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Does anyone else feel like: - they've missed an opportunity to get rich with minimal effort from crypto - still have absolutely no interest in jumping in at t

Does anyone else feel like: - they've missed an opportunity to get rich with minimal effort from crypto - still have absolutely no interest in jumping in at this point?

luxurytent 6y ago
When everything is going up, you can feel like everyone is winning but you. There's many get-rich-quick-schemes available right now and if you put in the effort to know where to go, you can get "rich" quick too. Or, you can continue enjoying your life the way you are without worrying what others are doing. Many times, they are only projecting one side of the story.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  But the meth voices say to keep browsing for patterns
kungito 6y ago
What helps me sleep at night is that even had I entered all this time ago with BTC I would have exited 100 times by now. There have indeed been many 2x,3x,5x multipliers with BTC but there have been so many instances when it was unclear how everything is going to turn out which would personally prompt me to consider exiting with what I had. As my friend nicely put it: only way we could have gotten rich from BTC is had we bought it when it was pennies and forgotten about it up until last year
- ur-whale 6y ago
  AKA : no risk, no rewards.
- petercooper 6y ago
  That's exactly my attitude towards it too. But this has also given me a strong lesson for the future. If I get in on the ground floor of anything and decide to sell out, always keep a little skin the game that you don't touch.. because you never know if it'll go big. If the GP had sold 99% of his 3650 coins and kept 1% till now, that would still be $1.8m.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    When do you sell it though? If you had coins from 2011, is now the time to sell? What if it goes up 100x next year.
    - dmwallin 6y ago
      Set yourself a threshold amount that you are okay with a 100% loss on, and a periodic schedule based on your risk-appetite. At each interval if you are above your threshold you sell your excess holdings and if you are below you sit tight. Alternatively you can set yourself a price threshold. For example, sell half your holdings every time the price doubles. Essentially this acts as a log function on your gains in exchange for lowering risk. There's a ton of room for fine tuning a set of rules to manage risk, as long as you are willing to stick to them.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - petercooper 6y ago
      Personally I would sell what I'd call the "FOMO holding" once it's worth a "life changing" amount of money. So if I held 100 Bitcoin as such a fund, that might well have been years ago, but then I'd also be retired and not care. The sister comment here is more nuanced and surely a better answer, though.
- belval 6y ago
  Same thing here, I made a good profit a while back. To believe that I would be a millionaire today requires ignoring everything I know about my risk tolerance and while Bitcoin worked, it could've gone the Ponzi scheme way and crash to 0$ overnight. There were risks of Chinese miners going for a 51% attack, regulation in the US to downright outlawing mining in Canada.
- loopz 6y ago
  Or the wallet got cracked. Most online wallets were. Or the HDD died..
- MarkPNeyer 6y ago
  Or if you have totally unshakeable faith in it, because you see us heading towards a game-theoretic attractor where bitcoin is the primary global store of value. That's worked for me :)
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Well, if you have the power to go back in time and change your decision to buy BTC, you might as well also go back in time and change your decision to then not sell it. :) That's basically what the "hodl" meme is: just decide to not sell until you need the money or until the money could significantly change your life. Of course, that's not exactly a new "investment" idea: there's always been a big difference between day-trading and just buying stocks (and index funds, etc.) with the intention to hold essentially indefinitely.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  Yup, same. Hell if I put in money now and it did 2x and went to $100k, I'd get out, too. There's just no way I see myself not getting out at $100k or say $200k. And I'm not risking my money on an investment that can 'only' do 2x or 4x. Bitcoin was cool as it could do 10x or 100x in the span of 1-2 years. But with the numbers where they're at and knowing myself, I'd cash out way before that. In the end because bitcoin isn't being used by virtually anyone, and is only valuable because of the momentum/hype (i.e., the reason I'd buy it is only because other people buying it solely for the purpose of thinking even more others will buy it only for speculation and not use, and the price rises), it's just not an interesting investment for me long-term. Short-term it could be but I'd be as not surprised if it did -50% as if it did +50% in the next year. Not really interested in that kind of exposure, given that I don't think I'll ever hold enough to enjoy the extreme potential upside.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Interesting to read this, as my instincts are completely different. Wouldn't a better strategy be to e.g. wait until Bitcoin doubles (which you believe is likely to happen), then sell half (so that you get your money back, sans inflation)... and then for the following twenty years, sell 5% of the remaining Bitcoins each year? The greatest risk is that maybe Bitcoin never doubles, and maybe you lose all the money you put it. But at the moment the price doubles and you sell half, so you get your money back... why throw away the chance of maybe getting insanely rich in the future?
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      To me, it really depends on one's financial situation. It's much easier to hodl if you have a good-paying job with benefits, a 401K with a healthy amount stocked away, a decent savings reserve, or equity on a house. Also helps if you've played a lot of poker.
    - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
