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