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To me this is just the typical example of people that profited handsomely because of: 1- being sons of rich people and 2- being disgustingly lucky Bitcoin is a

To me this is just the typical example of people that profited handsomely because of: 1- being sons of rich people and 2- being disgustingly lucky Bitcoin is a braindead bubble with no fundamentals whatsoever, these guys just happened to have a few million lying around, they put it into something that made absolutely zero sense and ended up billionaires.

EGreg 9y ago
They finally got their wish after they weren't able to do it with Facebook.
nickpp 9y ago
You could've bought 100 bitcoin when it cost $0.01 and today be a millionaire. Did you?
- missandei 9y ago
  As I could have bought dogecoin and a million other examples of total nonsense. Instead I bought stocks that trebled in price and made some financial sense, and will keep making financial sense in the future.
  - nickpp 9y ago
    So did they, but they choose differently. Then why do you accuse them when you had the exact same chances and only your respective choices produced the different outcomes?
  - jimbob21 9y ago
    Yeah, but dogecoin still isn't worth anything and most of the altcoins from christmas past aren't either. You know what is, Mr. Skeptic? Two things: the jealousy you're feeling because they made a calculated risk and it paid off, and the fiat value of BTC as an asset. So run back to your stocks, keep making the same trades everybody else does in the name of "sense" and tell me how you feel when all that "sense" your talking about collapses in two years when the economy cycles.
golergka 9y ago
> being disgustingly lucky Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of explanation.
- derefr 9y ago
  Lots of people with high risk-tolerance got kind of rich by buying Bitcoin early. The only difference with the Winklevosses is that they had a lot more money to leverage in that early investment. It's not improbable that someone was going to have a lot of money and put it into Bitcoin.
  - golergka 9y ago
    It's also not improbable that someone got involved in the earliest stage of what was Facebook by pure luck. However, both those things together are starting to get just a little bit improbable from the pure luck standpoint, don't you think?
    - derefr 9y ago
      Any professional investor is riding on a combination of a very long lucky streak, and portfolio-based risk-adjusting. Paying attention to the Winklevosses here is a selection effect; you're ignoring everyone who executed the exact same investment strategy they did, but ended up making bad bets rather than good ones. You can entirely explain away the Winklevoss' success by supposing an investor pool of sufficient size that you can pick a set of first-pass winners (1:10000, say) and then pick a second-pass winner from that set (1:10000 again), where they happened to be the ones to be drawn, and everyone else wasn't. The sheer number of people trying to win explains away the improbability required to win—in exactly the same way that the number of people entered into a lottery explains away the improbability of the winner's guess. Also, we only know who the Winklevosses are because they were a first-pass winner. So there's no reason to privilege them here; it'd make much more sense to look at all first-pass winners (in this case, early Facebook investors), rather than this random famous example of one, and then ask about this set's cumulative probability of at least one of them having gotten even richer from an early Bitcoin investment.
agorabinary 9y ago
"with no fundamentals whatsoever" It's a sad state of the HN community that this post isn't already downvoted into oblivion. edit: Oh look, a throwaway account!
- missandei 9y ago
  Wouldn't you agree that probably 90% of the current price is driven by FOMO and people putting money in bitcoin because "it's rising" or "my friend doubled his money while sitting on the toilet, so ill buy some of it" ? There are other currencies with vastly superior usage properties (for example ethereum), for which I could understand an investment based on the fact they might actually be adopted as infrastructure
  - golergka 9y ago
    No. I'm constantly buffled how HN audience completely misses the fact that Bitcoin is nowadays used in most of street-level drug transactions that give it most of it's liquidity.

EGreg 9y ago

They finally got their wish after they weren't able to do it with Facebook.

nickpp 9y ago

You could've bought 100 bitcoin when it cost $0.01 and today be a millionaire. Did you?

missandei 9y ago
As I could have bought dogecoin and a million other examples of total nonsense. Instead I bought stocks that trebled in price and made some financial sense, and will keep making financial sense in the future.
- nickpp 9y ago
  So did they, but they choose differently. Then why do you accuse them when you had the exact same chances and only your respective choices produced the different outcomes?
- jimbob21 9y ago
  Yeah, but dogecoin still isn't worth anything and most of the altcoins from christmas past aren't either. You know what is, Mr. Skeptic? Two things: the jealousy you're feeling because they made a calculated risk and it paid off, and the fiat value of BTC as an asset. So run back to your stocks, keep making the same trades everybody else does in the name of "sense" and tell me how you feel when all that "sense" your talking about collapses in two years when the economy cycles.

golergka 9y ago

> being disgustingly lucky Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of explanation.

derefr 9y ago
Lots of people with high risk-tolerance got kind of rich by buying Bitcoin early. The only difference with the Winklevosses is that they had a lot more money to leverage in that early investment. It's not improbable that someone was going to have a lot of money and put it into Bitcoin.
- golergka 9y ago
  It's also not improbable that someone got involved in the earliest stage of what was Facebook by pure luck. However, both those things together are starting to get just a little bit improbable from the pure luck standpoint, don't you think?
  - derefr 9y ago
    Any professional investor is riding on a combination of a very long lucky streak, and portfolio-based risk-adjusting. Paying attention to the Winklevosses here is a selection effect; you're ignoring everyone who executed the exact same investment strategy they did, but ended up making bad bets rather than good ones. You can entirely explain away the Winklevoss' success by supposing an investor pool of sufficient size that you can pick a set of first-pass winners (1:10000, say) and then pick a second-pass winner from that set (1:10000 again), where they happened to be the ones to be drawn, and everyone else wasn't. The sheer number of people trying to win explains away the improbability required to win—in exactly the same way that the number of people entered into a lottery explains away the improbability of the winner's guess. Also, we only know who the Winklevosses are because they were a first-pass winner. So there's no reason to privilege them here; it'd make much more sense to look at all first-pass winners (in this case, early Facebook investors), rather than this random famous example of one, and then ask about this set's cumulative probability of at least one of them having gotten even richer from an early Bitcoin investment.

agorabinary 9y ago

"with no fundamentals whatsoever" It's a sad state of the HN community that this post isn't already downvoted into oblivion. edit: Oh look, a throwaway account!

missandei 9y ago
Wouldn't you agree that probably 90% of the current price is driven by FOMO and people putting money in bitcoin because "it's rising" or "my friend doubled his money while sitting on the toilet, so ill buy some of it" ? There are other currencies with vastly superior usage properties (for example ethereum), for which I could understand an investment based on the fact they might actually be adopted as infrastructure
- golergka 9y ago
  No. I'm constantly buffled how HN audience completely misses the fact that Bitcoin is nowadays used in most of street-level drug transactions that give it most of it's liquidity.