What kind of addiction? I never do drugs; I am very strictly against the recreational abuse of psychotropics. Except in such circumstances as having just lost a fortune, I don’t drink immoderately; I rarely drink at all. I don’t have any history of problems with gambling—perhaps because I understand the mathematics of gambling; if someone offers me a game of chance, I will only bet on the EV+ side in the amount proved optimal by the Kelly Criterion. Not sure what you mean.
What I believe is that sometimes, no matter how smart we are, we have an emotional part that we do not consciously control part of the time, and overconfidence in our intelligence can activate that emotional part.
There are cases of very intelligent people ruined, or who ended up committing suicide and things like that, and I think it is largely because of that, apart from not learning to be happy with everyday things, with contentment.
The worst part: I am sufficiently intelligent to have warned others in the past not to do what I did.
I get rekt by NOT following my own advice. I knew better.
Perhaps I was underconfident in my own intelligence, and thus vulnerable to the allure of all the influences that urge people towards taking debt against BTC and using margin. It’s not that anyone told me to do this. There is a sort of a psychological background noise urging it: The “don’t spend your BTC—borrow against it!” ads we’ve all seen, the promotion of margin trading by exchanges, the public chatter of some traders who act like they have brass balls with margin, etc. If you don’t have confidence in your own judgment, then eventually, it sinks in. It is a subtle type of peer pressure and social influence.
The person most to blame for popularizing this is Michael Saylor, the exchanges took advantage of his message to make a lot of money.