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This. So much. As a developer, I personally feel sick thinking about all the greed associated with cryptocurrency right now. I was an early adopter of both Bitc

This. So much. As a developer, I personally feel sick thinking about all the greed associated with cryptocurrency right now. I was an early adopter of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I only mined a bit or purchased enough to build little side projects for fun. Now I have non-technical friends and coworkers who are suddenly millionaires (literally, a friend bragged to me about having a few hundred BTC. He since quit his job) because they decided to dump their life savings into this stuff knowing nothing about it. It frustrates me to no end when I have family members ask, why didn't you buy or mine more? Why aren't you a millionaire? You were so into this stuff, weren't you? Yeah, I was. As a developer, not as a speculator. It's not just about the markets. But all of the exciting tech constantly gets drowned out by the noise of people going on about lucrative investments and comparing coins to gold. I'm so sick of the hype. I'm disappointed at the lack of millions I could have made (maybe, if I were a serious "hodlr"), but I do actually see value in the tech so it's extremely frustrating... Distributed ledgers and consensus algorithms are neat. Greed isn't.

quickthrower2 9y ago
I wonder how many of these instant millionaires are savvy enough financially and emotionally to handle the wealth. I could see it being easy to lose it all like many lottery winners, or lose friends or become depressed with nothing to do.
- lz400 9y ago
  Occurrences of people getting hacked to the tune of 6 figures are common in bitcoin forums and subreddits. I think by now so many hackers must be rich out of this.
  - simonebrunozzi 9y ago
    Ah, I imagined this would be the case, but I actually never looked for details. Do you have anything in mind to share with us? Or simply just go search on Reddit and you find plenty?
    - xur17 9y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/53xwal/got_hacked_200_ether_gone_please_help_to_find_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/53xwal/got_hacked... https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ird55/holy_shit_my_eth_accounts_been_hacked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ird55/holy_shit_... https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6qlxxa/i_lost_150000_ethereum_on_my_pc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6qlxxa/i_lost_150... https://medium.com/security-news/report-shows-230k-of-cryptocurrency-stolen-in-recent-shapeshift-cyber-attack-96c75679459b https://medium.com/security-news/report-shows-230k-of-crypto... http://www.altcointoday.com/chinese-exchange-yunbi-lost-40000-etc/ http://www.altcointoday.com/chinese-exchange-yunbi-lost-4000...
- max_ 9y ago
  You sound like some one who has ever made a lot of money. In a flash
da02 9y ago
What does it mean to be a Bitcoin millionaire? Did they sell near the highs and buy near the lows? Or do they hang on to it because they hope it will go higher?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  If you put $3,000 into bitcoin in early 2009 (EDIT: Actually, mid-2011), you'd have around $1M today. There's not much sense losing sleep over that statistic though. Most of us had $3k and didn't do that. All you can do is keep your eyes open for the next opportunity, which may never come.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    More like $1.5B today, if you could even have bought $3,000 worth of bitcoin at that time (early 2009 was weeks after the first block was mined).
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Whoops, thanks. It wasn't until February 2011 that BTC hit $1.00.
      - simonebrunozzi 9y ago
        And, buying $3,000 BTC at $1.00 in 2011, means that today you would be worth $10M, not $1M.
        AstralStorm 9y ago
        The trouble with alleged worth is that liquifying this much BTC is going to be problematic even at current market cap.
        makomk 9y ago
        Looking at the activity on Bitstamp right now, I don't think selling a few thousand BTC even affects the price noticably. Someone just sold almost 30,000 BTC for within half a percent of the previous trade - which is basically just the bid/ask spread these days.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Jacques once said that happiness is accepting what you have, not what you could have. It's not a direct quote, but the gist is worth taking to heart. It's easy to say, not so easy to do. But you gain nothing by tossing and turning.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  My guru as far as this lesson goes is Zachtronics. He's a game dev who makes programming games and who created infiniminer, which Notch adapted into minecraft. Zachtronics' games are some of the most fun I've played, and from a brief encounter (not irl) with the guy he seemed unperturbed (or like he'd made peace if he ever was) by the outcome.
