It's April 2011, I am mining on some number of Radeon 5850s making around 1.1 BTC each day. The price is crossing $2.
It's May 2011, I am mining on some number of Radeon 5850s, doubled. Mining difficulty is climbing quickly, and so is the price. We're almost at $10 by the end of the month and I'm still making around 1 BTC per day, somehow managing to stay on par with the difficulty as I buy more graphics cards.
It's early June, and as I am powering on even more GPUs, the price hits roughly $32 before halving over that weekend.
November 2011, we reach $2 after several months of everyone declaring it dead. I am on something like 8 5850s now, probably still making around 1BTC, maybe a bit less, it's difficult to remember after 10 years. After the monstrous crash of about $30, things begin to pick up by the end of the year and we enter 2012 at about $5.
We crash from $7 to $4 between January and February, then from $13 to $8 over one weekend in August. It's dead, each time.
It's 2013 and things are batshit insane. We have some minor 10% drops through the year but everyone is buying. Everyone is mining. I heat my new rental property with Radeon 7990s and only heat the house with graphics cards during the entire winter from 2012-2013. About 11 steps up the stairs, you go from freezing cold to being blasted with heat, like when you exit the plane into Spain.
By April we all lose our shit and people are buying bitcoin for $100. By the 9th they are paying $200 and within a week decide that $70 is more reasonable - a 66% drop in a week. Of course, people can't make up their minds whether Bitcoin is a scam or if it's the future of humanity, so the price goes haywire and we see regular gains and drops of 10/20/30%.
It's November 2013. Bitcoin is not a scam. Clearly, because it's now worth $200. Or is it worth $650? No, it's worth $550. Now it's $700. Nope, $1,100. Now it's $950.
Now it's December and it's $1,100 again. But what the hell is going on, MtGox won't let me log in despite me not sleeping and spending the last 15 hours through the night trying. Now I'm late for work and I've lost 20% of my money, even though I've actually gained 1000% this year, I'm only bothered about losing 20% of what I had a day ago, just like literally everyone else.
It's 2014. It's also most of 2015. The entirety of both years. Bitcoin is dead. Never coming back. We're down to $200. Mining still makes me the same $2-3/day that it ever has, even though the 1BTC/day from 2011 is now worth $200+/day. I give up. Everyone else gives up after buying these new things called shitcoins. I forget, not bothering to sell what I had left as it's barely enough to buy a small used car.
It's 2016 and apparently Bitcoin has tripled since I last looked at it. What. You what. What. Everyone now wants Ethereums. It's like Bitcoin, but it'll fit on my hard drive. Everyone's shitcoins have disappeared. The however many thousands of Doggo coins I mined before I quit have disappeared along with the exchange. Ethereums are bringing out these new shitcoins that actually do something, like Golem, which is like Seti@home but will eventually literally do everything and generate an income for you. Great! Ethereum shitcoins are not called shitcoins. The world of cryptocurrency is very different to how i remember it. I swap half my BTC for ETH and then 80% of that for various tokens.
It's 2017. Nothing bad is happening. Everyone is investing in ICOs for non-shitcoins. Everyone's making $2k/day just trading. Everyone's also making $500-2k/day just holding. Everyone has bitcoin and ether, as well as a tonne of ERC-20 tokens. Some people also have Bitconnect which seems very much like the HYIPs I used to join during my PTC/PTS days as a teenager. Seems like a scam, no good. Ethereum has several 20-30% drops throughout the year. Seems normal, I'm no longer phased after 2013. Everyone in my office is interested. They all discuss it at $10, but ask me about investing $15k when the price hits $300. Finally, they enter at $600 and no one does any work for the rest of the year. We just talk crypto.
It's the second half of 2017. I make more on crypto in one day than at my day job in a month. Literally everything is going up. No one considers that it'll ever drop again. I'm like: "🤷♂️ Looks pretty normal to me, but I better sell some soon else.."...
Actually, it's January to April 2018. New York bonuses or Chinese New year or some seemingly random event makes everyone sell literally everything. Everyone had put all their bitcoin into ether, and then all their ether into ICOs. What was once 25BTC was now 400,000,000 various ERC-20 tokens, or kittens, worth around $200. Not only did everyone sell their tokens, causing them to crash, but everyone sold everything else, making everything else crash. Crashception. Every second word on reddit is "crash".
