In addition, even now, at $3200, the market cap of bitcoin is still only ~50 billion. If you believe it has a good shot of being a superior global reserve currency, then it is still cheap and you should be glad that you can buy it for $3200.

Most people I know who knew about it but did not buy constantly thought it is worth less than the current price, whether that price is $3000 or $30. So they never buy. Your job as an investor/speculator is to guess what something is worth, not just look at a chart going up and wish you got in at sometime in the past. In addition, you need to realise that the people who really do well in any bull market or bubble are people who did stupid or manic things and managed to catch the upside. Sensible people rarely make outlandish returns. If you are a very level-headed, sensible person, you will not make outlandish returns, especially short-term.

You missed the part where he wrote that he was into this "as a developer, not as a speculator."

He might say (and even believe) that he's looking at this purely from a dev standpoint, but it's just another investor angry over sour grapes.

We are all "investors" whether you/he likes it or not. Even if you choose to keep all your funds in cash stuffed in your mattress - that's just investing in fiat currency :)

The technology hasn't fallen back. It's evolved, even. (With the new fork we'll potentially even see competing alternate realities soon :D) Several devs I know are still happily tinkering away and following the progress of various cryptos - if you're "sick" over the sphere as it currently is, don't blame it on external forces.

When I made the decision to sell my BTC, I was completely uneducated regarding the economics of investments and didn't have any family members with any sort of investment at all, so there was nothing pushing me in the right frame of mind to consider BTC anything other than another tech-toy I created.

So the anger that I heard from many in a similar boat mostly stems from this sentiment "hey I was there, I was a programmer, I understood this, but still the wrong people won out, as always." because one wasnt educated to be a evil capitalist/banker/investor. (The evil connotation stemming from group think especially in Europe where rich = villain)

We will see more of this kind of behavior the next time a big tech crunch happens and the VC dries out for years. "Why did nobody teach me how to raise capital when it was still plentiful?"...

And what's stopping him? There is nothing he could do yesterday that he cannot today, other than invest at yesterday's prices.

Hell, it's probably significantly easier to develop with today's landscape - services and libraries being much more numerous than before - so you're going to have to enumerate specifics if you want to argue otherwise.

It's a strange enough position to me that it makes me question whether people who say this actually understand the technology.

Plus, who cares about other peoples' "greed"? There's lots of greed in traditional finance but that doesn't stop most of us from investing in stocks and that kind of thing. If I think GOOG is a sane, rational long-term investment while others are going bonkers over it, I don't see why that would change my mind.

I don't really understand finance, so bear with me here : why should being a "superior global reserve currency" entail a stratospheric valuation? The USD has been a de-facto global reserve currency for the last 50 years, yet it's not like an individual dollar is worth 5000+ GBP, CHF, EUR, or JPY.

It seems to me like the high BTC valuation is being driven by speculation. That's fine and dandy, and as the Economist said is part of a "harmless bubble" - but ascribing this insane valuation to some kind of innate feature set of BTC seems to be misleading.

Happy to be proven wrong and/or educated. This isn't exactly my wheelhouse, after all.

Given that bitcoin has a hard-coded cap of 21 million coins, if bitcoin became a reserve currency of the importance the USD currently has, you could assume it would reach a market cap of 12 trillion, meaning each bitcoin will be worth $570000.

The reason the USD value has not spiraled to $5000 each is because the economists advising the government believe in inflationary currencies, and believe for some reason that the best thing for a currency to do is to devalue by 1-2% each year. They give some reasons for this which, like a lot of economics are driven by conjecture and not evidence-based. Money is printed approximately to achieve this target, however in recent years, 4 trillion dollars has been printed and given to banks, again based on very little other than economic conjecture. I'm not going to argue with proponents of this sort of economic theory because its a waste of time, however I am glad that a currency not linked to a nation state is going to be able to challenge all of these assumptions.

that is because Fed doesn't want it to be that way (and for a good reason) and prints [tons of] new USD. BTC can't be printed that easy and that unlimited.