  - sasas 9y ago
    There is a lesson here. In comparison, Notch appears very dissatisfied despite his accumulation of wealth.
- doktrin 9y ago
  That's sound advice, but as you said it's easier said than done. Every time I read about BTC, I get sick to my stomach thinking of what could have been. It's very tempting to view money as a possible solution to all of life's problems, particularly for those of us who don't have very fulfilling lives to begin with.
notme7 9y ago
This reminds me of a fun story. Back in 2011, our then head of IT kept a server under his desk that nobody but me seemed to notice. It was there for at least a year. One day over lunch he let it slip that it was a bitcoin node, but insisted it wasn't actually mining. I was at the office one night kinda late, and I walked around the corner to see him working on the server. He was installing what looked a lot like a graphics card. Sure. Not mining. In the end, he never got caught. I recently looked him up on LinkedIn and he hasn't been working for over a year. I obviously don't know this for sure, but given what a bitcoin enthusiast he was, I would not at all be surprised if he made a fortune mining for free by stealing the company's money and also investing heavily. Indeed, greed in cryptocurrency is a thing. (Created a throwaway to protect the privacy of the guilty, even though they don't deserve it.)
- sevenfive 9y ago
  Back of envelope suggests he was stealing $20k per year in power, probably not more than that. Considering this was 2011, the return on that $20k could have been gigantic. Reimbursing them would have been a drop in the bucket, if he could do it without outing himself...
  - jacobush 9y ago
    You need a new envelope. One server does not pull $20k worth of electricity a year.
  - to3m 9y ago
    I'd say $2000 would seem more likely, assuming it's some monster thing that draws 2KW when running flat out. 1 watt-year in the US costs around $0.75-$2.
  - where_do_i_live 9y ago
    Your envelope is more inflated than bitcoin itself. I am a miner, and i was a miner back in 2011. One of my rigs right now uses 923W with 6 high end graphics cards. That rig costs me ~$3/day * 365 = $1095. Do you really think you can hide the amount of heat from anyone - my rigs are basically a furnace - and in 2011, I think I could probably melt steel =P The guy may have had a few cards in there, but $20k is absurd.
noddy1 9y ago
If you understood and saw the promise, why didn't you load up? If you believe Sathoshi's thesis, and believe that the technology can fulfill the stated function, it is kind of a no-brainer to buy a few/a bunch? In addition, even now, at $3200, the market cap of bitcoin is still only ~50 billion. If you believe it has a good shot of being a superior global reserve currency, then it is still cheap and you should be glad that you can buy it for $3200. Most people I know who knew about it but did not buy constantly thought it is worth less than the current price, whether that price is $3000 or $30. So they never buy. Your job as an investor/speculator is to guess what something is worth, not just look at a chart going up and wish you got in at sometime in the past. In addition, you need to realise that the people who really do well in any bull market or bubble are people who did stupid or manic things and managed to catch the upside. Sensible people rarely make outlandish returns. If you are a very level-headed, sensible person, you will not make outlandish returns, especially short-term.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- etherael 9y ago
  > If you understood and saw the promise, why didn't you load up? His answer is right there in his original post, he understands the tech, which is cool, but he doesn't understand money and markets, which is the real reason the entire edifice has any value at all. His observation is akin to being interested in technology purely at the intellectual level, and not understanding how it can serve humanity and fill needs that are desperately unmet in our present paradigm, and people are more than willing to pay to have those needs met. What they already pay to have what we have instead of that is the net economic cost of all states and state controlled financial infrastructure in the world (which, to be clear, I mean all financial infrastructure, because there simply is no such thing as a private unregulated financial instutition outside the bounds of cryptocurrencies), which by comparison make the entire cryptocurrency market cap even now after the rapid appreciation look like the office tea budget. You need to understand both the tech and its utility to markets, and in turn the real utility of markets to humankind, and imho ideally the terrible threat represented by political authority, to do well out of the cryptocurrency wave. All these people that have loaded up without understanding the technology are eventually going to get taken as that technology matures and differentiates between all the available options, and they'll have no idea how to gauge the actual product level value of one relative to another, and they'll transfer value to those that do. You can't win with just one side of the equation.
