The issue is that many of us WeRE present and actively monitoring crypto. Heck I even tried to mine bitcoin back when you had a chance to mine one in your own gpu. I even thought maybe I’ll buy a coin or two; it’s only 20 bucks each!

But “better judgement” said that it’s a currency it shouldn’t appreciate so why bother unless you want to actually use it?

So if there’s regret it’s because many of us feel almost penalized for applying better judgement. It’s like you’re rewarded for stupidity. Not a single person I know and actually respect invested in crypto, and half brained idiots I know have become millionaires. So yeah this is not like horse betting.

Even if you bought a few bitcoins $20, who’s to say you wouldn’t have sold at $40? Easy to think “what if I bought”, but really, would you have hold it until 50K? Quite unlikely!

I don’t know any millionaires from crypto. I know people who are loud when market is up and very silent when it’s down. May be they were millionaires on paper at some point. Highly doubt they sold everything at the right time and became actual millionnaire. But sure, it did happen for many.

Yea this is how I try to think about.

I mined a "bunch" back in 2011 or so, lost the hard drive with the keys on it in the years since, didn't really think about backing it up, because of course it's not worth anything, etc, etc.

If I had that drive today, I'd be a millionaire. But also, if I had that drive in 2013, there's absolutely no chance I would have held it. I would have sold it for a few hundred bucks and been elated.

There is so much adaptation overlooked in any thing (item, experience, relationship, etc). becoming a thing of value, and so missing frames of references of this type occur frequently.

A friend got a great job, if I hadn't failed job interview X I would have a great job. Later you find your friend hated that job; your experience of the job you "missed" is unknown, etc. It's also part of survivor bias.

What would it have taken in advance for you to not cash in that early bitcoin that you didn't get (or lost) and didn't expect would become anything? Is that something you can prepare yourself for now? Is it worth preparing?

Deciding you have a financial portfolio, and framing that one part of it is risky, and another part is experimental, and then placing early bitcoin ownership as part of the experimental portion of your financial portfolio, and then later (as it becomes a larger percentage of the total) as part of the risky portion, and then looking for more situations that seem like it could fit this approach could possibly be one takeaway ... but it seems like a stretch.

You also have to avoid patterns that cause long-term failure but are misleading in the short term, such as buying and selling to realize gains, but then repeating ("it worked once") buying and selling until you have an overall loss. Like gamblers do. Sometimes they win, somethings they lose, but they lose overall by not ever stopping.

Also, how do you know someone who seems to have succeeded isn't simply in the "looks like success" portion of long-term failure? How would you avoid it?

Same for me. I actually tried to find my wallet in around when it went over a few hundred dollars.

Exactly, the fact that an assent went from $20 to $20,000 once doesn't tell us much. This is why in financial economics the variable of interest is returns, not price. Statistical analysis of returns will tell us what return to expect if we hold the asset over a random time period of a certain length, which is what happens in practice.

You have to be ruthless towards your own intuitions when investment. Human nature is absolutely geared towards buying high and selling low, and it isn't the first impression that gets you but the slow pressure in situations where social proof says you were wrong (although social proof proves nothing about money).

Just because someone was actively monitoring crypto & then missed out as the price went from $1 to $10,000 still doesn't mean they have misjudged. Even if crypto is the future - and I've become convinced that it is for privacy reasons - there was still scant evidence of that during Bitcoin's rise. There have been no great arguments circulating to explain why someone should buy in and a lot of the people who made money look like they just got lucky.

The difference between gambling and crypto is in the timelines. Gambling has a high frequency where crypto is quite a bit lower. This allows some lucky people to 'exit the casino' by the virtue of being lucky enough to have won the bet, and being pressured somehow to cash out and not continue gambling. For some, it is a birth of a child, perhaps a purchase decision etc. Low frequency allows for these events to take place, betting on horses does not.

Isn't that exactly like horse betting

It's like if you see a friend betting a bunch of money on a long-odds horse and then winning. You exercised good judgement, but he won anyway. Do you feel penalized for applying your better judgement in that situation?

