My Bitcoin Cash Journey: Chapter 1

I'm not sure when I first heard about Bitcoin. I remember hearing little stories here and there, like the one about the guy who held up a QR code at a college football game and made $25,000. But it was probably around the time of the whole Dorian Nakamoto saga that I'd say it first really entered my consciousness. I remember reading an article about them finding Bitcoin's anonymous creator, and not long after that, ended up talking about it with a buddy of mine in the middle of a golf round.

He seemed to know more about bitcoin than me, which wasn't saying much, but he tried to explain to me how bitcoins were acquired. Something about solving difficult math problems, and if you figure one out, you get rewarded with bitcoins. He also mentioned how they'd already figured most of the math problems out, so there were only a small amount of bitcoin left.

Like an idiot I thought, hey I'm decent at math, maybe I should try to solve one of these problems and get some bitcoins. But I'm so lazy, I never bothered looking up what the problems actually were.

Fast forward to early 2017, and I encountered bitcoin again when trying to deposit money into my sports betting account at Bovada. I even went to the trouble of setting up a Coinbase account, but I didn't take the final leap and actually purchase any coins.

A few weeks later, I ran into another friend at a kid's birthday party, and he was showing me all these coin prices on his phone and how much they had gone up.

"Wait, what are all these different coins, and why do you have so many?" I asked as he kept scrolling.

"I don't own all of them, but I do have a lot," he said.

He had bought his first bitcoin only a few months earlier, and it had already doubled since his purchase. He'd also made a killing by investing in some ICO.

"Cain, just buy one bitcoin. I know you're a gambler, it's not that much for you to just buy one," he said.

I still didn't buy any, but I did start paying attention, and over the next few months, I watched as the price of one Bitcoin went from roughly $1,000 all the way up to $3,000. FML, I thought.

I didn't understand it. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough, but at first, it didn't make sense to me. Why are people paying thousands of dollars for some new form of digital money? Wasn't our money already digital? Plus, one look at the BTC chart told me all I needed to know. I couldn't justify buying it.

But it could one day be worth $1M a coin, my friend said. You know that guy John McAfee? The antivirus guy? He thinks it's going to be wroth $1M by 2020.

What if he's right? I thought.

Then in July of that year, I went on a trip for work, and while sitting in the airport, I noticed my coworker was on the Coinbase app on his phone.

"Are you into Bitcoin?" I asked, which sounds like the nerdiest question ever, but he said he had recently bought a little, and we started talking.

The very next weekend, I watched as the price of BTC crashed from $3,000 to $1,800, at which point I decided to go ahead and buy one just for the hell of it. I still didn't quite understand it, it made no sense to me, but I took a chance and bought anyway.

Shortly afterward, I told my friend I'd finally bought a bitcoin, and he told me there was something called a hardfork coming at the end of July, so be prepared. Motivated by not wanting to lose my money, I read articles about what was going to happen on August 1, 2017.

Something about replay protection, something about private keys, something about making sure the coins are in a wallet you control when the chain splits. I found a site to create a paper wallet and withdrew my coins from the exchange. I have to admit it was all a bit scary. I didn't want $2000 to just disappear because I screwed up.

I waited a week or two for the dust to settle, and then I went searching for software that would help me split my coins. I found the electrum wallet, followed the instructions, and after a stress filled thirty minutes, I had 1 BTC, and 1 BCH.

At this point I knew almost nothing about Bitcoin Cash. Actually, I knew practically nothing about bitcoin itself. But over the next couple of months, I did some more research on Bitcoin Cash and started hearing about something called the flippening. There were rumors that the Chinese were going to flippen BTC and BCH. I learned terms like chain death spiral, and difficulty adjustments, and names like Roger Ver and Jihan Wu.

The gambler that I am, I sold my BTC for BCH hoping the flippening was real. In a matter of days, I watched as the price of BCH quickly doubled, then tripled in price. I remember constantly checking my phone. I remember being happy.

Then came November 11, 2017.

To be continued...