alexmat 9y ago
This can be said about so many tech innovations, not just Bitcoin.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Not quite. Unlike virtual money other innovations have intrinsic value, however small it may be.
  - peterisza 9y ago
    Bitcoin's intrinsic value lies in the system that can securely, verifiably, transferably and trustlessly store numbers, assign them to password-protected wallets and keep the sum of those numbers below a constant (21M). Due to these traits, such a system is suitable for representing value just like gold (but BTC is more easily transferable). It is pretty hard to create such a system, therefore it is valueable.
DennisP 9y ago
I'm a full-time developer on Ethereum, and also wish I'd bought more early ETH. But developers who understand this stuff are in high demand right now, and there are all sorts of opportunities. There's plenty of money to be made by working instead of just hodling.
mrb 9y ago
Well, Bitcoin is such an outlier. $1 invested in April 2010 would be worth $1 million today. A insane 1000000x ROI over 7 years. It's nuts. No other investment opportunities even come close to that so it's very, very hard for most people to avoid greed and envy. Not sure what the solution is.
- avaer 9y ago
  The solution is for the market to correct itself (if it is thus insane as claimed). If that happens it will be very very hard for the greedy to find buyers or sympathy.
  - doktrin 9y ago
    Why would the market correct itself? What could possibly cause a crash, short of some kind of catastrophic security vulnerability being discovered, or hostile regulation in one of the core markets?
    - mhb 9y ago
      Because tulips?
      - doktrin 9y ago
        Fair. A liquidation race is certainly plausible.
      - mrb 9y ago
        It was funny to compare Bitcoin to tulips back in 2010. However the Bitcoin ecosystem has now sustained impressive growth—by all metrics—for 8 straight years... I think we are past the "it's tulips" stage.
        mhb 9y ago
        When someone asks Why would the market correct itself?, the comparison with tulips seems completely appropriate.
polotics 9y ago
Wow, you got some unkind family members!
warent 9y ago
A few million dollars really isn't much. And, once you make a few million, human nature takes over and decides it isn't enough--you always need more. I find it's helpful to count your blessings, and also remember that there's really something to the adage easy come easy go.
nikolay 9y ago
I feel the same way. And I'm ever since disgusted by cryptocurrencies as I see a lot of people who I don't want to be associated with them being the driving force. Also, I believe in distributed ledgers, I respect Bitcoin as being the first, but it's the worst from a technical point of view and wastes tons of energy, which is getting ridiculous! I would feel the same if I started Google - to build something cool like a powerful search engine just to sell ads. Ewww! There are better and worse ways of making money. Crypto speculation and ads are the some of the worse, in my opinion. Charge for your service - it's the only honorable and clean thing to do. Don't be a sellout! Shortly put, I do believe in the blockchain, I don't believe in Bitcoin, which is majorly driven by low-class Chinese speculators and exchanges!
- noddy1 9y ago
  I don't think the google founders started the company "just to sell ads". It is just how they make money. What they DO is make the best search engine, host every video and livestream anyone on earth wants to upload, run the best email service on earth, run the best cloud office suite etc etc.
  - nikolay 9y ago
    Maybe that was the only viable option back then. Today, more people are willing to pay for services and not be bothered by mostly irrelevant and annoying ads! Yet, Google isn't changing as we're the product! I was an early adopter of Contributor, which got shot down in its original form! This speaks loudly about nowadays Google!
rebootthesystem 9y ago
I think you are reading it wrong. It isn't about greed. It's about recognizing an opportunity and having the drive and interest to jump on it, sometimes at great personal risk. I have failed to recognize and/or act on a number of opportunities so far in my life. One was when the consumer Internet was "waking up". Domain name registration was free. And, even later, as Network Solutions started to charge for them, domain names, good one's, were plentiful. And so, there I sat, living through the technical birth of the Internet, fully understanding it from an engineering perspective and yet, due to my lack of experience at the time, never made the mental connection to the opportunity that lay ahead. While other less technical people gobbled-up tons of good and very valuable domains I was geeking out making use of the embryonic consumer Internet. These people made millions. I did not. Another missed opportunity happened during the