11 ms·
Because they have 50,000 more. It was very easy to accumulate BTC in the early days. As usual, hindsight 20/20.
by fosk 8y ago
Because they have 50,000 more. It was very easy to accumulate BTC in the early days. As usual, hindsight 20/20.
- walrus01 8y agoMaybe I'm cynical but if I had 50,000 BTC and wasn't ultra bullish on cryptocurrency in general, I would slowly sell it off at a moderate rate sufficient to turn it into real USD denominated securities, while not flooding the market (basically pick some top-20 performing ETFs and mutual funds). True believers and zealots will of course "HODL".
- larrysalibra 8y agoLots of people took that exact same strategy at what in hindsight now looks like ridiculously low prices like $1 or $10 or $100. Those people don’t have 50,000 or often any bitcoin left.
- toxik 8y agoYour assets are only really worth something when you sell them. Many more should have sold at the height of the boom last year.
- acjohnson55 8y agoWhile true, that's hardly actionable. It's impossible to repeatedly pick peaks.
- brownbat 8y agoYeah, it's like saying everyone should have shorted housing in 2006. If everyone had perfect information... markets wouldn't even function in a recognizable way. If everyone sold before the peak there wouldn't be any peaks.
- rspeele 8y agoTrue. Had I been involved with Bitcoin, I probably would've done that, myself, and regretted it. But then again, if we're talking about cashing out for an amount of money on which you can pursue hobbies, live comfortably, and never have to work for another person again... I can't imagine I would regret it that much.
- Spooky23 8y agoI had bitcoin worth about $50 in 2009/10 go poof when I reimaged a laptop and forgot to backup.
- walrus01 8y agoBack of the napkin level calculation says that if you had about 675 bitcoin in 2010, it would've been worth $10,625,000 if you'd sold it at the $17,000 peak.
- mrb 8y agoBitcoin traded between $0.003 and $0.39 in 2009-2010. Source: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/ http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/ Therefore "$50" worth back then could be any amount between 128 and 16667 BTC, worth between $800k and $103M today.
- wild_preference 8y agoYou weren’t kidding about back of the napkin because that’s not 675 * 17k.
- DenisM 8y agoSell 1/4 of your holding every time the price doubles. You won’t make as much money as you could ideally, but you will make a sizable fraction of the maximum, no matter how far or near it will go.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI presume that the first step of your strategy would be to sell 1/4 of your holding now, since it's already doubled (more than once). I also presume that you mean, the second time, that you sell 1/4 of the 3/4 you have left. That strategy works for something like Bitcoin, if you got in near the beginning. It's a really nice strategy for that situation. But let's say your employer gave you got stock options at $1/share which, at the time they were granted, was exactly the stock price. The stock slowly goes up to $2.50, then slowly falls to below $1. There are two problems with your strategy in this scenario: First, when has it "doubled"? You were given these options for free, and (on the day they were granted), they are worth zero. As soon as the stock goes to $1.01, they've more than doubled... but you don't want to sell then. (This is also true of Bitcoins that you mined back when that was easy. They were essentially free, so when was the first doubling?) But if you wait until the stock is worth $2 ("doubling" in another sense), then you only sell once, and only a quarter of your holdings. That's much less gain than you could have made. Your strategy is a good one for a rocketship like Bitcoin. But you often don't know that you're on that kind of a rocketship until it's doubled several times. If you wait for confirmation that you're on a rocketship, you could miss some much smaller, but still really sweet gains. What I did when I had the options scenario is essentially your strategy, but with much lower numbers. When the stock went up maybe 25% or 50%, I sold off some of the options. And some more when it went up another 25%. That worked very well for me. But if the stock had been a rocketship, I would have missed out on a lot.
- Retric 8y agoSome of this is bound by the size of the investment. Sub 10,000$ returns are not going to change your life, but when you can start cashing in the equivalent of your annual salary not taking money off the table gets risky. At that point think of it as a math problem. Suppose you own a stock that’s never going to issue a dividend, but will do buybacks until eventually the company fails. In such situations you can expect 0-X doublings and a final price of zero. Now, what strategy works best depends on X, buy and hold is clearly a losing strategy in all situations. Further you don’t know X but you can come up with a reasonable bounds as nothing is going to be worth say 10^30$. Another approach is to simply constantly sell a fixed percentage each month. That’s very useful if you only have one large investment that does not nessisarily fail, just stop growing exponentially.
- lifeformed 8y agoNow seems like a reasonable time... I mean they have to sell eventually, right? What are they waiting for? Trillions?
- colechristensen 8y agoI sold at $15 and was happy that I'd paid for some real fancy graphics cards with the proceeds. Valuation at one point was well over $500k, oh well. Oh and half went poof in MtGox. I paid for a month's rent with a wallet I'd found with only a transaction fee inside which somehow didn't get deducted from a few years back.
- rohit2412 8y agoWell lucky you mtgox is getting a civil rehabilitation
- DesiLurker 8y agomy general thinking about such meteoric rise of, really, any security like btc/amzn/etc is that this is a cognitive mistake our mind does because of labels. the label amazon wasn't 'Amazon' until it showed consistent growth & shrewd judgement over time. the mistake we make is take that mental object we see now and back project on the past while remorse turns off our analytical ability to see all the possible risks associated with it then. I always remind myself that most public information is already priced into a stock & for every buyer of a stock there is a seller too.
- Hydraulix989 8y agoYep, it's gambling.
- fapjacks 8y agoI put the down payment of about eight grand on my last car with Bitcoin I sold in January of 2012. So you can do the math. :)
- panarky 8y agoI guess it all depends on whether you think BTC is more or less "real" than dollars or these supposed "securities" of which you speak.
- ric2b 8y agoMaybe they already sold enough to be comfortable for decades and are just trying to make the space welcoming and fun, because if they were into Bitcoin early on they probably love the idea of it and don't just want to make money, they want people to use it.