      You're making a mental difference that's not an actual difference. Suppose you have 100k, invest 20k of it in bitcoin and it doubles. You now have 40k bitcoin and 120k in total. You could say, sell half the bitcoin, you now still have 100k in other assets and 20k in bitcoin. Even if you lose the entire 20k, you'll never lose more than what you put in. But what does it matter? Fact is, you still lose 20k if bitcoin goes to zero. The fact you already made 20k on it doesn't change that fact. The source of your wealth should not indicate whether a loss is good or bad, or bearable or unbearable. At the end of the day, a loss is a loss. All your wealth goes into one big pot, you can't say 'this part is from savings, this part is from bitcoin'. It's just money, and losing it sucks. Of course there is something to be said about reducing your exposure to bitcoin as you grow richer and need to take less risky bets. But that's only great after the fact that bitcoin keeps going up in price. If bitcoin goes down in price, it's of course a poor idea to sell slowly instead of all at once. Again, a loss of $X is a loss of $X. At the end of the day, virtually everyone holds bitcoin not for the actual value of e.g. owning a small portion of Apple which sells something hundreds of millions of people use daily, profits, which flows back to you. Instead virtually everyone holds it simply because others are, and by doing so together, it keeps going up in price. You could apply the same to any other (scarce) good. Like a useless but rare metal. Or indeed, a useless copy-paste of the bitcoin software, to start a new crypto. Bitcoin's price isn't because it's valuable, it's because of a common idea to buy it because it'll make us rich. And that idea cannot hold true on anything but faith. Humans are pretty crazy and so I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin goes to $200k within 2-3 years. But it's still an insane investment proposition to me. (coming from a person who held 100% of his net worth in bitcoin for 3 years or so, btw).
- worker767424 6y ago
  I did a version of that a few years ago, but I basically turned $5 into $500 and cashed out. Guess I'd have $5,000 now. Still don't care.
paulcole 6y ago
I’ve definitely missed the opportunity to get rich but I still jumped in. I started putting a small amount into BTC each month on Coinbase. It’s money I can lose and that I would have spent on a vacation this year if not for COVID. I figure I’ll pull it out at the end of the year and if it’s gone up, then next year’s vacation will be a bit better. I don’t understand BTC at all and consider it gambling. But like Nick the Greek said, the next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  Yours isn't an unreasonable attitude. Just like when you go to Vegas: put $500 cash in your pocket, leave all other means of payment at home. You'll either come back with $0 or more than $500. In both case, you'll definitely have had $500 worth of entertainment. Bitcoin is like that: only invest money you don't need (assuming you have any) and meantime, just enjoy the feeling of having your stomach crawl up to the back of your throat on the roller coaster. You're also obviously allowed to enjoy yourself when/if you become rich.
bayesianbot 6y ago
Luckily I'm absolutely terrible with money. I was talking about bitcoin to everyone in 2011, but didn't invest myself as I thought I didn't have enough to put for it to matter. Had I invested, I'd have wasted the coins long time ago, and would be just kicking myself daily or on suicide watch.
pjc50 6y ago
Yup. That reminds me, I need to sell the free Stellar Lumens I got from Keybase. If I can work out how to do that without a scam or a disaster, I might consider touching the rest of the ecosystem.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Jedd 6y ago
  I'm in a similar position - though for various reasons I did a bit of a username landgrab early on, so I have about 10x what most people got 'for free'. The price fluctuations are wild, and because we're not talking megabucks (a couple of thousand USD equiv) and I'm not actually out of pocket in any real sense, they're fascinating to watch, and incur no great temptation to do anything with. While Lumens are extremely unlikely to go the way of BTC, watching what's going on with bitcoins the past decade does make me want to just sit on these.
ur-whale 6y ago
Your feeling is IMO the norm for lots of folks. I have had this conversation with many a friend, who actually view Bitcoin as a Ponzi, and therefore decide not to play the game (a ponzi ca be lucrative if : a) you know it's a ponzi b) you're smart in your timing and not too greedy but it's still a crapshoot). The real questions are: - what if it isn't a Ponzi ? - how much will your "won't touch it with a 10 feet pole" attidude cost you then ?
- pdimitar 6y ago
  It hasn't costed me anything though since I never spent or gained a cent on/off of BTC.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    Cost is probably not the right word. Opportunity cost is likely better.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Yep, that is true. I regret I haven't hopped on the hype train but oh well, I am not an oracle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- phatfish 6y ago
  The same can be said of any investment opportunity. It comes down to the amount you have available to invest, and how much effort you want to put into it. For those who want a low effort fairly safe hedge against inflation and currency changes an index tracker fund is probably the way to go. A small percentage on risky investments is probably fine, but then you do have to choose the correct risky ones =) I wish I had bought Tesla shares in 2011 too.
- sytelus 6y ago
  It is a ponzi scheme. I think eventually majority of investors will participate in it. At present, total stock + gold market is $100T. If you expect 5% of this diverted to BTC then upper bound on BTC market cap is $5T. This means upper bound on BTC price is $250K. When that price arrives, suddenly things will become stagnant. People will wait for few years in the hope something will happen and then sell out for more appreciating assets. This will eventually cause BTC prices to oscillate between $100K-$200K. In addition, you have couple of major risks such as feds making it illegal or taxing it heavily or some other coin that Elon Musk starts preaching heavily. At this point, if you do have BTC, you should sell out at $70K-100K range just to be safe. If you keep holding after that then you are taking increasingly bigger risks but much less reward.
wodenokoto 6y ago
When it reached 100, I thought, this is the apex, it is not gonna grow anymore, it is too late to jump on. And I've repeated that thought on 1.000, 10.000, 20.000 and again now. So yes, you are not alone in feeling this is a missed opportunity.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Why not just buy a small amount of bitcoins now, something you won't mind losing? If they increase 100 fold you won't feel like you're missing out. And if they don't just think of it as insurance. I personally hate the idea of bitcoin and avoided it for a long time, but I feel better having a little just to avoid the thought I let my personal feelings get in the way of an opportunity with a good risk/reward ratio.