economic downturn of 2008. The market crashed. I had been a day trader a decade earlier and have always kept a level of awareness about the market. I was on the phone with a friend and made the comment that Ford was an absolute goldmine as it had dropped down to about $1.50 per share. The company had none of the problems the other auto makers had. It just got dragged down with the rest of the market. It told him I should get off the phone and buy 100K shares of F. In other words, I recognized the opportunity and had the ability to take advantage of it. Yet, I did not. I would have made somewhere in the order of $1.7 million inside of a year and a half or so. I'm sure people who also recognized the opportunity and brought themselves to pull the trigger made a killing. I, for some strange reason, did not. I look at cryptocurrency and your comments the same way. You probably recognized the opportunity yet did not act. This has nothing to do with being intelligent or dumb. I have no clue what it is but it happens. I wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Plenty more opportunities ahead. Just try to grab onto of one when the time comes.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Luck favors the prepared. I've slowly woken up to this stuff over the years, I figure in your life you'll have somewhere between 1 and 10 of such opportunities, how you handle those will make all the difference in how you'll live the remainder of your life. In my life so far: - electronics - digital - computers - the web - cellular communications - smartphones + app ecosystems - crypto currencies (in progress) - deep learning (in progress)
jahnu 9y ago
I'd love to know what % of BTC trading is speculation and what % is non-BTC related trade.
19890309 9y ago
You missed out on the boat. So did I (a developer as well). So did many others (developers or not). Learn and move on. No need to be bitter (because it is so blatantly obvious you are when you say things like 'they decided to dump their life savings into this stuff knowing nothing about it') Who cares if you know everything or very little about it? They saw something that you with all of your 'vested interest and expertise' didn't - they saw that this thing would be a great investment. So what next? You make a good point when you champion the technology itself. I love the tech as well and I'm learning all I can about it. However, I'm also going to be dumping a significant amount of my networth in the next bitcoin which I believe will be Antshares/NEO. BUY IT ASAP I tell'ya. Don't miss the wave again. Never again. Why Antshares/NEO? Its chinese roots for one. The support by groups such as Microsoft and Alibaba. And for me, the reason why I champion it over all others is that as well as the aforementioned properties, NEO could be bigger because, they've created a platform that supports programming languages that all developers already know. Developer take up could be huge, especially in China and then the rest of the world. Also, if you truly believe in Bitcoin as a technology, why not buy now? I still think that if it indeed delivers on its promise, it will be way bigger.
- empath75 9y ago
  Thanks random person, I just cashed out my 401k and bought this. Hope it works out!
  - 19890309 9y ago
    It's not for everyone. Some people have the appetite for risk and others don't and never will. You can invest or watch and complain while others become wealthy...all the while claiming to be highly technical and that everyone else is an imbecile who happened about their new found wealth by being careless. Risk often appears careless to those with a weak stomach. Risk is typically very ugly. It's not supposed to be pretty. If it were, all and sundry would be participants. Risk wouldn't be risk without risk is all I'd leave you with.
- zweicoder 9y ago
  In your opinion, what makes ANS stand out from ETH?
tednoob 9y ago
I think I would say that I have some regrets not buying/mining. When I first heard about bitcoin I thought that it was pretty neat but I did not want to support it because I thought it is such a waste of exergy.
mattm 9y ago
In order to bootstrap a currency you need the price factor to interest lay people and generate adoption. There is no other way. I haven't seen the argument lately, but in the early days when the price started to rise, there was a lot of complaining from people who wanted the price to be stable. Stability is boring. It doesn't garner attention. It's the high fluctuations that generate interest and bring in new people to the ecosystem. Without it, Bitcoin would have been basically another technology that most people would have never heard of.
- grey-area 9y ago
  Or, you could make it useful rather than a vehicle for speculation. There are plenty of other ways.
p0nce 9y ago
I'm just fed up hearing about cryprocurrency. I have no interest in "better currency" and the topic keeps coming like it will change anything.
aerovistae 9y ago
Why did this require a throwaway? unless you're a well-known bitcoin contributor, which would be entertaining.

