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> Your job as an investor/speculator

You missed the part where he wrote that he was into this "as a developer, not as a speculator."

> I'm disappointed at the lack of millions I could have made (maybe, if I were a serious "hodlr")

He might say (and even believe) that he's looking at this purely from a dev standpoint, but it's just another investor angry over sour grapes.

We are all "investors" whether you/he likes it or not. Even if you choose to keep all your funds in cash stuffed in your mattress - that's just investing in fiat currency :)

The technology hasn't fallen back. It's evolved, even. (With the new fork we'll potentially even see competing alternate realities soon :D) Several devs I know are still happily tinkering away and following the progress of various cryptos - if you're "sick" over the sphere as it currently is, don't blame it on external forces.

I took it more as the frustration of someone who wanted to grow a garden when the circus rolled in to drill for oil.

> wanted to grow a garden

And what's stopping him? There is nothing he could do yesterday that he cannot today, other than invest at yesterday's prices.

Hell, it's probably significantly easier to develop with today's landscape - services and libraries being much more numerous than before - so you're going to have to enumerate specifics if you want to argue otherwise.

Having been bitten by this aswell (had ~100 Bitcoins in 2011) the issue is less with being angry about sour grapes and more about being I'll prepared for the situation.

When I made the decision to sell my BTC, I was completely uneducated regarding the economics of investments and didn't have any family members with any sort of investment at all, so there was nothing pushing me in the right frame of mind to consider BTC anything other than another tech-toy I created.

So the anger that I heard from many in a similar boat mostly stems from this sentiment "hey I was there, I was a programmer, I understood this, but still the wrong people won out, as always." because one wasnt educated to be a evil capitalist/banker/investor. (The evil connotation stemming from group think especially in Europe where rich = villain)

We will see more of this kind of behavior the next time a big tech crunch happens and the VC dries out for years. "Why did nobody teach me how to raise capital when it was still plentiful?"...

IMO it seems weird to be interested in a technology which enables digital scarcity and therefore value, but not be interested in the value created by a practical implementation of the technology.

It's a strange enough position to me that it makes me question whether people who say this actually understand the technology.

Plus, who cares about other peoples' "greed"? There's lots of greed in traditional finance but that doesn't stop most of us from investing in stocks and that kind of thing. If I think GOOG is a sane, rational long-term investment while others are going bonkers over it, I don't see why that would change my mind.

> In addition, even now, at $3200, the market cap of bitcoin is still only ~50 billion. If you believe it has a good shot of being a superior global reserve currency, then it is still cheap and you should be glad that you can buy it for $3200.

I don't really understand finance, so bear with me here : why should being a "superior global reserve currency" entail a stratospheric valuation? The USD has been a de-facto global reserve currency for the last 50 years, yet it's not like an individual dollar is worth 5000+ GBP, CHF, EUR, or JPY.

It seems to me like the high BTC valuation is being driven by speculation. That's fine and dandy, and as the Economist said is part of a "harmless bubble" - but ascribing this insane valuation to some kind of innate feature set of BTC seems to be misleading.

Happy to be proven wrong and/or educated. This isn't exactly my wheelhouse, after all.

> The USD has been a de-facto global reserve currency for the last 50 years, yet it's not like an individual dollar is worth 5000+ GBP, CHF, EUR, or JPY.

that is because Fed doesn't want it to be that way (and for a good reason) and prints [tons of] new USD. BTC can't be printed that easy and that unlimited.

Depending on how you define the money supply then you could say that the total supply of the US dollar is around 12 trillion dollars (based on M2 money supply.)

Given that bitcoin has a hard-coded cap of 21 million coins, if bitcoin became a reserve currency of the importance the USD currently has, you could assume it would reach a market cap of 12 trillion, meaning each bitcoin will be worth $570000.

The reason the USD value has not spiraled to $5000 each is because the economists advising the government believe in inflationary currencies, and believe for some reason that the best thing for a currency to do is to devalue by 1-2% each year. They give some reasons for this which, like a lot of economics are driven by conjecture and not evidence-based. Money is printed approximately to achieve this target, however in recent years, 4 trillion dollars has been printed and given to banks, again based on very little other than economic conjecture. I'm not going to argue with proponents of this sort of economic theory because its a waste of time, however I am glad that a currency not linked to a nation state is going to be able to challenge all of these assumptions.

> If you understood and saw the promise, why didn't you load up?

His answer is right there in his original post, he understands the tech, which is cool, but he doesn't understand money and markets, which is the real reason the entire edifice has any value at all. His observation is akin to being interested in technology purely at the intellectual level, and not understanding how it can serve humanity and fill needs that are desperately unmet in our present paradigm, and people are more than willing to pay to have those needs met. What they already pay to have what we have instead of that is the net economic cost of all states and state controlled financial infrastructure in the world (which, to be clear, I mean all financial infrastructure, because there simply is no such thing as a private unregulated financial instutition outside the bounds of cryptocurrencies), which by comparison make the entire cryptocurrency market cap even now after the rapid appreciation look like the office tea budget.

You need to understand both the tech and its utility to markets, and in turn the real utility of markets to humankind, and imho ideally the terrible threat represented by political authority, to do well out of the cryptocurrency wave. All these people that have loaded up without understanding the technology are eventually going to get taken as that technology matures and differentiates between all the available options, and they'll have no idea how to gauge the actual product level value of one relative to another, and they'll transfer value to those that do.

You can't win with just one side of the equation.