  - adamisom 6y ago
    This doesn't necessarily mean you're invalid, but if BTC increased 100x, they'd exceed the world's GDP. So... yeah, though maybe you can't say that's impossible, if by some miracle BTC became the dominant currency in a (much richer) future.
    - marvinkennis 6y ago
      I'm holding a tiny amount of BTC, but this has been my reason not to invest more. I know that at most I might be comfortable investing $20K in Bitcoin now, but that's literally it. If that amount increased 100x, it'd be $2mm. A good amount of money but by no means life changing to the extent that I will forever regret it.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      > This doesn't necessarily mean you're invalid, but if BTC increased 100x, they'd exceed the world's GDP. Ahh, but the asteroid 16 Psyche is worth $10 quintillion and one day we'll mine it. That lets the BTC cap go 100,000x further than the world GDP. [On a more serious note, note that GDPs have a time component and market caps -- or the amount of a currency in circulation -- don't. If each unit of money gets spent every month, you only need GDP/12 units of money in circulation; if each unit of money gets spent every 10 years, you need GDPx10 units of money.]
ilkkao 6y ago
It helps to think that odds for not selling during the first peak are quite close to 0%, at least for me. Other outcome would have meant very stressful last years.
pdimitar 6y ago
That's exactly how I feel. But is there a way to actually cash out? I mean, suppose you had 2 BTC for years. Can you literally get $100K right now in your bank account and can you actually exchange them easily for the fiat currency?
- superbcarrot 6y ago
  Yes, this is very easy to do exactly in the way you describe.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Oh well, in that case I do feel a tinge of regret. :(
- matwood 6y ago
  Easily cash out yes, but would have you kept track of that BTC for years is another question. There were plenty of gotchas along the way with BTC before it went completely mainstream. Buggy hardware wallets, scams, exchanges going bankrupt/stealing btc, people's hard drives dying, etc... mean for anyone to have held from $1 to $50k they were prescient and a bit lucky.
- rtrdea 6y ago
  Lol yes
- xur17 6y ago
  Yes, you could easily do this for 10s of millions of dollar right now on a number of exchanges. As you go up, you might need to find OTC desks, etc, but it's still very doable.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Kind of. But it's a thing with a lot of investments; if one invested in Apple ten years ago their investment would have been 10x now. If one invested in Tesla ten years ago it would be worth 100x now (I think? there was a split at some point. Yahoo Finance's chart indicates it's gone up 10x in a year). Jumping in now is a bad idea because it's at peak hype; never buy at peak hype. It MIGHT go up a bit more, but it won't be a 10x increase at this point - you should've bought a year ago in that case. But a year ago, nobody could have predicted it would go up 10x.
- sky_rw 6y ago
  Judging by the sentiment in this thread it is definitely not at peak hype. That's what everybody said when it was $17k and crashed to $5k. I loaded up on it, now its $50k. I bet there were a lot of similar comments saying that it would never be 10x. I also seem to recall a lot of people 10 years ago saying TSLA was overpriced and they would never hit their production goals. Time will tell.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    If everyone agrees with an investment then it no longer has the potential for high returns as everyone is already in. You need to look at what others don’t and decide for yourself. No one can know the future, you need to have personal beliefs, ideals, and investment theses. Not listening to the HN groupthink helps for investment decisions. The people here are super smart about many things but money is not one of them.
IgorPartola 6y ago
Remember that pizza you bought in 2013? You could have invested that money into TSLA and it would be worth a heck of a lot more now. Opportunities like that exist today also. Does that make you not want to eat pizza? I bought BTC at $20. I sold at $1000. When I sold I had something like 1.95 BTC (had a bit of it stolen from poorly secured exchanges, lost some trying my hand at bot trading). Still happy with it because what I bought at the time with with it made me happy (Sonos speakers and photo gear). Would it have been nice to hold onto it until it was $50k? Maybe. But I have been enjoying the benefits of what I got for far longer. Having said that, I think XLM is in a good position to jump up in price and I still have their free initial allotment.
- f430 6y ago
  I bought like 200 BTC back when it was $10 and ended up selling half of it when it hit $1000. I liquidated the remaining ~90 BTC until 2018 when it was approaching $10,000. I have no positions in crypto anymore. Lot of people are going to be caught holding the bag now. It's not common to hear somebody moving a big chunk of their savings in to this "digital gold". I am worried that this is going to result in a lot of broken dreams. Doubly more worried about people over leveraged in real estate. Bitcoin is a poor storage of value and the cognitive dissonance is profound-the more they hype it as "digital gold" the more it deviates from that description. I realized that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency is largely a vehicle for money laundering, in particular moving money out of China, Russia and other similar countries.
- BrissyCoder 6y ago
  What's your thinking w.r.t XLM?
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    It’s a solid and usable cryptocurrency that is developing good strategic partnerships. Currently Ukraine is exploring it as its official cryptocurrency, as I understand. Nano is another good one but seems much more obscure.
- worker767424 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
georgyo 6y ago
A long long time ago, I mined 3650 coins on a single cpu in a month. Bitcoin was worthless at the time, and I thought the idea was interesting. After a month, I went back to folding at home. A little over a year later bitcoin hit a dollar and I sold it all. On one hand I made a few thousand from nothing. However if I held it I would have been a pretty rich right now. I truly believe that bitcoin is something that cannot work, so I have not and will not reinvest in it. But the sting of it doing so much better does bother me at times.
