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Those that purchased Bitcoin at the beginning did, in fact, receive a very disproportionate return on their investment. Regarding opportunity cost, I totally agree. Even if someone bought Bitcoin with money that they could have invested in something else, the return on their Bitcoin investment would likely be much higher than the return they would have gotten on that other investment. Of course, all of this is hypothetical.
When we are looking at past performance of various portfolios it is not hypothetical to compare them, even though we could take hypothetical examples, or we could even compare our own performance to a hypothetical example, such as someone who might have DCA'd into BTC versus if he had invested in some other various kinds of investment opportunities that he might have had at various points in time.
Surely, we cannot go back in time and change what we did, but we can choose the extent to which we might want to be aggressive in our bitcoin investment now or the extent to which we might want to employ a more aggressive bitcoin investment strategy - and we still might end up making mistakes because we cannot necessarily know the extent to which any strategy that we start to employ now might pay off - yet if we are ongoingly assessing our own situation and we are attempting to employ good practices, we likely would end up improving the chances that our investments would pay off over the passage of time, especially if we make sure to include (and maybe even prioritize) bitcoin accumulation into what we are doing...and maybe even more important for those who either don't have any bitcoin or do not have very many bitcoin.
You can learn a lot about and refine your strategy by comparing historical portfolios, (your own or others'), to hypothetical portfolios. It's also interesting to consider the potential earnings if one had chosen to invest in Bitcoin at different times rather than other assets. This could be a helpful exercise to weigh the possible risks and rewards of potential future investments.
It's not just about buying and selling in the short term to try and make a quick profit, but rather about making a commitment to accumulating Bitcoin over time, understanding that the true potential of the technology may not be fully realized by using the short-term approach.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there were a lot of people who were drawn to the idea of getting rich quick by investing in this new and mysterious technology. These were often referred to as "get rich quick" investors, and they tended to focus on short-term gains rather than the long-term potential of the technology. However, over time, the market has matured, and many people have realized that Bitcoin is a long-term investment, and that to really see the benefits, you need to be patient and committed to accumulating over time, but a lot investors are still myopic about this fact and still holding on to the old and outdated technique of Bitcoin investment.
I doubt that it is a good framework to suggest that bitcoin investors are more mature now than they were in the past, because there were surely a lot of people who got into bitcoin for the tech and maybe they also ended up getting rich along the way, yet it is not fair to generalize about the gambling tendencies improving because there are always going to be gamblers and there are always going to be different types of investors..and even the new players who might be very rich, they may well also make a lot of the same mistakes that earlier investors made - and I would still suggest that we are very early stages to bitcoin, even though we also know that bitcoin is continuing to get stronger the longer and longer that it exists including that bitcoin's network effects (referring to
the 7 network effects described by Trace Mayer) are continuing to grown.
It is difficult to know what level of adoption bitcoin has, and I have my doubts that it has even reached 1% of the world's population, even though we have rich folks and rich institutions currently coming into bitcoin, including some of them entering through the newly approved Spot ETFs. These guys are neither imuned from gambling tendencies or making mistakes of the past, including but not limited to mistakes made that led up to a lot of the 2022 cascading crashes of Terra/Luna, Celsius, Blockfi, 3AC, Voyager, FTX, Alameda Research, Genesis (perhaps involving Grayscale) and probably some others that I am forgetting about...
I don't include Binance in my criticisms, even though Binance and CZ were persecuted and likely coopted by the US Govt.. which who knows exactly how that is going to play out, and it appears just a few days ago CZ's sentencing was delayed for 2 months until the end of April.
https://www.ccn.com/news/binance-founder-czs-sentencing-pushed-back-reasons-unknown/