Ether went from $1,200 to $75 in a year or so. Declared dead by everyone.
It's 2018-2020. I'm like, well, not sure. Probably will repeat the cycle of dips, moons and crashes, but probably should have sold. How many Deloreans could I have bought? Better not check my "How many Deloreans I can afford if I traded all of my cryptos for deloreans.xlsx" spreadsheet. My heart and soul must be dead. I have felt no emotion or regret during the crash. 2013 had used up all of that. All of my colleagues are bored and stop talking about crypto. Despite what they said, they weren't interested in the tech, only the money. One buys a folding phone for $1,500 with what was once $10k of Galaxy Ripple chocolate bars, I think. I buy more Ether, deciding to not exchange any for other tokens. From now on, only BTC and ETH for me. I buy some occasionally, but not as much as I should. I pretty much leave crypto will the expectation that we'll just repeat it all again in a few years.
It's 2021, things are batshit insane again. Already?Woopdedoo. Everyone's talking to me about crypto. Fgs. I just decided to try the real stock market where people cry over a 3% crash. Everyone is jumping back in. What is defi and nft? Are cryptokitties nft? Is my kitty still alive? Who knows. Give it 5 years and there'll be a yet another new equivalent to shitcoins.
Bitcoin drops by $10k in January, I'm like, meh. I play with Coinbase Earn and shortly make a mint.
It's the present: Bitcoin drops another 10k in February, even though it's still higher than the last drop. I'm like, meh. Everyone panics. For some reason I decide to write a 20 word reddit post and it turns into whatever the hell I'm writing now for whatever point I'm trying to make. Something about not declaring it dead over a $10k drop when we're still up by $20k this year.
It's mid 2021. Bitconnect is back and they want your doge. Bitcoin hits $80k but crashes by 20% down to $64k. The world is on fire and shit is hitting the CPU fan. It crashes by another $5k before hitting $85k. Ether was $4k but now deemed dead because it's only $2k. Soon it'll be $5k. Elon tweeted about doge being the national currency of Mars. It's a joke, but now doge is $42 and I remember that old exchange that vanished with probably $420,000,000 worth of my doge, and 50 LTC. Twelve seconds later it's back to $0.10. Everyone is mad because it is now only worth double of what it was worth yesterday, even though it is down from ,12 seconds ago.
It's every other year from now until the end of eternity.. Everything crashed by 50% overnight. Now it costs me 250 satoshis or less for my latte. Ether is $126 or something and no one knows what is happening anymore. The price went so high because 10 billion people on Earth use it daily, either directly or because their car automatically pays for tolls on the Ethereum network with that project from Oaken Innovations that hasn't been updated in years, that now no exchange can display it correctly or something. Everyone is now an NZT or NFT or POS or some other acronym. While I'm working, my phone earns me 0.2 GLM, my fridge earns me 4 MYST, my washing machine earns me a few E-DOGE, all while I process medical simulations and allow some family in China to access wikipedia without their government seeing. My family on Mars send me some DOGE to keep me afloat. Ripple is still being investigated by the SEC while their owners siphon another $100m each year. The price of all cryptos goes 10x every other year but it's all dead when it drops 10-20%.
It's the end of this post. I've no idea what's going on. Has the crash reverted in the time that I've written this? How many Deloreans worth of crypto have I lost today? How many Deloreans worth of crypto have I gained since the start of the year? I look at the price of literally every crypto and see a 10% drop after an unlimited % gain since inception and several hundred percent just this year or so.
Its the end of the end of this post. I consider how to end it, but instead have two endings. Things don't make sense. I consider changing the title to reflect my original intention of pointing out how a 10-20% drop is pretty much to be expected with crypto and that by looking at the bigger picture, you won't even see this dip on a chart next year. Instead, I do whatever I am doing now. I give up and decide to post this so I can use the reddit app to check if anyone has posted anything meaningful about NuCypher, even though I expect the usual pump posts.
