Rationalists are familiar with Pascal's Wager, arguably to a fault. (There's a lot of discussion regarding how it ties into strong AI. The darker theories look

Rationalists are familiar with Pascal's Wager, arguably to a fault. (There's a lot of discussion regarding how it ties into strong AI. The darker theories look something like Stross's A Colder War.) It's certainly true that long-odds betting isn't an inherent winner, and crypto better is long-odds betting. But BTC was the first blockchain currency, and is credited with being the first decentralized answer to the double-spend question. People who understood the tech and the importance of that idea at the beginning might well have made a prediction that this was different than your average investment bubble, and given that BTC and ETH are clearly the 'safest' cryptocurrencies they'd have a solid point. It was still a long odds chance. It could have dried up regardless of technical merit, or crashed when the selfish miner problem was unveiled, or been supplanted by a more-usable version of the same insight. But it's quite reasonable to argue that 2011-2013 BTC was a much more justified bet than early-stage Ripple or Litecoin or other cryptos.