Bought my first bitcoin around $17 (after the first Goxxing in June 2011) and watched as I lost over 90% of my investment on those first few over the subsequent months. I continued buying more.

You might think: "oh, well, it was so cheap, risk was minimal"... Not exactly. There was a much more material risk that bitcoin would simply die back then. Compared to today, there was virtually no infrastructure investment, merchant acceptance, or mindshare from mainstream technologists, etc. Mentioning bitcoin to virtually anyone got blank stares, utter indifference, or potentially a dismissive chuckle. We really had NOT gotten over that hump of inevitability at that point.

I'm confident that we're now over that hump. I don't know what that means for price short/medium term (markets are fickle), but my long-term analysis has not changed from when I was still buying more in 2011 after losing >90% on my first: bitcoin is a breakthrough technology with huge potential. It's also a rare *very* asymmetric investment opportunity; you either lose nearly everything (down ~100%) or make 10-100x (1000%-10000%) on your investment. Gotta due your own analysis as to the probabilities of either of those and also figure out your risk tolerance, but that's the situation.

It's funny how little changes... Nothing in the past 3+ years has come around to get me to change my investment thesis, and the boom/bust cycles have repeated several times. The discussion/emotion/sentiment/ridiculousness on both the ramps and falls are always the same. I guess humans are fairly consistent.