- sperma 6y ago
  Do you ever think that you losing out on tens of millions of dollars might have affected your desire to challenge your believes that "bitcoin is something that cannot work"? I know I'd probably cope in a similar manner
  - loceng 6y ago
    No more or no less than it is influencing people who are pro-Bitcoin, and in fact that bias may give them a clear, less biased view.
  - Zhyl 6y ago
    It's also a possible butterfly effect. Would Bitcoin have taken off without those specific few thousand coins in the economy? If even half of Bitcoin holders at the time thought they'd make it big and held, how could Bitcoin have had the liquidity to gain value?
    - AshWolfy 6y ago
      liquidity never mattered because its not a currency
      - Zhyl 6y ago
        You still need trade volume. If there is no Bitcoin to buy, there is no Bitcoin to sell.
syrgian 6y ago
I would have slept a lot worse if people thought that I held millions in an asset that can be easily stolen by invading my home and putting my family at risk. I would only be happy if I was very careful with not revealing who I was, ever (hard to do if a exchange gets compromised). It helps that I have all my necessities well covered.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  >I would have slept a lot worse if people thought that I held millions in an asset That scenario only holds if you go around blabbing about your BTC holdings ... why would you ever do something like that?
  - lazide 6y ago
    I mean, that was a trend for a long time hah. Even in this thread we’ve got folks talking about the 3k+ Bitcoin they used to have. There were a number of robberies of people somewhat prominent in the early movement even on the assumption they still held some.
rich_sasha 6y ago
To make meaningful amounts of money on BTC, you'd need to invest a significant amount. My feeling is, yes, maybe it go up 50%, or double, or whatnot, but mostly it can go down to 0 any time. If you want to bet a tiny bit and hope it tentuples, you still won't be rich. I'm always tempted to make some kind of agent simulation, where all agents know they are in a bubble, but hope they can get out before everyone else. Then eventually the price pops and, pop.
- tr352 6y ago
  ThemePark Corona edition.
dawnerd 6y ago
I gave up after multiple attempts to get in at the wrong time. I'm not exactly interested in risking enough money for it to be worth it long term anyways. Now if only I still had my original wallet...
fullshark 6y ago
I imagine that's the majority of people who've heard of it.
sethammons 6y ago
Haha, yes. In 2011, a guy on my team was all about bitcoin and dogecoin and such. I think bitcoin was like 11 cents a coin, or maybe a dollar by that point. I just plain didn't get it. Still barely do. I could have easily picked up a few hundred dollars of coin or, if I was a believer, a grand or two. Had I held onto it, I would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, if I got in at 10 cents, I would have sold at a dollar. And if I didn't sell there, I would have sold at 10 dollars, 100, 1000, etc. I would never, ever have ridden it to 10k, 20k, 30k. Still not putting money on it.
- anm89 6y ago
  doge coin did not exist in 2011.
  - kvee 6y ago
    I read his original statement with the "and such" to mean that he isn't specifically referring to dogecoin, but just things like it. Which gets him off the hook for it not existing back then.
- brighton36 6y ago
  Bitcoin is the most complicated idea known to man: number go up.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  The last point is the big one. Almost no one would have carried on through the last 3 bitcoin bubbles if they did buy at the start.
  - SamPatt 6y ago
    I know several people personally that did. Among people who have worked in the cryptocurrency industry it's not unusual that they've cashed out small portions of their stash in each bubble but still hold some today.
    - 6y ago
rjkershner 6y ago
I was aware of Bitcoin back when it all started and thought it didn't have any tangible value. I still believe it has no real value. While I wish I could foresee playing the market to make some money, at the end of the day "magical internet money" is just smoke and mirrors.
ben_w 6y ago
Yes on both counts. In roughly 2013, the shared office building I was working in installed a BTC vending machine. It advertised itself with a graph showing BTC rising close to exponentially, with a strong implication that it would keep doing so, which immediately made me think “irrational growth optimism, probably doomed to bubble and burst”. Had I spent £1k of spare cash then, I would now have enough to buy another house. EDIT: And I’ve just now remembered that someone gave me £0.50 of BTC as a “thank you” on Twitter, which I sold to a friend for £25 and which is probably now worth £250.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Yeah, which is one of the reasons why I continue to not buy into the whole thing. The only reason there is any temptation at all for me is FOMO from the rising price, and that's a terrible sign. Worse, it comes with a bunch of negatives, slow transaction rate, huge power cost, etc.
sytelus 6y ago
Think about all the people who bought lotteries since you were born and have became rich while you stood on the sidelines. Do you feel regret?
tracedddd 6y ago
I won’t shill you on anything in particular. But regardless of your opinion on crypto you haven’t missed your opportunities. Projects still 100x. Next time it’s off everyone’s mind and not in the news, just pick 3 or 4 newer projects that have a decent sounding team, put $1000 in on each, and forget about it. Check back when everyone is manic again.
solomonb 6y ago
I mined in 2011 and sold at $5500. It was enough for a down payment on a house in a major metropolitan area but had I kept holding I would be a millionaire now. :(
worker767424 6y ago
Yes and no. I'm sure I wouldn't have hodled, so I didn't really "miss" anything. You also couldn't be too technically inclined because you'd fall in love with blockchain, cash out, but it all in ETH, and go work for a company building a computer architecture that runs at 100 Hz on Etherium for $1 per Hz that pays you a below-market rate, get acquiried when the company fails, and find yourself at FAANG, only to fail the acquihire interview. You also couldn't be too too technically inclined because you realize how inefficient the whole thing is.

