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There are some true believers here, but you're right, some guys who made a load of paper wealth through nothing more than luck and good fortune hearing about bitcoin earlier than others do seem to think that their success was actually due to their above average investing abilities. A bit like taking investment advice from someone who won powerball jackpot lottery.
There are some true believers here, but you're right, some guys who made a load of paper wealth through nothing more than luck and good fortune hearing about bitcoin earlier than others do seem to think that their success was actually due to their above average investing abilities. A bit like taking investment advice from someone who won powerball jackpot lottery.
I've responded to this sort of ugliness before, but I'll do it again now because it's so offensive. Yes, there are probably a few people who bought hundreds or thousands of bitcoin on a whim in 2011, properly secured it, completely forgot about it, then came back years later, remember they had it, remembered their passwords/whatever, etc...
But most of the people who held (or bought) through the 2011 crash were different. They did the math on the potential bitcoin represented, and continued to hold a *very* unpopular position, and a 90% mark-to-market loss for many. That's really not easy at all. And contextualize yourself to the timeframe: the media was declaring bitcoin dead (yes, quite more strongly than now), it was almost embarassing to talk about in polite company, no reputable public figures, VCs, or tech people had come out with much support, and it wasn't *that* hard to think that the experiment was just that... Most of the "whim" people bailed. It took considerable vision (and risk-tolerance), backed by solid analysis, to hold or buy more.
But I guess if you hang around the alt-forum too long, you just auto-assume that everyone is a shallow-thinker making snap-decisions...
Sorry you see my opinion as 'ugly', I didn't mean to offend anyone. What I am saying is someone who looked at bitcoin in 2011 and invested 1-2 thousand dollars, and had sense to hodl doesn't automatically become an investment guru. Maybe some do have useful skills, but risking 1K USD is nothing to get too excited about.
In a sense, this is an old difference-of-opinion story.
Sorry that you took his take personally, Melbustus, but kennyP has a global-level point. For the record, I've implicitly defended guys like you, even though I looked into Bitcoin in 2011 but got scared off by all those hacking stories (The scaredy point for me was keylogger malware; I got logic-trapped and was either too skeered - or too proud - to join Bitcointalk in '11 to ask for help. I didn't jump into altcoins until I got Raxco's PerfectGuard.)As a (personal) result, I have no envy of you guys and surprisingly little regret. The way I see it: had I pursued that alternate course, I would have either been: a multi-millionaire; robbed; a theoretical 'multimillionaire' ensnarled in the Gox bankruptcy; or, someone who took the bird in the hand in '12 like so many others. There's really no way to tell that's not essentially mental masturbation. So: the way I see it, there's really no point in worrying, fantasizing or whatnot. What was done, was done and that's that. Might as well enjoy what you've got; you'll certainly have no complaints from me!
But to get back to kennyP's point: he's essentially saying that you and the other whales are specialists. The trouble with specialization is that there's an inevitable echo-chamber effect within the specialty; at a minimum, it shows up in 'expertitis': using jargon terms as if they were all defined in a basic high-school-level dictionary. No worries, in and of itself, but specialists who strike it 'lucky' [<--- pls note inverted commas] tend to yield to that ole debbil that lurks in all of us: namely, vanity. Many are the specialists who, after getting fortune and prominence, fancy themselves as experts in politics plus the entire field of which they're only a part. Case in point: Paul Krugman.
Had I taken that opposite course and had gotten 'lucky', I'd take that lottery-winner categorization as a cautionary tale. One of the open and sad secrets about the lottery is that the typical jackpot winner blows his or her wad in about five years. The reason why is important - and it does pertain to kennyP's point. Many of them fancy themselves to be skilled and shrewd businesspeople stuck in dead-end jobs. If they only had the bankroll, they'd become loaded and esteemed! The world would finally know their real selves!
So, they start up or buy a small business like a restaurant, bar, or whatnot and spend lavishly on it. And within five years...
Anyhoo: to get back to the point, all of Bill Gates' billions can't erase his social maladroitness [which to some extent I share.] All of Warren Buffet's billions can't change the fact that he's been flat-out wrong about Bitcoin. All the wealth that an old-style goldbug had shrewdly accumulated in the 1970s in no way prepared him for the 1980s, when gold collapsed and stocks (and bonds!) became the place to be. And...
If you need a little peace of mind, Melbustus, this might help: 'luck' is really a myth - a thought-sparing heuristic for people who have neither the time nor the inclination to get to the truth of the matter. We all use myths of this sort to one extent or another to get us by in our everyday lives, else we'd have no time to act! You can content yourself with the empirical fact that people prone to use the myth of 'luck' are preponderantly people who won't make much of themselves socio-economically. In an important sense, they've installed their own glass ceiling.