quickthrower2 9y ago

I wonder how many of these instant millionaires are savvy enough financially and emotionally to handle the wealth. I could see it being easy to lose it all like many lottery winners, or lose friends or become depressed with nothing to do.

lz400 9y ago
Occurrences of people getting hacked to the tune of 6 figures are common in bitcoin forums and subreddits. I think by now so many hackers must be rich out of this.
- simonebrunozzi 9y ago
  Ah, I imagined this would be the case, but I actually never looked for details. Do you have anything in mind to share with us? Or simply just go search on Reddit and you find plenty?
  - xur17 9y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/53xwal/got_hacked_200_ether_gone_please_help_to_find_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/53xwal/got_hacked... https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ird55/holy_shit_my_eth_accounts_been_hacked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ird55/holy_shit_... https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6qlxxa/i_lost_150000_ethereum_on_my_pc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6qlxxa/i_lost_150... https://medium.com/security-news/report-shows-230k-of-cryptocurrency-stolen-in-recent-shapeshift-cyber-attack-96c75679459b https://medium.com/security-news/report-shows-230k-of-crypto... http://www.altcointoday.com/chinese-exchange-yunbi-lost-40000-etc/ http://www.altcointoday.com/chinese-exchange-yunbi-lost-4000...
max_ 9y ago
You sound like some one who has ever made a lot of money. In a flash

da02 9y ago

What does it mean to be a Bitcoin millionaire? Did they sell near the highs and buy near the lows? Or do they hang on to it because they hope it will go higher?

sillysaurus3 9y ago
If you put $3,000 into bitcoin in early 2009 (EDIT: Actually, mid-2011), you'd have around $1M today. There's not much sense losing sleep over that statistic though. Most of us had $3k and didn't do that. All you can do is keep your eyes open for the next opportunity, which may never come.
- sowbug 9y ago
  More like $1.5B today, if you could even have bought $3,000 worth of bitcoin at that time (early 2009 was weeks after the first block was mined).
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Whoops, thanks. It wasn't until February 2011 that BTC hit $1.00.
    - simonebrunozzi 9y ago
      And, buying $3,000 BTC at $1.00 in 2011, means that today you would be worth $10M, not $1M.
      - AstralStorm 9y ago
        The trouble with alleged worth is that liquifying this much BTC is going to be problematic even at current market cap.
        makomk 9y ago
        Looking at the activity on Bitstamp right now, I don't think selling a few thousand BTC even affects the price noticably. Someone just sold almost 30,000 BTC for within half a percent of the previous trade - which is basically just the bid/ask spread these days.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Jacques once said that happiness is accepting what you have, not what you could have. It's not a direct quote, but the gist is worth taking to heart. It's easy to say, not so easy to do. But you gain nothing by tossing and turning.

nebabyte 9y ago
My guru as far as this lesson goes is Zachtronics. He's a game dev who makes programming games and who created infiniminer, which Notch adapted into minecraft. Zachtronics' games are some of the most fun I've played, and from a brief encounter (not irl) with the guy he seemed unperturbed (or like he'd made peace if he ever was) by the outcome.
- sasas 9y ago
  There is a lesson here. In comparison, Notch appears very dissatisfied despite his accumulation of wealth.
doktrin 9y ago
That's sound advice, but as you said it's easier said than done. Every time I read about BTC, I get sick to my stomach thinking of what could have been. It's very tempting to view money as a possible solution to all of life's problems, particularly for those of us who don't have very fulfilling lives to begin with.

