You are overthinking my comment. All I was saying is that this company and the people leading it have been involved with bitcoin since the price was measured in cents. It goes back so far that it predates the bitcoin payment processors that would handle transactions and pay you out in your currency of choice. Odds are they have had some stake in bitcoin. They therefore have likely made money as the value of that bitcoin has increased.

And for the record I generally don't have a positive opinion of cryptocurrencies and am specifically down on bitcoin. I am not projecting what the market cap will be in the future. I am simply commenting on its history.

I believe the person you responded to was saying “…and owners have no real financial motivation to sell [their company]” and wasn’t making a prediction on the future price of Bitcoin.

Thanks for the clarification! Makes sense now.

This line of reasoning is disappointingly unpopular. I think it fits a weird pattern of selection effects, where people get rich from very risky ventures (often retconned to have been savvy, precient business decisions) and it's implied that what they did was a good idea. Naturally there's no visibility for other crazy ventures that go nowhere, and it's much less fun to look at people who lost big by getting in on the top floor, chasing the success of people who were pretty smart, but very lucky.

Ultimately your expected marginal value for speculative investments where you don't have significant expertise or scale or regulatory capture or magical powers has to be negative.

Speculative investments like that are somewhat like the lottery, though you'd hope people would be a bit more informed to improve their odds compared to the lottery. In which case, your EV may still be negative overall, but if the potential effect size of "winning" is magnitudes larger than your downside risk, it still might make sense if you want a chance to entirely change your circumstances, vs just slowly amass savings over time.

Why would you “[…]” the first part of the sentence that explains exactly why it could have made sense?

Not really. Say I buy Bitcoins in 2012 and sell them in 2014. I paid the very market value in 2012, and received the very market value in 2014. All this 'regret' with 'hindsight 20/20' fails to take into account that one cannot know how the market value is going to be in 1 month, 1 year, or any time table. That is why its speculation.

The above comment doesn't really come down to speculation though. It really just depends how much of that BTC they turned into cash to buy infrastructure or pay people. Considering that it is logistically easier to do this with just money rather than exchanging, then it isn't unlikely that they maintained a fair amount of that BTC, and thus the "they probably have a bunch of money" conclusion.

I'm not sure why FOMO has to do with any of this. Your logic also just doesn't make sense when talking about any investment. If the market value goes up and you continue to hold then you can sell it for more than you bought it for. No one is talking about regret here except you. All investing is speculative. That's the nature of investing.

> The above comment doesn't really come down to speculation though. It really just depends how much of that BTC they turned into cash to buy infrastructure or pay people. Considering that it is logistically easier to do this with just money rather than exchanging, then it isn't unlikely that they maintained a fair amount of that BTC, and thus the "they probably have a bunch of money" conclusion.

Yes, I misunderstood the point.

The US government gets rid of Bitcoins ASAP, and I know of businesses who accept Bitcoin and who also sell it ASAP.

All investing involves some speculation, that's true. But gold and t-bills and startup equity and shitcoins all involve very different kinds of speculation.

Would we be having the same conversation if they had stock in GAFAM instead of Bitcoin?

Maybe if it was the early days of Microsoft. Even then there was a lot more data available about investing in businesses, even revolutionary computer ones. Nobody had knew for sure what was going to happen with Bitcoin, and the plausible outcomes varied hugely.

Yeah but if someone was buying a service from you in MSFT and you didn't need to cash it all out to pay expenses and salaries, would you? Or would you keep some of the stock saying "ehhh fuck it. Let's see what happens?"

Also, considering that early day cryptocurrency enthusiasts were also bullish on the technology that adjusts the chance that they'd keep some. I'm not sure why this is such a debate. The original comment just said "hey, they might have kept some of that crypto that people would pay them in. If they did, then they probably don't have to worry themselves with money." That's a speculative comment but also has a decent likelihood of being true.