Does sound a wee bit whiny... especially since it seems to me that you must be doing something wrong if you are saying that you are more poor today as compared to 2017 (inflation adjusted or whatever.. 

and even going by your forum registration date, you just got here during the later portions of the 2017 run, to the extent that you might have had started to buy BTC in 2017, yet even if you did not blow your whole wadd in the peak of 2017, you would have had 2018, 2019 and  2020 to accumulate bitcoin.. Holy fucking shit, there would have been, and should have had been opportunities to stack some sats in the past nearly 8 years, even if you had front-loaded your BTC investment in BTC at some point in late 2017.

So for example, if you had invested $100 per week into bitcoin starting from your forum registration date, you would have had invested nearly $40k, and accumulated nearly 3 BTC.    Yet you could have accumulated an additional 7 BTC or so, if you had been able to front load your investment into BTC with another $40k somewhere towards the beginning of the time that you came to the forum.  So that could have had been 10 BTC with $80k invested (those are mindrust amounts of BTC) .. and surely would not be a bad place to be and even should have had put you better off today as compared to BTC, especially if you had been able to focus on BTC, even if your dollar availability amounts might have had been different than the amounts I outlined as a possible budget.

sure if i had never spent any. but the general rule the wife and i came up with was back in 2011 when mining 1/3 was to be for repayment of the mining card, 1/3 was to electric, and the last 1/3 was to be "saved."

however, i, like many other who mined cheap coins back in the day, sold a lot of those cheap coins back in the day,

so, whale? haha no. im more like plankton.

So... it is a Friday night, and I am feeling loquacious.  And no, that does not mean drubk.  Or Drumpt.  On Whisskey or anything else... sue me.  pip paf poofle.

If I were not lazy I could dig around and find a post where i said something along the lines of "...Until the powers that be figure out that ETH (or ETH like chains) will allow them to print all the digital money they want".

And much more recently I warned that the ETFs were a mixed blessing. Increasing adoption at the cost of centralization of holdings... following as similar pattern as gold.

A couple months or 3 back I said something on NOSTR along the lines of "prepare yourself to hear big 'maxi' type talking heads to start to front for 'stable coins'".

*sigh*

As much as I love to be right from a sort of egotistic view... I wish I was wrong.

That said.  We are not in the absolute woods.  The powers that be are taking a foothold for sure.  But they are also realizing there is a strong incentive to keep bolstering the network now that they are invested.  Think of the prior example of miner manufacturers "testing" their chips by "burning them in for months" lol.  Butterfly labs..  Bitmain.

And now people like Saylor and Lummis are inching towards the idea of issuing "stable coins" to save the USD.  And this mean ETH opr Solana or whatever other shitcoin centralized garbage is in vogue.   And maybe also BTC on LND? ( https://web.archive.org/web/20241201051720/https://www.weforum.org/organizations/lightning-labs/ )  It looks a lot like this is where we are going.

Ultimately all this does nothing other than change timeliness, and offer opportunities.

Bitcoin will never stop being king.  And more money coming into the digital realm means more money to get parked in the corn.  

Eventually.

Ok... loquacious mode off.  Read and merit (or hate) before i delete it lol.

So... it is a Friday night, and I am feeling loquacious.  And no, that does not mean drubk.  Or Drumpt.  On Whisskey or anything else... sue me.  pip paf poofle.

If I were not lazy I could dig around and find a post where i said something along the lines of "...Until the powers that be figure out that ETH (or ETH like chains) will allow them to print all the digital money they want".

And much more recently I warned that the ETFs were a mixed blessing. Increasing adoption at the cost of centralization of holdings... following as similar pattern as gold.

A couple months or 3 back I said something on NOSTR along the lines of "prepare yourself to hear big 'maxi' type talking heads to start to front for 'stable coins'".

*sigh*

As much as I love to be right from a sort of egotistic view... I wish I was wrong.

That said.  We are not in the absolute woods.  The powers that be are taking a foothold for sure.  But they are also realizing there is a strong incentive to keep bolstering the network now that they are invested.  Think of the prior example of miner manufacturers "testing" their chips by "burning them in for months" lol.  Butterfly labs..  Bitmain.

And now people like Saylor and Lummis are inching towards the idea of issuing "stable coins" to save the USD.  And this mean ETH opr Solana or whatever other shitcoin centralized garbage is in vogue.   And maybe also BTC on LND? ( https://web.archive.org/web/20241201051720/https://www.weforum.org/organizations/lightning-labs/ )  It looks a lot like this is where we are going.

Ultimately all this does nothing other than change timeliness, and offer opportunities.

Bitcoin will never stop being king.  And more money coming into the digital realm means more money to get parked in the corn.  

Eventually.

Ok... loquacious mode off.  Read and merit (or hate) before i delete it lol.