But wait, it gets worse. Even just going back a year, if you had bought and sold the right stocks at the right times, you'd be the richest person on earth by far, even if you only started with a few bucks.

But don't worry, you could do the same thing over the next year. You've learned from your "mistakes," right?

In all seriousness, your financial advice is pretty bad and akin to recommending gambling strategies for Roulette. If you both realize you are gambling and are cheering each other on for fun, that's one thing, but I get the sense that you really don't understand that you are in fact gambling.

I have never seen a clearer speculative bubble (as seen from within the midst of the bubble and not hindsight) in my lifetime than this one. You just don't invest for the medium or long term on a speculative bubble. Bitcoins do have some intrinsic value, but as the author of the article we're all commenting on noted, the price of Tulips still hasn't recovered to its 1637 peak.

I would strongly recommend rereading skwirl's post and introspecting on the ways that emotions rather than the hard calculus of the market may be at influence.

I say this as someone who is long on BTC (and purchased right before the last great crash, where it dropped 30x in an instant). I've known the entire time that it's a wild gamble, and having a few coins just in case it becomes absurdly successful sounded fun (it's been very successful for that, watching the highs and lows, talking about it with friends and coworkers, even if it crashed again I've already gotten my money's worth).

Product and service availability for Bitcoin is very small, indeed, but it's not zero and the point you're trying to make is probably lost on anyone who already knows that you are either exaggerating or confused.

I bought and sold my bitcoins when prices where bellow 100$. Well, given the fact that I doubled the money I should be happy and brag about it, but I'm not. I could be holding 10k now and it hits in the stomach when I'm thinking about it.

On the other hand, I would never invest more than I can afford to lose.

There are thousand, if not tens of thousands of trades that can get someone that RoR.

I can point towards other instruments that can have that much or more risk to reward ratio. I calculate speculative risk at 100% value + incidental costs of the trade. So if someone said they doubled their investment that would mean a ratio of 1:1 aka a coin flip.

Though if someone did not know that these regulated speculative opportunities are abundantly available, they most likely should stay away.

I have a problem classifying random things like this as a mistake. You didn't have enough information at the time to predict that BTC would exceed $1000, and you don't have enough information now to predict what it will do, either.

It's just a game of musical chairs. The only "mistake" is to play. Some mistakes we pay for, while others ultimately benefit us.

Good call divesting some of your BTC in favor of physical assets.

Plus are you implying that hackers, like Bill Gates, Larry Page and Satoshi, can't possibly be (or deserve to be) ultra-rich?

There isn't a "can't be happy" feeling to a market - just what people actually do. At the scales and volumes involved, it is literally impossible for any of those countries to divest themselves of treasuries suddenly (for one thing, bonds don't work that way).

Moreover, governments only invest in real things. The productive output of the US is a real thing because all those places buy tons of US goods and services. Bitcoins are not real things. Perhaps moreover, why would any one of those places invest in a currency at a scale which would simply let them purchase the computing power to take it over permanently?

Because the money levels being talked about are large enough that you could trivially destroy it. Which means your entire foreign exchange rate is subject to whether someone wants to screw with the blockchain.

Which means at any junction, some third actor can hold the entire currency hostage - unless the governments invest in huge amounts of hashing hardware to protect it. Which is (1) a colossal waste of money and energy and (2) would, in turn, give them the capability to do the exact same thing.

Bitcoin will never be a currency held or traded by governments.

this is utter rubbish right here.

"> Barring some kind of final(!) crash, there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up."

That's quite a difference there to what you implied.

> but there is nothing wrong with stating an opinion based on personal experience.

And that's really all I did.

Regarding investing: telling someone who just bought a shitload of BTC to sell at a loss after some minor and entirely expected market fluctuation is just malicious.

Why? BTC is, for our purposes, infinitely divisible. BTC is just as useful when it is worth $1, as when it is worth $1B. I believe the bitcoin network has value, but 1BTC doesn't hold any more intrinsic value than 0.1BTC. They both leverage the same network.

So the difference between 1BTC and 0.1BTC is that there are significantly fewer of the former than the latter.