Does anyone else feel like: - they've missed an opportunity to get rich with minimal effort from crypto - still have absolutely no interest in jumping in at this point?

luxurytent 6y ago

When everything is going up, you can feel like everyone is winning but you. There's many get-rich-quick-schemes available right now and if you put in the effort to know where to go, you can get "rich" quick too. Or, you can continue enjoying your life the way you are without worrying what others are doing. Many times, they are only projecting one side of the story.

suifbwish 6y ago
But the meth voices say to keep browsing for patterns

kungito 6y ago

What helps me sleep at night is that even had I entered all this time ago with BTC I would have exited 100 times by now. There have indeed been many 2x,3x,5x multipliers with BTC but there have been so many instances when it was unclear how everything is going to turn out which would personally prompt me to consider exiting with what I had. As my friend nicely put it: only way we could have gotten rich from BTC is had we bought it when it was pennies and forgotten about it up until last year

ur-whale 6y ago
AKA : no risk, no rewards.
petercooper 6y ago
That's exactly my attitude towards it too. But this has also given me a strong lesson for the future. If I get in on the ground floor of anything and decide to sell out, always keep a little skin the game that you don't touch.. because you never know if it'll go big. If the GP had sold 99% of his 3650 coins and kept 1% till now, that would still be $1.8m.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  When do you sell it though? If you had coins from 2011, is now the time to sell? What if it goes up 100x next year.
  - dmwallin 6y ago
    Set yourself a threshold amount that you are okay with a 100% loss on, and a periodic schedule based on your risk-appetite. At each interval if you are above your threshold you sell your excess holdings and if you are below you sit tight. Alternatively you can set yourself a price threshold. For example, sell half your holdings every time the price doubles. Essentially this acts as a log function on your gains in exchange for lowering risk. There's a ton of room for fine tuning a set of rules to manage risk, as long as you are willing to stick to them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - petercooper 6y ago
    Personally I would sell what I'd call the "FOMO holding" once it's worth a "life changing" amount of money. So if I held 100 Bitcoin as such a fund, that might well have been years ago, but then I'd also be retired and not care. The sister comment here is more nuanced and surely a better answer, though.
belval 6y ago
Same thing here, I made a good profit a while back. To believe that I would be a millionaire today requires ignoring everything I know about my risk tolerance and while Bitcoin worked, it could've gone the Ponzi scheme way and crash to 0$ overnight. There were risks of Chinese miners going for a 51% attack, regulation in the US to downright outlawing mining in Canada.
loopz 6y ago
Or the wallet got cracked. Most online wallets were. Or the HDD died..
MarkPNeyer 6y ago
Or if you have totally unshakeable faith in it, because you see us heading towards a game-theoretic attractor where bitcoin is the primary global store of value. That's worked for me :)
tshaddox 6y ago
Well, if you have the power to go back in time and change your decision to buy BTC, you might as well also go back in time and change your decision to then not sell it. :) That's basically what the "hodl" meme is: just decide to not sell until you need the money or until the money could significantly change your life. Of course, that's not exactly a new "investment" idea: there's always been a big difference between day-trading and just buying stocks (and index funds, etc.) with the intention to hold essentially indefinitely.
IkmoIkmo 6y ago
Yup, same. Hell if I put in money now and it did 2x and went to $100k, I'd get out, too. There's just no way I see myself not getting out at $100k or say $200k. And I'm not risking my money on an investment that can 'only' do 2x or 4x. Bitcoin was cool as it could do 10x or 100x in the span of 1-2 years. But with the numbers where they're at and knowing myself, I'd cash out way before that. In the end because bitcoin isn't being used by virtually anyone, and is only valuable because of the momentum/hype (i.e., the reason I'd buy it is only because other people buying it solely for the purpose of thinking even more others will buy it only for speculation and not use, and the price rises), it's just not an interesting investment for me long-term. Short-term it could be but I'd be as not surprised if it did -50% as if it did +50% in the next year. Not really interested in that kind of exposure, given that I don't think I'll ever hold enough to enjoy the extreme potential upside.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Interesting to read this, as my instincts are completely different. Wouldn't a better strategy be to e.g. wait until Bitcoin doubles (which you believe is likely to happen), then sell half (so that you get your money back, sans inflation)... and then for the following twenty years, sell 5% of the remaining Bitcoins each year? The greatest risk is that maybe Bitcoin never doubles, and maybe you lose all the money you put it. But at the moment the price doubles and you sell half, so you get your money back... why throw away the chance of maybe getting insanely rich in the future?
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    To me, it really depends on one's financial situation. It's much easier to hodl if you have a good-paying job with benefits, a 401K with a healthy amount stocked away, a decent savings reserve, or equity on a house. Also helps if you've played a lot of poker.
  - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    You're making a mental difference that's not an actual difference. Suppose you have 100k, invest 20k of it in bitcoin and it doubles. You now have 40k bitcoin and 120k in total. You could say, sell half the bitcoin, you now still have 100k in other assets and 20k in bitcoin. Even if you lose the entire 20k, you'll never lose more than what you put in. But what does it matter? Fact is, you still lose 20k if bitcoin goes to zero. The fact you already made 20k on it doesn't change that fact. The source of your wealth should not indicate whether a loss is good or bad, or bearable or unbearable. At the end of the day, a loss is a loss. All your wealth goes into one big pot, you can't say 'this part is from savings, this part is from bitcoin'. It's just money, and losing it sucks. Of course there is something to be said about reducing your exposure to bitcoin as you grow richer and need to take less risky bets. But that's only great after the fact that bitcoin keeps going up in price. If bitcoin goes down in price, it's of course a poor idea to sell slowly instead of all at once. Again, a loss of $X is a loss of $X. At the end of the day, virtually everyone holds bitcoin not for the actual value of e.g. owning a small portion of Apple which sells something hundreds of millions of people use daily, profits, which flows back to you. Instead virtually everyone holds it simply because others are, and by doing so together, it keeps going up in price. You could apply the same to any other (scarce) good. Like a useless but rare metal. Or indeed, a useless copy-paste of the bitcoin software, to start a new crypto. Bitcoin's price isn't because it's valuable, it's because of a common idea to buy it because it'll make us rich. And that idea cannot hold true on anything but faith. Humans are pretty crazy and so I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin goes to $200k within 2-3 years. But it's still an insane investment proposition to me. (coming from a person who held 100% of his net worth in bitcoin for 3 years or so, btw).
worker767424 6y ago
I did a version of that a few years ago, but I basically turned $5 into $500 and cashed out. Guess I'd have $5,000 now. Still don't care.

