Emotionally it does matter. Economically there's no difference between having the $2000 cash and buying 100BTC at $20 versus having 100BTC at $20 and choosing not to sell it.

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).

There absolutely is. You can't effectively spend bitcoin, except on the exchanges. You can't use bitcoin to buy anything. The only thing you can do is use USD to buy bitcoin and transfer the bitcoin, and have it transferred back into USD by the merchant.

When you exaggerate points like this you undermined the reasonable advice you're trying to give people.

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.

Really? Is there something a stock or anything accessible by mere mortals that goes up 20+ times it's value every year? :-)

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.

If someone wants an accessible instrument that regularly goes 20x+ times initial risk in a year or even a month! look into the options markets. Remember to always only buy to open your call and put positions and sell before the contract expires if it is in the money.

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.

Well if you knew stock movements like the poster suggested, you could achieve huge returns by playing with options. Like the options on Nokia that went from a few pennies to a dollar or so when MS announced the purchase. Options jump around by a huge lot each week. So it seems that starting from $100, if you knew were things were going each week, you'd make a ton of money. (There's a limit as you get more money - it's uh, hard, to double a billion dollars on a limited set of options in a week, versus only $100.)