The only thing that really matters is: was it the right decision given the information you had at the time?

I've been in it since 2012. The financial crisis of 2009 prompted me to study economics, the federal reserve system and the history of banking in the U.S. I went looking for solutions since the problem was affecting me and many people I knew. Bitcoin was the best solution I found. At first it seemed too quirky and strange, but I've continued to study over the years and have come to appreciate the elegance of the "quirks". Here is me presenting my take on bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fUiFtJ8BaY

With BTC especially, my argument (to myself) is that if I weren't lazy and got BTC at $20 I would have definitely sold at $100.

I did that, and then rebought at 130 and sold again at 175, and so on until I only had a couple and then MtGox happened and I lost 80% of that and lost interest for a couple years. It's definitely possible to get in early and not become rich at all.

You should stay away from casinos. Gamblers tend to follow this pattern, they are ahead in between but they always lose it all in the end, they just don't know when to walk away.

Ah yeah, that typical behaviour of gamblers that when they lose it all they stop gambling for years :P

The difference is that Crypto is The Future.

Horse betting has been established to be just that: Betting (I have no clue if that's really true, no offense to the hn horse racing crowd). There is no big institution money that says otherwise. There are no startup wizards working in the field. Nobody claims they are going to change the world.

Crypto on the other hand is sold as the future, and the people who miss out on the future are losers. The tech is really complicated, you don't understand what's going on, but, clearly, some very smart people do and they are convinced.

The point being, it's a lot easier to disregard horses than it is to disregard the future.

>The difference is that Crypto is The Future.

[Citation needed]

Imagine you actually read, and understood, my entire post.

> you don't understand what's going on, but, clearly, some very smart people do and they are convinced.

Even applying a steel man, it is not convincing. Don’t defer to “smart people”. Do your own research from first principles.

My understanding was that his post was to be read in an ironic tone.

Oh I see. poe’s law strikes again.

I think you should have kept the capitalisation consistent.. The Future

Apparently I'm not the only one who did not get the sarcasm.

It is a great point.

Off Track Betting near me is also always packed with people betting on horses. No one there though is foolish enough to create an ideology around horse betting and I am sure most know deep down the house always wins.

The difference is that I founded and raised millions of VC $$ in the crypto space, and watched some of my friends make tens or hundreds of millions, and yet I made very little from crypto. I didn't build a protocol or anything with a token. The whole time I felt like I could have just built some pie-in-the-sky "crypto for ML" thing and done a huge token sale.

I tend to counter in a different way:

YES, I knew about Bitcoin a couple of years before I invested in it.

YES, I could have made a significant return during that time.

YES, I should have investigated it further at that time, instead of focussing on other things.

YES, I made a risk/return analysis at that time, and felt that the risk of investing was too high, even if I didn't do my due diligence.

Everyone, at every time makes a decision to either invest or not invest in something at any point in time, even if that decision is subconscious. I can feel bad about making that decision, but I did make it. My risk/reward appetite just wasn't high enough.

The lucky ones are the ones who were a little foolish (spot my bias...) and not greedy. Those who got on the bandwagon (again, spot my bias), and decided to cash out when they thought "That's great enough ROI!".

Of course the problem with humans is, if they cashed out at say 25K, they'd have regrets when BTC hit 30K-35K, and since they have money they'd be tempted to join in again...

In an alternative world where Bitcoin crashed and burned after it was launched but before you decided to invest you would feel that much smarter!

It's all very easy in hindsight, the trouble is to predict it accurately. A better way to look at this is to say that some people got lucky and some didn't.

Who goes for horse betting when you could buy powerball tickets?

Because horse betting is a game of skill where powerball is pure randomness.

It's funny, trading games lead to philosophy. You can't maximize, everything is fuzzy, a blend of patience and reaction is key.

Whenever someone says "I could have made X money if I put it into Y" I say "yeah, crystal balls are in short supply".