paulcole 6y ago

I’ve definitely missed the opportunity to get rich but I still jumped in. I started putting a small amount into BTC each month on Coinbase. It’s money I can lose and that I would have spent on a vacation this year if not for COVID. I figure I’ll pull it out at the end of the year and if it’s gone up, then next year’s vacation will be a bit better. I don’t understand BTC at all and consider it gambling. But like Nick the Greek said, the next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing.

ur-whale 6y ago
Yours isn't an unreasonable attitude. Just like when you go to Vegas: put $500 cash in your pocket, leave all other means of payment at home. You'll either come back with $0 or more than $500. In both case, you'll definitely have had $500 worth of entertainment. Bitcoin is like that: only invest money you don't need (assuming you have any) and meantime, just enjoy the feeling of having your stomach crawl up to the back of your throat on the roller coaster. You're also obviously allowed to enjoy yourself when/if you become rich.

bayesianbot 6y ago

Luckily I'm absolutely terrible with money. I was talking about bitcoin to everyone in 2011, but didn't invest myself as I thought I didn't have enough to put for it to matter. Had I invested, I'd have wasted the coins long time ago, and would be just kicking myself daily or on suicide watch.

pjc50 6y ago

Yup. That reminds me, I need to sell the free Stellar Lumens I got from Keybase. If I can work out how to do that without a scam or a disaster, I might consider touching the rest of the ecosystem.

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Jedd 6y ago
I'm in a similar position - though for various reasons I did a bit of a username landgrab early on, so I have about 10x what most people got 'for free'. The price fluctuations are wild, and because we're not talking megabucks (a couple of thousand USD equiv) and I'm not actually out of pocket in any real sense, they're fascinating to watch, and incur no great temptation to do anything with. While Lumens are extremely unlikely to go the way of BTC, watching what's going on with bitcoins the past decade does make me want to just sit on these.

ur-whale 6y ago

Your feeling is IMO the norm for lots of folks. I have had this conversation with many a friend, who actually view Bitcoin as a Ponzi, and therefore decide not to play the game (a ponzi ca be lucrative if : a) you know it's a ponzi b) you're smart in your timing and not too greedy but it's still a crapshoot). The real questions are: - what if it isn't a Ponzi ? - how much will your "won't touch it with a 10 feet pole" attidude cost you then ?

pdimitar 6y ago
It hasn't costed me anything though since I never spent or gained a cent on/off of BTC.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  Cost is probably not the right word. Opportunity cost is likely better.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Yep, that is true. I regret I haven't hopped on the hype train but oh well, I am not an oracle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
phatfish 6y ago
The same can be said of any investment opportunity. It comes down to the amount you have available to invest, and how much effort you want to put into it. For those who want a low effort fairly safe hedge against inflation and currency changes an index tracker fund is probably the way to go. A small percentage on risky investments is probably fine, but then you do have to choose the correct risky ones =) I wish I had bought Tesla shares in 2011 too.
sytelus 6y ago
It is a ponzi scheme. I think eventually majority of investors will participate in it. At present, total stock + gold market is $100T. If you expect 5% of this diverted to BTC then upper bound on BTC market cap is $5T. This means upper bound on BTC price is $250K. When that price arrives, suddenly things will become stagnant. People will wait for few years in the hope something will happen and then sell out for more appreciating assets. This will eventually cause BTC prices to oscillate between $100K-$200K. In addition, you have couple of major risks such as feds making it illegal or taxing it heavily or some other coin that Elon Musk starts preaching heavily. At this point, if you do have BTC, you should sell out at $70K-100K range just to be safe. If you keep holding after that then you are taking increasingly bigger risks but much less reward.

wodenokoto 6y ago

When it reached 100, I thought, this is the apex, it is not gonna grow anymore, it is too late to jump on. And I've repeated that thought on 1.000, 10.000, 20.000 and again now. So yes, you are not alone in feeling this is a missed opportunity.

