June 2013
When I started with Bitcoin, the price was about $50 USD per bitcoin and we would meet in person to buy them, in the Portland Meetup Group.
Portland Bitcoin Group Meetup in August 2013. Paying beer and snacks with bitcoin was the thing... Check out more pictures here: https://www.meetup.com/Portland-Bitcoin-Group/photos/16565062/#268883942
Price changes back then were 5 to 10 dollars, very unstable and that was the reason why so many of us thought it would be the perfect currency, rather than a way to store value only. Today we know that's not the case... not with bitcoins but with satoshis.
Considering that my background is Systems Engineering, the idea of setting up a machine that could mine hundreds of bitcoins in a week seemed the best for me to start making more serious money... Trading was an alien concept and buying and holding seemed too passive. Many attendees to the meetups asked me and my "partner" (Who then would fund the purchase of mining gear from KnC), that mining didn't make sense if one wanted to make profit... Buying and HODLing was the best way.
We called it The Bit-Coin-Mine-ator! and the price to build it was about $800 USD
February 2014
The difficulty of the blockchain had skyrocketed and it was taking too long to get bitcoins out of an ASIC machine. It was officially not profitable to make money mining Bitcoin, however... There was this new thing called "Scrypt" and everyone was making bank mining alts. Time to invest into mining gear again.
However, there was no reputable company producing an ASIC-based system to mine Scrypt-based cryptocurrencies, so we decided to build one...
Behold, the super-crypto-coin-minator! . Sold for parts on eBay.
November 2014
We purchased was a Titan from KnC (Great products, it's a real shame that they couldn't make it work long term), which produced about 21 bitcoins in 18 months. Since it was hosted by a friend for some time, we paid about 10 bitcoins in electricity. Price per bitcoin was about $200 USD and had been stagnant for a long time...
The beautiful KnC Titan . https://imgur.com/6zkgHVz
July 2016
Since the price had been stagnant for 2 years and the whole market seemed to be going nowhere, I decided to sell all my bitcoins to pay for expensive immigration lawyers and plane tickets (When price per bitcoin was about $500) and invest that money into starting an online business selling Android-based Kodi boxes. My partner thought didn't have a strong opinion for or against it, since he was just collecting profits thousands of miles away in Tokyo.
About a nine months, the online business failed and was shutdown. I decide to focus on my day job and actually found a much better job working for a Fortune 500 company. All I had from Bitcoin and crypto is leftovers in all the wallets spread across computers and online wallet service providers (Probably about $150 USD at the time).
July 2017
A year later, a good buddy of mine sees the price per bitcoin and wants advice to get into Bitcoin. This is a real good friend of mine and he told me while he was helping me move a big sofa, so I decide to look into whats going on.
Turns out crypto markets are exploding and I decide to invest into it again, mining.
September 2017
Bought an Antminer S9, since it was the only one available. Cost was about $2,000 USD and arrived in October but was defective, so after shipping it back twice to Bitmain, I get it to mine in mid December.
Bought an Antminer D3, because it was supposed to make everyone rich... if you got it on time. Spent about $2,500 USD on it. Arrived in December.
Bought an Antminer L3, oh... wait... no. Darn Bitmain decided to accept Bitcoin Cash only and by mistake I sent 0.5 btc (About $2,500) to the wrong address. Rookie mistake.
January 2018
Bitcoin prices are half of what they were a couple of months ago. My miners have NOT reached the ROI point yet.
In retrospective, buying and holding is the best option.