Early miner's story:
"When I first heard about bitcoin, right at the end of 2009- I was mining ~400-700 a day for a week or two. plain old AMD tower
I never actually spent any bitcoin in exchange for products at the time nor managed to exchange them - All deleted years ago,hard drive gone, kaput, send to trash and god knows where right now. I'm still relatively poor, wasn't too long ago when I couldn't afford duvet covers and only finally got back into bitcoin very recently despite following it's progress for years. So the idea that anyone who heard about bitcoin early is automatically rich isn't always true. many people wasted it away, deleted, donated, got hacked, "invested" and so on and so forth when coins were worth a fraction of the value they are today , It can make you angry if you think about it too much but hey that's life, no such thing as a free lunch and nobody can predict the future
some people look back and say it makes them feel sick to see how easy mining was with the low diff back the and start envisaging what they would of done in that situation, but it makes you feel more sick having a winning lottery ticket and throwing it away than never playing, watching the rest of the game unfold but never jumping in.
I don't want to get into a rant but it's so easy in retrospect to say you would of just mined for a few days and held those coins for 4 years and be rich. You'd have to have some crazy self control and strange level of foresight to hold onto them. I remember at the time you would literally earn more money by clicking adverts for hours than mining, it wasn't even called mining it was called 'generating'- there was no competition, no standalone miner, no pools, and definately no fpga or asics..The concept itself was fascinating, you could see it's something special but the idea of any sort of mainstream adoption was just a pipe dream, to see it on prime time news for the first time was surreal.
except once you got wallet balance them what would you do with it? There was nothing you could buy with them, no exchanges just a few guys on IRC. The economy was built by these guys establishing services, and forging a demand- and if nobody ever spent bitcoin would not be where it is today..
I remember the first place i saw to buy was through the mail by sending cash. and there wasn't even alpaca socks then, not that i remember.. first thing i saw for sale was a photo then some tea leaves.the famous pizza story was a while after that.
there was no economy, it wasn't seen as a get rich scheme nor an investment= it was just a test of niche beta software with a tiny community of hackers and libertarians. just like wow gold marketed towards crypto geeks, you could delete the wallet and install windows again and not bat an eyelid. In fact i did that more than once. people sent xxx btc transactions just to test sending was working correctly!! this could buy you a house now!, so there is definately room to feel sick.. far as i remember the faucet gave out 50 (or maybe it was 5?) anyway the real true winners are the ones who 'luckily' forgot about wallets until recently, they wake up to a golden ticket.
for anyone else, likely would of jumped at a chance to sell those coins for a fraction of a dollar a little later down the line (easy 10x increase on the 'informal' rate which was published).. who would turn down free money for leaving your computer running in the background for a week, especially if they are poor student or whatnot? these weren't big vc's and finance guys playing with it at this time.. what about .25 cents, half a dollar, $1- when everyone was screaming crash and couldn't believe they could exchange 1 of those coins generated by running this program for a real life dollar, how about $2 dollar, $5, $10+ or when it crashed from 30 (when everyone was saying it's all over) and so on and so forth.. right up until the crazy % increase we are at today. who knows maybe in a further 5 years people will find it insane a mbtc was just over a dollar in the same way, it wasn't so far back at all when $1000 was much to early to be talking about.
I'm definitely sure I'm not the only person who had a similar experience, and a lot of people came a bit later, with slashdot article for example. I would be inclined to agree with your opinion that current estimates on lost coins are too conservative and hazard a guess that minimum of 15% of released coins are permanently gone to the blockchain, of course when dealing with a resource which has value by scarcity this only serves to ultimately increase the value, so it's not all bad."