akvadrako 6y ago
Why not just buy a small amount of bitcoins now, something you won't mind losing? If they increase 100 fold you won't feel like you're missing out. And if they don't just think of it as insurance. I personally hate the idea of bitcoin and avoided it for a long time, but I feel better having a little just to avoid the thought I let my personal feelings get in the way of an opportunity with a good risk/reward ratio.
- adamisom 6y ago
  This doesn't necessarily mean you're invalid, but if BTC increased 100x, they'd exceed the world's GDP. So... yeah, though maybe you can't say that's impossible, if by some miracle BTC became the dominant currency in a (much richer) future.
  - marvinkennis 6y ago
    I'm holding a tiny amount of BTC, but this has been my reason not to invest more. I know that at most I might be comfortable investing $20K in Bitcoin now, but that's literally it. If that amount increased 100x, it'd be $2mm. A good amount of money but by no means life changing to the extent that I will forever regret it.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    > This doesn't necessarily mean you're invalid, but if BTC increased 100x, they'd exceed the world's GDP. Ahh, but the asteroid 16 Psyche is worth $10 quintillion and one day we'll mine it. That lets the BTC cap go 100,000x further than the world GDP. [On a more serious note, note that GDPs have a time component and market caps -- or the amount of a currency in circulation -- don't. If each unit of money gets spent every month, you only need GDP/12 units of money in circulation; if each unit of money gets spent every 10 years, you need GDPx10 units of money.]

ilkkao 6y ago

It helps to think that odds for not selling during the first peak are quite close to 0%, at least for me. Other outcome would have meant very stressful last years.

pdimitar 6y ago

That's exactly how I feel. But is there a way to actually cash out? I mean, suppose you had 2 BTC for years. Can you literally get $100K right now in your bank account and can you actually exchange them easily for the fiat currency?

superbcarrot 6y ago
Yes, this is very easy to do exactly in the way you describe.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Oh well, in that case I do feel a tinge of regret. :(
matwood 6y ago
Easily cash out yes, but would have you kept track of that BTC for years is another question. There were plenty of gotchas along the way with BTC before it went completely mainstream. Buggy hardware wallets, scams, exchanges going bankrupt/stealing btc, people's hard drives dying, etc... mean for anyone to have held from $1 to $50k they were prescient and a bit lucky.
rtrdea 6y ago
Lol yes
xur17 6y ago
Yes, you could easily do this for 10s of millions of dollar right now on a number of exchanges. As you go up, you might need to find OTC desks, etc, but it's still very doable.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Kind of. But it's a thing with a lot of investments; if one invested in Apple ten years ago their investment would have been 10x now. If one invested in Tesla ten years ago it would be worth 100x now (I think? there was a split at some point. Yahoo Finance's chart indicates it's gone up 10x in a year). Jumping in now is a bad idea because it's at peak hype; never buy at peak hype. It MIGHT go up a bit more, but it won't be a 10x increase at this point - you should've bought a year ago in that case. But a year ago, nobody could have predicted it would go up 10x.

sky_rw 6y ago
Judging by the sentiment in this thread it is definitely not at peak hype. That's what everybody said when it was $17k and crashed to $5k. I loaded up on it, now its $50k. I bet there were a lot of similar comments saying that it would never be 10x. I also seem to recall a lot of people 10 years ago saying TSLA was overpriced and they would never hit their production goals. Time will tell.
- seibelj 6y ago
  If everyone agrees with an investment then it no longer has the potential for high returns as everyone is already in. You need to look at what others don’t and decide for yourself. No one can know the future, you need to have personal beliefs, ideals, and investment theses. Not listening to the HN groupthink helps for investment decisions. The people here are super smart about many things but money is not one of them.

IgorPartola 6y ago

Remember that pizza you bought in 2013? You could have invested that money into TSLA and it would be worth a heck of a lot more now. Opportunities like that exist today also. Does that make you not want to eat pizza? I bought BTC at $20. I sold at $1000. When I sold I had something like 1.95 BTC (had a bit of it stolen from poorly secured exchanges, lost some trying my hand at bot trading). Still happy with it because what I bought at the time with with it made me happy (Sonos speakers and photo gear). Would it have been nice to hold onto it until it was $50k? Maybe. But I have been enjoying the benefits of what I got for far longer. Having said that, I think XLM is in a good position to jump up in price and I still have their free initial allotment.

f430 6y ago
I bought like 200 BTC back when it was $10 and ended up selling half of it when it hit $1000. I liquidated the remaining ~90 BTC until 2018 when it was approaching $10,000. I have no positions in crypto anymore. Lot of people are going to be caught holding the bag now. It's not common to hear somebody moving a big chunk of their savings in to this "digital gold". I am worried that this is going to result in a lot of broken dreams. Doubly more worried about people over leveraged in real estate. Bitcoin is a poor storage of value and the cognitive dissonance is profound-the more they hype it as "digital gold" the more it deviates from that description. I realized that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency is largely a vehicle for money laundering, in particular moving money out of China, Russia and other similar countries.
BrissyCoder 6y ago
What's your thinking w.r.t XLM?
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  It’s a solid and usable cryptocurrency that is developing good strategic partnerships. Currently Ukraine is exploring it as its official cryptocurrency, as I understand. Nano is another good one but seems much more obscure.
worker767424 6y ago

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georgyo 6y ago

A long long time ago, I mined 3650 coins on a single cpu in a month. Bitcoin was worthless at the time, and I thought the idea was interesting. After a month, I went back to folding at home. A little over a year later bitcoin hit a dollar and I sold it all. On one hand I made a few thousand from nothing. However if I held it I would have been a pretty rich right now. I truly believe that bitcoin is something that cannot work, so I have not and will not reinvest in it. But the sting of it doing so much better does bother me at times.