His answer is right there in his original post, he understands the tech, which is cool, but he doesn't understand money and markets, which is the real reason the entire edifice has any value at all. His observation is akin to being interested in technology purely at the intellectual level, and not understanding how it can serve humanity and fill needs that are desperately unmet in our present paradigm, and people are more than willing to pay to have those needs met. What they already pay to have what we have instead of that is the net economic cost of all states and state controlled financial infrastructure in the world (which, to be clear, I mean all financial infrastructure, because there simply is no such thing as a private unregulated financial instutition outside the bounds of cryptocurrencies), which by comparison make the entire cryptocurrency market cap even now after the rapid appreciation look like the office tea budget.

You need to understand both the tech and its utility to markets, and in turn the real utility of markets to humankind, and imho ideally the terrible threat represented by political authority, to do well out of the cryptocurrency wave. All these people that have loaded up without understanding the technology are eventually going to get taken as that technology matures and differentiates between all the available options, and they'll have no idea how to gauge the actual product level value of one relative to another, and they'll transfer value to those that do.

You can't win with just one side of the equation.

It's not a direct quote, but the gist is worth taking to heart. It's easy to say, not so easy to do. But you gain nothing by tossing and turning.

Zachtronics' games are some of the most fun I've played, and from a brief encounter (not irl) with the guy he seemed unperturbed (or like he'd made peace if he ever was) by the outcome.

I was at the office one night kinda late, and I walked around the corner to see him working on the server. He was installing what looked a lot like a graphics card. Sure. Not mining.

In the end, he never got caught. I recently looked him up on LinkedIn and he hasn't been working for over a year. I obviously don't know this for sure, but given what a bitcoin enthusiast he was, I would not at all be surprised if he made a fortune mining for free by stealing the company's money and also investing heavily.

Indeed, greed in cryptocurrency is a thing.

(Created a throwaway to protect the privacy of the guilty, even though they don't deserve it.)

Do you really think you can hide the amount of heat from anyone - my rigs are basically a furnace - and in 2011, I think I could probably melt steel =P The guy may have had a few cards in there, but $20k is absurd.

I would feel the same if I started Google - to build something cool like a powerful search engine just to sell ads. Ewww!

There are better and worse ways of making money. Crypto speculation and ads are the some of the worse, in my opinion. Charge for your service - it's the only honorable and clean thing to do. Don't be a sellout!

Shortly put, I do believe in the blockchain, I don't believe in Bitcoin, which is majorly driven by low-class Chinese speculators and exchanges!

It is just how they make money. What they DO is make the best search engine, host every video and livestream anyone on earth wants to upload, run the best email service on earth, run the best cloud office suite etc etc.

I was an early adopter of Contributor, which got shot down in its original form! This speaks loudly about nowadays Google!

Stability is boring. It doesn't garner attention. It's the high fluctuations that generate interest and bring in new people to the ecosystem.

Without it, Bitcoin would have been basically another technology that most people would have never heard of.

$1 -> $65,000

I have failed to recognize and/or act on a number of opportunities so far in my life.

One was when the consumer Internet was "waking up". Domain name registration was free. And, even later, as Network Solutions started to charge for them, domain names, good one's, were plentiful.

And so, there I sat, living through the technical birth of the Internet, fully understanding it from an engineering perspective and yet, due to my lack of experience at the time, never made the mental connection to the opportunity that lay ahead. While other less technical people gobbled-up tons of good and very valuable domains I was geeking out making use of the embryonic consumer Internet. These people made millions. I did not.

Another missed opportunity happened during the economic downturn of 2008. The market crashed. I had been a day trader a decade earlier and have always kept a level of awareness about the market. I was on the phone with a friend and made the comment that Ford was an absolute goldmine as it had dropped down to about $1.50 per share. The company had none of the problems the other auto makers had. It just got dragged down with the rest of the market. It told him I should get off the phone and buy 100K shares of F.

In other words, I recognized the opportunity and had the ability to take advantage of it. Yet, I did not. I would have made somewhere in the order of $1.7 million inside of a year and a half or so.

I'm sure people who also recognized the opportunity and brought themselves to pull the trigger made a killing. I, for some strange reason, did not.

I look at cryptocurrency and your comments the same way. You probably recognized the opportunity yet did not act. This has nothing to do with being intelligent or dumb. I have no clue what it is but it happens.

I wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Plenty more opportunities ahead. Just try to grab onto of one when the time comes.

In my life so far:

- electronics

- digital

- computers

- the web

- cellular communications

- smartphones + app ecosystems

- crypto currencies (in progress)

- deep learning (in progress)

Not doing much with deep learning yet other than spending as much time as possible learning. Need to identify opportunities.

I did jump into the iOS fray years ago. It proved to be a bust. The App Store is so bad in terms of discoverability, building relationships with your users and the race to the bottom that it became impossible to make a profit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ird55/holy_shit_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6qlxxa/i_lost_150...

https://medium.com/security-news/report-shows-230k-of-crypto...

http://www.altcointoday.com/chinese-exchange-yunbi-lost-4000...

There's not much sense losing sleep over that statistic though. Most of us had $3k and didn't do that. All you can do is keep your eyes open for the next opportunity, which may never come.

> hence it sounds like the scene of Housing crisis.

If everyone wanted to sell BTC and no-one wanted to buy, it would crash just like anything else.

It's up for anyone's guess how big each of those groups is relative to the others. Believers tend to assume that the last one is big, e.g. the "send money back to the home country" use case.

Ha

https://xkcd.com/538/

(replace "encrypted" with "untraceable" and make the skiddie a webmaster of some unregulated exchange and you can see the future of this situation)

(Not that I'm arguing or worrying. I was just curious.)

I know there is the other side of that, that the government can seize your funds in a bank account, but realistically they won't target you out of millions of people who have millions in their name.

Just like Bernie Madoff's investment fund or any other Ponzi scheme.

> BUY IT ASAP I tell'ya. Don't miss the wave again. Never again.

It's always the green accounts that post this. I wonder why?

It's because when making strong statements I don't want to be shunned by people like you. I have feelings too you know.

That aside, you can mark this comment for a couple of months from now when ANS is worth $2000 +. It is so obvious to me that NEO will be big.

14c7DSHkWmcEZ7kiQ6sBL5YwzSqT6orU8r

Is the BTC address you can use to thank me for turning you on to this.

I've read on it and continue to read on it. There's enough material on the internet on it. Start with a quora search for a general feel of what is being asked about it and get a feel of why it is in such demand.

Then validate the solution once you've determined there's sufficient interest in it. Read the recently translated(Chinese to English) whitepaper on ANS https://github.com/neo-project/neo/wiki/Whitepaper-1.1

Finally, don't get bogged down with stifling analysis paralysis - invest in or develop on the platform if you like it. Don't feel angry at others nor be jealous of them for previous misses. Make a bet - if you win, you win and if you don't life goes on. Start again.

No, they gambled. There was nothing to 'see'. It was reckless behaviour. Don't run around and spread retroactive financial advice that was unwarranted without the now available posteriors.

Risk often appears careless to those with a weak stomach. Risk is typically very ugly. It's not supposed to be pretty. If it were, all and sundry would be participants.

Risk wouldn't be risk without risk is all I'd leave you with.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Antshares/comments/6gsso4/what_is_t...

But like one of the contributors on the sub points out, ANS/NEO has some govt support (I use support lightly because there have been discussions with govt about NEO but nothing officially announced yet). Therefore, if this turns out to be the case, then undoubtedly, you'll find that NEO will be the crypto that wins in China. I think that this alone would make it very very big in terms of market cap.

Finally, technically, contract writing in ANS/NEO aims to be as easy as possible compared to ETH where unless you learn solidity, you cannot immediately jump in and start writing code for it. ANS/NEO aims to make it easy for any developer anywhere in the world to jump right in.

EDIT:

I think that many crypto-variants will exist simultaneously but that there'll be one or two that win because they implement ease of use quickly and well. Let's consider the internet in the early days; it was only useful to a select few who could withstand the pains of getting up and running with it. Crypto is the same way today. Few are willing to withstand the pain of its use - be it devs or regular users who may or may not double up as speculators.

If a coin can't be stupidly easy to use, then there cannot be mass adoption. ANS/NEO seems to have figured that out - making onboarding devs easy and attempting to reduce the energy required to run the network.