcoin. Crypto friends told me to buy Ethereum. I was stupid, should have listened.

2017-2020: stocks seemed better than crypto to me. I was partially wrong, partially right. No regrets, made some good money.

2021: by now, it’s evident that Monero is the technically best coin to replace money. Interest rates are low and (after Covid rebound) stocks are overvalued. Start to pour serious money into Monero in January. Then it hit 300+ around April. And I saw some MAGA idiots posting on r/Monero. Figured if the dumb money is entering, I should sell, so I sold a significant chunk.

2022 until now: slow and steady accumulation of Monero. Basically. dollar cost averaging, but always buying through low limit orders. My portfolio is always in the Green this way.

to my shame, probably mental outlaw

ive heard of monero before but he sparked my interest

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I was into stocks, all r/wallstreetbets-like. I went all-in on GME and made insane gains only to be wiped out by all the shitty brokers DISABLING the BUY BUTTON. Only didn’t loose all my money because my mom begged me to cash out my initial at the very top. After that fiasco I was like “fuck it, if it is going to be like this I might as well invest in crypto where I know upfront that it’s manipulated af”. I don’t know how exactly I came to Monero but I was looking for fundamentals and after a few days investigating some rank 6000 shitcoin I realized that Monero was and still is the only god damn currency that is used. I then proceeded to put all my savings into Monero during a CSGO match. I haven’t made money from Monero going up but I did make a lot of good friends since then and learned a lot of FOSS-related things, I am really happy with how things went <3

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I never trusted bitcoin and knew every move was being tracked by the feds… I also got tired of shady in person cash deals in parking lots for ‘clean’ BTC…

Fast forward many years and now I’m a Monero extremist.

It was pretty easy for me lmfao. Was on dread heard about the benefits of using monero and I well dropped btc instantly and began using it. Here I am today and pretty satisfied with monero and its community. Also Im not too fond of having my transactions public and traceable. Xmr for life!❤️‍🔥

I was interested in BTC and used it from 2014 until the fees went stupid in 2017 and abandones it. Lastyear i wanted another crack at crypto because i was still interested and found out Monero has low fees, faster confirmations, and is actually private.

Austro-Libertarianisn -> BTC Standard -> Luke Smith -> Mental Outlaw -> You Guys