The first day rule: 'the cheapest and your best chance to buy the most'

On December 5, 2013, with Bitcoin hovering near $1,000 after a vertical run from $200 the month before, Thomas Hunt confessed a regret on @MadBitcoins. The tweet would become one of the earliest community aphorisms.

Two favs, four retweets in 2013 numbers — strong relative to the era median, where most originals pulled zero of either. But the engagement is the smallest part of why the tweet survives. The format is the part that survives.

It's half aphorism, half confession. Hunt is doing two things at once: stating a generalizable rule about Bitcoin price discovery, and admitting he learned it because he didn't act fast enough himself. The hashtag #learnedthehardway is the confession layer. Without it, the tweet reads as a flat declarative. With it, the tweet reads as advice from someone who paid for the knowledge.

The macro context

December 5, 2013 was a remarkable moment to write this. Bitcoin had crossed $1,000 for the first time on Nov 28. The Senate Homeland Security hearings on November 18 had treated Bitcoin with more curiosity than hostility, which surprised the market and contributed to the rally. The "first day rule" was being stated, in real time, by someone watching a 5x run from people who had heard of Bitcoin a month earlier and were arriving at the worst possible moment.

The rule, of course, isn't always literally true. Bitcoin would crash from ~$1,150 in late November 2013 to ~$200 by early 2015 — anyone who bought at the "first day rule" peak in December 2013 spent two years underwater. But over long-enough horizons the rule holds: by 2017, $1,000 looked cheap; by 2021, even the 2017 top looked cheap. The aphorism became one of the field's quiet credos.

The afterlife

The "first day rule" tweet gets cited, in variations, for years afterward. Hunt himself returns to the format — the "When Bitcoin is a million dollars a coin, a million dollars won't be worth that much. #FutureProblems" tweet from Nov 26, 2013 is a sibling aphorism in the same register. Both are short, both assume a long-time-horizon view, both treat present price as a moment in a much longer arc. Both pulled four favs and two retweets in 2013 — high water marks for the era.

What makes them aphorisms rather than tweets is the public-confession structure. Hunt is not predicting Bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin; he's setting up the joke at his own future expense. He's not saying he was smart to buy early; he's saying he didn't buy early enough. The audience trust this generates is hard to manufacture. By 2017, when MadBitcoins would tell readers "blockchain is not a truth machine" during peak hype, the audience had a 4-year-old record of an account that owned its mistakes in public.

The first-day rule tweet is the seed of that trust.