At the end of 2010 I held Bitcoin worth a fraction of a cent, and watched it walk toward a dollar.
In 2010 Bitcoin barely had a price. On May 22 someone paid 10,000 BTC, then worth about $41, for two pizzas: one coin was a fraction of a cent. It did not reach $1 until early 2011. In June, Japan's Hayabusa returned the first samples collected from the surface of an asteroid.
At the end of 2010 I got my hands on Bitcoin, back when it was worth almost nothing. To put the almost nothing in perspective: that May, someone had paid ten thousand bitcoins for two pizzas, a sum worth about forty dollars at the time. One coin was a fraction of a cent.
Then I watched it walk. Fractions of a cent, then a cent, then toward a whole dollar by early the next year. Most people I mentioned it to thought it was a toy, or a scam, or a game for cryptographers with too much time. Maybe it was all of those things. It was also the first money in history that no government printed and no bank kept, and I could feel that it mattered before I could prove it.
That is the whole game, isn’t it. Feeling that something matters while it is still cheap enough to be embarrassing. By the time it is obvious, it is expensive, and the interesting window has closed.
I have been early and I have been wrong, and I can tell you they feel identical in the moment. The only way to learn which one you are is to hold the position and wait.
FILL: what you actually did with it, and what holding through the volatility taught you.