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A comment on Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by noduerme on Thursday May 12, 2022 @03:48PM (#31359359)
When I launched a home built casino in 2011, I bought 5000 BTC to initially bank it. I didn't want to take BTC, I wanted to get licensure in Malta and take credit cards. But I didn't have any investment, or $500k to buy a license. I just had good software, so I launched it in BTC as a proof of concept and to try to earn enough to bootstrap the cost of licensing.

Long story short: That project is long gone. I viewed BTC as an interesting payment method that might have some inherent value as an efficient and anonymous means of transfer, which it's not anymore. I never trusted it and I didn't want to gamble on its fluctuations since the casino was denominated in USD and I was already exposing my savings to literal gambling risk (albeit playing as the house - still scary). So eventually I took to just getting rid of BTC daily, trading out the day's rake, and only buying it to do payouts. Closed the casino in 2013 and never saw any major profit, stakes being as low as they were.

I'm a middle aged working coder with a net worth short of $1m. I've thought a lot about what my life could have been like if I hadn't done ANYTHING except hold that initial 5000 BTC instead of getting out of it. And you know what? I'm not sorry about it. I did what seemed smartest to me at the time: I got rid of what I thought was a bad investment. And by then I knew plenty more about Bitcoin than most of the people who've bought into crypto since. Under the same set of conditions, where that was a meaningful chunk of my savings, I'd do the same again every time.

You're absolutely right that there is nothing healthy about being bitter or angry towards people who strike it rich - even, or perhaps especially, if they do so by pure luck.

Life is a casino. Envy gets you nowhere, and it's not a good look. Show a little class and you might get comped for the show.

[edited for readability]

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Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by Layke1123 on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:11PM (#31362066)
When 9 people in a group of 10 see one person get lucky by owning more than 90% of the available assets around them and not seeing an iota of it going to them, you are about to get a lesson in how unlucky you can also be.
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Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by noduerme on Friday May 13, 2022 @01:05AM (#31363556)
But this is the nature of a casino. One out of ten people gets a big payout for the same basic actions. If you're among the other nine people like I am, you take it in stride. You don't jump and cannibalize the guy who won. Not least because your self-esteem shouldn't be contingent upon how much money you have compared to someone else. People who win big randomly can't really be proud of what they have. But if you know you earned and deserve what you have, you can have pride. True pride in yourself is more valuable than money. I see this every single day with the ultra-rich I work for. The ones who got it by luck have no self control or pride. They'll soon lose it. I really don't care if they have more goodies than me. But that's because I have pride in myself, and it's ugly and despicable to base your self worth on comparing what you have to other people's material wealth.

In fact, frequently I feel sorry for them because they seem so desperate to be friends with me - because my life experience had been "real" and presented me with real shit they never had to deal with. They lack more for true friends than you or I. And I can't covet what they have when I can see, plainly, that I wouldn't want to trade places with them. And that a lot of times they want to trade places with me.

We all die. Happiness and bliss is just as likely to find you in a park behind a dumpster as in a penthouse. All the rest of the angst about judging who deserves what is just a waste of the time you have on this earth to define yourself independently.

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Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by Layke1123 on Friday May 13, 2022 @10:36AM (#31368208)
This isn't about losing 1% of your wealth gambling.

This is about wealth inequality. This is about watching as resources are entirely captured for a very small few. But history will continue to teach lessons about what happens when the rich get too big for their britches.

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Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by noduerme on Friday May 13, 2022 @08:10PM (#31373851)
Who said 1%? I know people who have just lost most of their life savings in this crypto crash. My view is that they gambled big, and some won and others lost. My point is that I'm not angry at the ones who won, nor particularly sympathetic to those who lost, because I'm happy with my decision to stay out of the game even though I at one point held a winning ticket.
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Re:Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing? by Layke1123 on Saturday May 14, 2022 @02:26AM (#31375547)
You are by yourself and will never understand the solidarity that workers have in each other. That communities have in each other if this is how you view life.
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