notme7 9y ago

This reminds me of a fun story. Back in 2011, our then head of IT kept a server under his desk that nobody but me seemed to notice. It was there for at least a year. One day over lunch he let it slip that it was a bitcoin node, but insisted it wasn't actually mining. I was at the office one night kinda late, and I walked around the corner to see him working on the server. He was installing what looked a lot like a graphics card. Sure. Not mining. In the end, he never got caught. I recently looked him up on LinkedIn and he hasn't been working for over a year. I obviously don't know this for sure, but given what a bitcoin enthusiast he was, I would not at all be surprised if he made a fortune mining for free by stealing the company's money and also investing heavily. Indeed, greed in cryptocurrency is a thing. (Created a throwaway to protect the privacy of the guilty, even though they don't deserve it.)

sevenfive 9y ago
Back of envelope suggests he was stealing $20k per year in power, probably not more than that. Considering this was 2011, the return on that $20k could have been gigantic. Reimbursing them would have been a drop in the bucket, if he could do it without outing himself...
- jacobush 9y ago
  You need a new envelope. One server does not pull $20k worth of electricity a year.
- to3m 9y ago
  I'd say $2000 would seem more likely, assuming it's some monster thing that draws 2KW when running flat out. 1 watt-year in the US costs around $0.75-$2.
- where_do_i_live 9y ago
  Your envelope is more inflated than bitcoin itself. I am a miner, and i was a miner back in 2011. One of my rigs right now uses 923W with 6 high end graphics cards. That rig costs me ~$3/day * 365 = $1095. Do you really think you can hide the amount of heat from anyone - my rigs are basically a furnace - and in 2011, I think I could probably melt steel =P The guy may have had a few cards in there, but $20k is absurd.

noddy1 9y ago

If you understood and saw the promise, why didn't you load up? If you believe Sathoshi's thesis, and believe that the technology can fulfill the stated function, it is kind of a no-brainer to buy a few/a bunch? In addition, even now, at $3200, the market cap of bitcoin is still only ~50 billion. If you believe it has a good shot of being a superior global reserve currency, then it is still cheap and you should be glad that you can buy it for $3200. Most people I know who knew about it but did not buy constantly thought it is worth less than the current price, whether that price is $3000 or $30. So they never buy. Your job as an investor/speculator is to guess what something is worth, not just look at a chart going up and wish you got in at sometime in the past. In addition, you need to realise that the people who really do well in any bull market or bubble are people who did stupid or manic things and managed to catch the upside. Sensible people rarely make outlandish returns. If you are a very level-headed, sensible person, you will not make outlandish returns, especially short-term.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
etherael 9y ago
> If you understood and saw the promise, why didn't you load up? His answer is right there in his original post, he understands the tech, which is cool, but he doesn't understand money and markets, which is the real reason the entire edifice has any value at all. His observation is akin to being interested in technology purely at the intellectual level, and not understanding how it can serve humanity and fill needs that are desperately unmet in our present paradigm, and people are more than willing to pay to have those needs met. What they already pay to have what we have instead of that is the net economic cost of all states and state controlled financial infrastructure in the world (which, to be clear, I mean all financial infrastructure, because there simply is no such thing as a private unregulated financial instutition outside the bounds of cryptocurrencies), which by comparison make the entire cryptocurrency market cap even now after the rapid appreciation look like the office tea budget. You need to understand both the tech and its utility to markets, and in turn the real utility of markets to humankind, and imho ideally the terrible threat represented by political authority, to do well out of the cryptocurrency wave. All these people that have loaded up without understanding the technology are eventually going to get taken as that technology matures and differentiates between all the available options, and they'll have no idea how to gauge the actual product level value of one relative to another, and they'll transfer value to those that do. You can't win with just one side of the equation.

alexmat 9y ago

This can be said about so many tech innovations, not just Bitcoin.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Not quite. Unlike virtual money other innovations have intrinsic value, however small it may be.
- peterisza 9y ago
  Bitcoin's intrinsic value lies in the system that can securely, verifiably, transferably and trustlessly store numbers, assign them to password-protected wallets and keep the sum of those numbers below a constant (21M). Due to these traits, such a system is suitable for representing value just like gold (but BTC is more easily transferable). It is pretty hard to create such a system, therefore it is valueable.

