(8/16) Non-fungible by Nature
(8/) The following post is part 8 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 7 can be found here. Part 9.
So I started looking around. Buying bitcoin was not easy. It required a lot of trust and it required a lot of patience. Just about any bitcoin transaction required trusting someone you didn’t know and there really were no middlemen. And it looks like I wasn’t able to purchase any bitcoin until ~9 months after that initial run-up.
Looking through my old emails…I created a Mt. Gox account on 11/28/13, then a Blockchain account on 12/8/13, then a Localbitcoins account on 12/15/13. I sent my first request to a dude on Localbitcoins on 12/26/13 in an attempt to buy some via PayPal. And what a shitshow that turned out to be…
Localbitcoins.com was one of the only ways (that I could find) in which one could *somewhat safely* purchase bitcoin. The premise was that by using the site, you could arrange a physical meet-up with someone in your physical proximity at a local coffee shop with a laptop. And when you deemed them trustworthy, you could hand them some cash and watch them hit the ‘send’ button to send bitcoin directly into your digital wallet. I wasn’t all that excited to meet up with someone, so I found this dude on the site named IvanRussia who had a bunch of good feedback.
He was willing to do a transaction online through an interesting mechanism… He figured out a method that would leave both the buyer and the seller (relatively) protected: once the terms were agreed upon, he would create a private eBay listing for the amount and then ship some random, unrelated item. That way, I could be satisfied knowing that should anything could go wrong, eBay/PayPal would hold him liable were he not to come through. So in my case, he created a private listing for a Hotwheels car. $200 for a random 50 cent Hotwheels car. I was reluctant but felt like this was my only shot. I clicked ‘Buy It Now’ and just had to wait and hope he’d come through. About a week or so later, I received the Hot Wheels car, contacted him, and sure enough - he sent me the Bitcoin. Crazy.
I tried some other guy via PayPal and Craigslist, but it turned into this really stressful experience. I was at work, sent him some cash via PayPal and nothing showed up in my account. The weird thing was he was still emailing me, telling me that he sent it and I just needed to be patient. A few minutes went by. A few more. I started freaking out. I quickly pulled up the terms of service for PayPal and saw that they didn’t offer protection for ‘digital goods’. Shit. So I hit the guy up and we got in this big, long argument…I was furious and he was apologetic. He couldn’t figure out how to refund me my money and I was livid…terrified that I had lost $300 to a scammer. I sat there on the phone arguing with PayPal for a whole afternoon trying to get my money back (while I was supposed to be working). He told me that he emailed ‘help@paypal.com’ and told them to refund me my money…a ridiculous statement…but when I asked the PayPal agent to check that mailbox - she came back a half hour later and said ‘You wouldn’t believe this, but he actually did send that email. We’ll be refunding you shortly.’ The dude was telling the truth. I got my money back, but still…no Bitcoin.
I’m sharing these stories to let y’all in on the fact that getting your hands on Bitcoin when they were ‘cheap’, wasn’t easy. It was really freakin difficult. And the only people who really did it were those who were really motivated to do so. There was no ‘coinbase’ and there was no ‘robinhood’ and I’m suspecting that the vast majority of the people who heard about it and wanted to buy some simply couldn’t figure out how. It was just putting your faith in strangers hoping they wouldn’t fuck you over. I didn’t get fucked over but I came dangerously close quite a few times…again - all of this to say - those who wanted to buy some *REALLY* wanted to buy some. It wasn’t this whole ‘oh I’m going to buy some as an investment’, it was more like ‘oh, I want to figure out how this damn thing works, even if it means it’s going to cost me.’
You’re halfway there. Only 8 more! Part 9!