It’s Sunday again, which means throwback time. In the poker throwback a few weeks ago, I ended on a cliffhanger: my roommate mentioning some magic internet money called Bitcoin, back in 2012. Today I’m paying that story off — how the tip reached me, why I paid four times what my roommate paid, and how buying coins from an anonymous stranger on Skype turned into one of the best friendships of my life.
Grab a coffee. This one has everything: a world-class poker coach, a dip that never came, a handshake across nine timezones, and a group of friends who still get roasted about this weekend in our WhatsApp group thirteen years later.
The Tip
Sometime in late 2012, I was living in a poker house in Italy with my roommate.
He took coaching from the best poker player in the world at the time — a name everyone in poker knows, probably a billionaire these days, and one I’ll keep to myself. During one of their sessions, the coach dropped something that had nothing to do with poker: buy Bitcoin. The price was $5 when he said it. When he got in himself, I genuinely can’t tell you — for all I know, he bought at 50 cents.
By the time my roommate and I sat down to actually research this thing, Bitcoin traded at $11. My roommate was convinced. He wanted to put in $10,000 — serious money for us. We were grinding $1/2 online, making $5,000 to $8,000 a month in a good stretch.
This is where my risk management kicked in. Ten grand into magic internet money that had already doubled since the tip? I advised him: do $5k now, add if it dips. He listened, sort of. He bought $5,000 worth at $11.
Then I applied the same advice to myself, with one difference. I decided to wait for the dip first.
The Dip That Never Came
You already know how this goes. The dip never came.
I watched Bitcoin hit $20 and told myself it would pull back. I watched it hit $30. Then $40. Every candle up made buying feel worse — the tip had come at $5, and here I was about to pay many multiples of that. Anchoring is a hell of a drug.
In March 2013, I finally caved and bought at $44.
And here’s the part I have to be honest about, because it’s the most on-brand thing I’ve ever done: even at $44, after months of watching it run, I half-sized my buy. Same logic as the advice I gave my roommate. Never blast your full stack into something this volatile. I kept buying over the following months, all the way up to $250, then stopped. So my first entry was $44, but my real average that year sat above $100.
My roommate got in at $11 with conviction. I got in at $44 with a plan. He’s still a good friend, and somehow he holds no grudge for the eight figures my risk management cost him. I’m the one who told him to buy half, remember. The discipline that poker drilled into me saved my bankroll a hundred times — and cost my friend a fortune exactly once. I’d still sign for that deal. He might not.
The Weekend Nobody Listened
That same stretch of March 2013, four of my friends from Nijmegen visited the Italy house for a weekend. I talked Bitcoin at them the entire time. The price, the tech, the coach’s tip, my freshly placed buy — everything.
They thought it was a scam.
Nobody bought. Not one of them. And I get it — none of these guys played poker. They didn’t come from a world of calculated gambles and weird internet money. They had normal jobs, normal lives, and a friend in Italy rambling about digital coins between FIFA matches. Funny enough, one of the guys in that picture ended up building my Dogecoin miners not long after — but that’s a story for another Sunday.. This crew all got into crypto eventually, in the 2017 cycle like most of the world. And to this day, every blue moon, someone in our WhatsApp group brings it up: “should have listened in Italy.” Thirteen years, and the joke still lands.
And our hometown later grew its own little Bitcoin scene too, a different story with a different cast
Okay, But How Do You Actually Buy Bitcoin in 2013?
Deciding to buy was the easy half. Actually buying was its own adventure.
The obvious route was Mt.Gox, the big exchange of the era. One problem: Mt.Gox had a verification waitlist measured in weeks. Weeks! The price was ripping and I was supposed to sit in a queue like it was a government office.
So I did what any poker player would do: I asked the community. TwoPlusTwo was the poker forum back in those days — every serious grinder lived on it. I posted there looking for someone to sell me coins directly. The mods removed my post. Selling coins peer-to-peer wasn’t the kind of thing you were supposed to arrange on the forum back then. So not only were there no bites — I wasn’t even allowed to fish.
Then my roommate remembered something. A friend of his in Chiang Mai ran a small side hustle facilitating OTC Bitcoin deals — matching buyers and sellers from the chats he was in, taking around 2% for the trouble. Everything anonymous, everything on trust. To me, this guy was a name on Skype and nothing more.
We agreed on my price: $44. And then the timezones did their thing. While Europe slept, Bitcoin ripped something like 20% overnight. Here’s the detail that matters: he hadn’t locked in the price with his seller yet.
I remember the sweat. A stranger, on the other side of the planet, in a market with zero recourse, holding a handshake that just went underwater. He could ghost. He could reprice. Nothing in the world obligated him to honor $44.
He honored $44.
I sent the money through a PokerStars transfer — the payment rail of choice when both parties live on poker sites — and the Bitcoin arrived. Only years later did he admit that he lost money on that first deal with me. He ate the difference to keep his word to someone he’d never met.
The Longest Payoff in Crypto
That could have been the end of it. A clean trade, a good story. Instead, it became the beginning.
He added me to those OTC chats, and I ended up doing some small arbitrage deals there myself — my first taste of crypto beyond just holding. And the friendship grew way past the trade. I stayed at his place in Chiang Mai for four or five months in 2015, came back and did it again in 2016. What started over a Bitcoin buy solidified into a real friendship, one visit at a time. So in 2017, when I quit poker, set off traveling, and started building AirdropAlert, there was no question where my base would be: his house, in Chiang Mai.
Think about that chain of events. An anonymous stranger honors a losing handshake in 2013, that handshake grows into years of visits and months under his roof, and by 2017 AirdropAlert gets built at his kitchen table. My first Bitcoin buy didn’t just get me coins. It got me one of the best friendships of my life, a front-row seat to how crypto trading actually worked, and eventually the launchpad for everything I do today.
He mostly trades stocks these days. And at least once a year, without fail, he reminds me of my NVIDIA fumble — I already confessed that one in full, so he has the receipts. Some debts never get settled; some jokes never die.
Final Words
People ask me sometimes if I regret not buying at $11. Or at $5. The honest answer: not really. The $44 buy was never about catching the bottom. It was the moment I stopped watching from the rail and got into the game — half-sized, over-researched, months late, and exactly on time.
You see how one decision compounds? One decision to move to Italy with a guy I only knew from the online tables snowballed into buying Bitcoin at levels that now look historical. And that snowballed into my entire life path in web3. Nobody plans a chain like that. You make one good bet on a person, and you let it run.
The coach gave the tip. My roommate had the conviction. The stranger in Chiang Mai had the integrity. All I brought was risk management and the willingness to finally click buy. Somehow, that mix was enough to change the entire direction of my life.
And the four guys from that weekend in Italy? They know who they are. Should have listened.
Here’s the part that matters most, though. Different people in this story, different life paths, different careers — the roommate, the OTC stranger who became a brother, the four skeptics on the couch. Every single one of them stood on a beach in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, at my wedding in 2021. No matter the destination or the life path, you keep your friends close at heart.
Want more stories from the early days? The full collection lives in the Morten crypto archives.