DennisP 9y ago

I'm a full-time developer on Ethereum, and also wish I'd bought more early ETH. But developers who understand this stuff are in high demand right now, and there are all sorts of opportunities. There's plenty of money to be made by working instead of just hodling.

mrb 9y ago

Well, Bitcoin is such an outlier. $1 invested in April 2010 would be worth $1 million today. A insane 1000000x ROI over 7 years. It's nuts. No other investment opportunities even come close to that so it's very, very hard for most people to avoid greed and envy. Not sure what the solution is.

avaer 9y ago
The solution is for the market to correct itself (if it is thus insane as claimed). If that happens it will be very very hard for the greedy to find buyers or sympathy.
- doktrin 9y ago
  Why would the market correct itself? What could possibly cause a crash, short of some kind of catastrophic security vulnerability being discovered, or hostile regulation in one of the core markets?
  - mhb 9y ago
    Because tulips?
    - doktrin 9y ago
      Fair. A liquidation race is certainly plausible.
    - mrb 9y ago
      It was funny to compare Bitcoin to tulips back in 2010. However the Bitcoin ecosystem has now sustained impressive growth—by all metrics—for 8 straight years... I think we are past the "it's tulips" stage.
      - mhb 9y ago
        When someone asks Why would the market correct itself?, the comparison with tulips seems completely appropriate.

polotics 9y ago

Wow, you got some unkind family members!

warent 9y ago

A few million dollars really isn't much. And, once you make a few million, human nature takes over and decides it isn't enough--you always need more. I find it's helpful to count your blessings, and also remember that there's really something to the adage easy come easy go.

nikolay 9y ago

I feel the same way. And I'm ever since disgusted by cryptocurrencies as I see a lot of people who I don't want to be associated with them being the driving force. Also, I believe in distributed ledgers, I respect Bitcoin as being the first, but it's the worst from a technical point of view and wastes tons of energy, which is getting ridiculous! I would feel the same if I started Google - to build something cool like a powerful search engine just to sell ads. Ewww! There are better and worse ways of making money. Crypto speculation and ads are the some of the worse, in my opinion. Charge for your service - it's the only honorable and clean thing to do. Don't be a sellout! Shortly put, I do believe in the blockchain, I don't believe in Bitcoin, which is majorly driven by low-class Chinese speculators and exchanges!

noddy1 9y ago
I don't think the google founders started the company "just to sell ads". It is just how they make money. What they DO is make the best search engine, host every video and livestream anyone on earth wants to upload, run the best email service on earth, run the best cloud office suite etc etc.
- nikolay 9y ago
  Maybe that was the only viable option back then. Today, more people are willing to pay for services and not be bothered by mostly irrelevant and annoying ads! Yet, Google isn't changing as we're the product! I was an early adopter of Contributor, which got shot down in its original form! This speaks loudly about nowadays Google!

rebootthesystem 9y ago

I think you are reading it wrong. It isn't about greed. It's about recognizing an opportunity and having the drive and interest to jump on it, sometimes at great personal risk. I have failed to recognize and/or act on a number of opportunities so far in my life. One was when the consumer Internet was "waking up". Domain name registration was free. And, even later, as Network Solutions started to charge for them, domain names, good one's, were plentiful. And so, there I sat, living through the technical birth of the Internet, fully understanding it from an engineering perspective and yet, due to my lack of experience at the time, never made the mental connection to the opportunity that lay ahead. While other less technical people gobbled-up tons of good and very valuable domains I was geeking out making use of the embryonic consumer Internet. These people made millions. I did not. Another missed opportunity happened during the economic downturn of 2008. The market crashed. I had been a day trader a decade earlier and have always kept a level of awareness about the market. I was on the phone with a friend and made the comment that Ford was an absolute goldmine as it had dropped down to about $1.50 per share. The company had none of the problems the other auto makers had. It just got dragged down with the rest of the market. It told him I should get off the phone and buy 100K shares of F. In other words, I recognized the opportunity and had the ability to take advantage of it. Yet, I did not. I would have made somewhere in the order of $1.7 million inside of a year and a half or so. I'm sure people who also recognized the opportunity and brought themselves to pull the trigger made a killing. I, for some strange reason, did not. I look at cryptocurrency and your comments the same way. You probably recognized the opportunity yet did not act. This has nothing to do with being intelligent or dumb. I have no clue what it is but it happens. I wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Plenty more opportunities ahead. Just try to grab onto of one when the time comes.

