It's easy to look at things in the past as missed opportunities without considering all the 'gambles' and great things you've achieved... eg. your wife/daughter... perhaps if you'd never gambled on chatting up your now wife, you'd not be with her and not have a daughter... maybe if you'd spent an extra 5 minutes in a casino 10 years ago you'd have left and got hit by a car. It's easy to forget about the good things in life and get bogged down by all the things that in retrospect seem like no brainers.... what if I'd bought Coca Cola shares in the fifties, or invested in Microsoft in the 80s or short sold British Airways Stock before 9/11, so many ifs, buts and maybes... try to focus on the things that matter, living life is much more important than counting it.

Oh man, you sound like me trying to do IM. I spent thousands of dollars on software. Then I went back to programming, because it was a waste of money trying to cheat the system.

Hold on to your 6.5BTC, its a respectable amount. If you use some, replace it. Build your savings over time like a 401k, $100/week or month. Whatever you can afford to throw away.

Can you explain why you bought mining equipment? I think it was pretty clear that people over invested in mining and I'm curious why that happened, why buy mining equipment and not just bitcoins?

So the moral is don't mine? That was a mistake but looking back to 2011, you gotta let that part go.

Thanks for sharing your story. I remember first hearing about bitcoin in 2012 when I heard about the deep web. I didn't think much of it, except that it was just a digital currency. If only I had researched it, just like I do with everything else. But oh well, I am a holder

Sure:

I was initially attracted to mining based on stories of GPU mining of BTC. I knew I had missed the boat on BTC mining, but I thought that I might be able to get ahead of curve with scrypt, but I was mistaken, clearly.

I also thought it might be a good way to diversify on my investment, things with BTC were pretty shaky around Mt. Gox time, and I thought that I could always sell the scrypt miners, or, if I got hacked, my investment sat in the miners and not in a wallet.


It was a decent diversification strategy in theory, but it underestimated difficulty increases and also the amount of time I had to invest in getting miners running.