If you want to "invest" in safe things, you buy treasury bonds. You'll get lousy returns, but you're guaranteed to get your money back. If you are willing to "

If you want to "invest" in safe things, you buy treasury bonds. You'll get lousy returns, but you're guaranteed to get your money back. If you are willing to "invest" in unsafe things, you buy bitcoin or a start-up. You might get 10x or 100x returns, or you might lose all your money. Taleb advises what he calls the "barbell strategy": you put 80% of your money in ultra-safe things (treasury bonds), and the rest in ultra-risky things (out of money options, bitcoin, startups). The actual price of bitcoin is irrelevant. If I have $10k to invest, I might get 10000 bitcoins at a price of $1 or 2 bitcoins at a price of $5000. It doesn't matter. It's the same $10k invested. BTW, when I started watching bitcoin in 2011, it's price was $1. People were saying the same thing than, who is crazy enough to invest in this thing at the outrageous price of $1.