jacquesm 9y ago
Luck favors the prepared. I've slowly woken up to this stuff over the years, I figure in your life you'll have somewhere between 1 and 10 of such opportunities, how you handle those will make all the difference in how you'll live the remainder of your life. In my life so far: - electronics - digital - computers - the web - cellular communications - smartphones + app ecosystems - crypto currencies (in progress) - deep learning (in progress)

jahnu 9y ago

I'd love to know what % of BTC trading is speculation and what % is non-BTC related trade.

19890309 9y ago

You missed out on the boat. So did I (a developer as well). So did many others (developers or not). Learn and move on. No need to be bitter (because it is so blatantly obvious you are when you say things like 'they decided to dump their life savings into this stuff knowing nothing about it') Who cares if you know everything or very little about it? They saw something that you with all of your 'vested interest and expertise' didn't - they saw that this thing would be a great investment. So what next? You make a good point when you champion the technology itself. I love the tech as well and I'm learning all I can about it. However, I'm also going to be dumping a significant amount of my networth in the next bitcoin which I believe will be Antshares/NEO. BUY IT ASAP I tell'ya. Don't miss the wave again. Never again. Why Antshares/NEO? Its chinese roots for one. The support by groups such as Microsoft and Alibaba. And for me, the reason why I champion it over all others is that as well as the aforementioned properties, NEO could be bigger because, they've created a platform that supports programming languages that all developers already know. Developer take up could be huge, especially in China and then the rest of the world. Also, if you truly believe in Bitcoin as a technology, why not buy now? I still think that if it indeed delivers on its promise, it will be way bigger.

empath75 9y ago
Thanks random person, I just cashed out my 401k and bought this. Hope it works out!
- 19890309 9y ago
  It's not for everyone. Some people have the appetite for risk and others don't and never will. You can invest or watch and complain while others become wealthy...all the while claiming to be highly technical and that everyone else is an imbecile who happened about their new found wealth by being careless. Risk often appears careless to those with a weak stomach. Risk is typically very ugly. It's not supposed to be pretty. If it were, all and sundry would be participants. Risk wouldn't be risk without risk is all I'd leave you with.
zweicoder 9y ago
In your opinion, what makes ANS stand out from ETH?

tednoob 9y ago

I think I would say that I have some regrets not buying/mining. When I first heard about bitcoin I thought that it was pretty neat but I did not want to support it because I thought it is such a waste of exergy.

mattm 9y ago

In order to bootstrap a currency you need the price factor to interest lay people and generate adoption. There is no other way. I haven't seen the argument lately, but in the early days when the price started to rise, there was a lot of complaining from people who wanted the price to be stable. Stability is boring. It doesn't garner attention. It's the high fluctuations that generate interest and bring in new people to the ecosystem. Without it, Bitcoin would have been basically another technology that most people would have never heard of.

grey-area 9y ago
Or, you could make it useful rather than a vehicle for speculation. There are plenty of other ways.

p0nce 9y ago

I'm just fed up hearing about cryprocurrency. I have no interest in "better currency" and the topic keeps coming like it will change anything.

aerovistae 9y ago

Why did this require a throwaway? unless you're a well-known bitcoin contributor, which would be entertaining.