sperma 6y ago
Do you ever think that you losing out on tens of millions of dollars might have affected your desire to challenge your believes that "bitcoin is something that cannot work"? I know I'd probably cope in a similar manner
- loceng 6y ago
  No more or no less than it is influencing people who are pro-Bitcoin, and in fact that bias may give them a clear, less biased view.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  It's also a possible butterfly effect. Would Bitcoin have taken off without those specific few thousand coins in the economy? If even half of Bitcoin holders at the time thought they'd make it big and held, how could Bitcoin have had the liquidity to gain value?
  - AshWolfy 6y ago
    liquidity never mattered because its not a currency
    - Zhyl 6y ago
      You still need trade volume. If there is no Bitcoin to buy, there is no Bitcoin to sell.

syrgian 6y ago

I would have slept a lot worse if people thought that I held millions in an asset that can be easily stolen by invading my home and putting my family at risk. I would only be happy if I was very careful with not revealing who I was, ever (hard to do if a exchange gets compromised). It helps that I have all my necessities well covered.

ur-whale 6y ago
>I would have slept a lot worse if people thought that I held millions in an asset That scenario only holds if you go around blabbing about your BTC holdings ... why would you ever do something like that?
- lazide 6y ago
  I mean, that was a trend for a long time hah. Even in this thread we’ve got folks talking about the 3k+ Bitcoin they used to have. There were a number of robberies of people somewhat prominent in the early movement even on the assumption they still held some.

rich_sasha 6y ago

To make meaningful amounts of money on BTC, you'd need to invest a significant amount. My feeling is, yes, maybe it go up 50%, or double, or whatnot, but mostly it can go down to 0 any time. If you want to bet a tiny bit and hope it tentuples, you still won't be rich. I'm always tempted to make some kind of agent simulation, where all agents know they are in a bubble, but hope they can get out before everyone else. Then eventually the price pops and, pop.

tr352 6y ago
ThemePark Corona edition.

dawnerd 6y ago

I gave up after multiple attempts to get in at the wrong time. I'm not exactly interested in risking enough money for it to be worth it long term anyways. Now if only I still had my original wallet...

fullshark 6y ago

I imagine that's the majority of people who've heard of it.

sethammons 6y ago

Haha, yes. In 2011, a guy on my team was all about bitcoin and dogecoin and such. I think bitcoin was like 11 cents a coin, or maybe a dollar by that point. I just plain didn't get it. Still barely do. I could have easily picked up a few hundred dollars of coin or, if I was a believer, a grand or two. Had I held onto it, I would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, if I got in at 10 cents, I would have sold at a dollar. And if I didn't sell there, I would have sold at 10 dollars, 100, 1000, etc. I would never, ever have ridden it to 10k, 20k, 30k. Still not putting money on it.

anm89 6y ago
doge coin did not exist in 2011.
- kvee 6y ago
  I read his original statement with the "and such" to mean that he isn't specifically referring to dogecoin, but just things like it. Which gets him off the hook for it not existing back then.
brighton36 6y ago
Bitcoin is the most complicated idea known to man: number go up.
SilverRed 6y ago
The last point is the big one. Almost no one would have carried on through the last 3 bitcoin bubbles if they did buy at the start.
- SamPatt 6y ago
  I know several people personally that did. Among people who have worked in the cryptocurrency industry it's not unusual that they've cashed out small portions of their stash in each bubble but still hold some today.
  - 6y ago

rjkershner 6y ago

I was aware of Bitcoin back when it all started and thought it didn't have any tangible value. I still believe it has no real value. While I wish I could foresee playing the market to make some money, at the end of the day "magical internet money" is just smoke and mirrors.

ben_w 6y ago

Yes on both counts. In roughly 2013, the shared office building I was working in installed a BTC vending machine. It advertised itself with a graph showing BTC rising close to exponentially, with a strong implication that it would keep doing so, which immediately made me think “irrational growth optimism, probably doomed to bubble and burst”. Had I spent £1k of spare cash then, I would now have enough to buy another house. EDIT: And I’ve just now remembered that someone gave me £0.50 of BTC as a “thank you” on Twitter, which I sold to a friend for £25 and which is probably now worth £250.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

Yeah, which is one of the reasons why I continue to not buy into the whole thing. The only reason there is any temptation at all for me is FOMO from the rising price, and that's a terrible sign. Worse, it comes with a bunch of negatives, slow transaction rate, huge power cost, etc.

sytelus 6y ago

Think about all the people who bought lotteries since you were born and have became rich while you stood on the sidelines. Do you feel regret?

tracedddd 6y ago

I won’t shill you on anything in particular. But regardless of your opinion on crypto you haven’t missed your opportunities. Projects still 100x. Next time it’s off everyone’s mind and not in the news, just pick 3 or 4 newer projects that have a decent sounding team, put $1000 in on each, and forget about it. Check back when everyone is manic again.

solomonb 6y ago

I mined in 2011 and sold at $5500. It was enough for a down payment on a house in a major metropolitan area but had I kept holding I would be a millionaire now. :(

worker767424 6y ago

Yes and no. I'm sure I wouldn't have hodled, so I didn't really "miss" anything. You also couldn't be too technically inclined because you'd fall in love with blockchain, cash out, but it all in ETH, and go work for a company building a computer architecture that runs at 100 Hz on Etherium for $1 per Hz that pays you a below-market rate, get acquiried when the company fails, and find yourself at FAANG, only to fail the acquihire interview. You also couldn't be too too technically inclined because you realize how inefficient the whole thing is.