Huge mistake.
Sold almost all of it at $200 to $400. Felt like a complete baller. Who else has made 50x to 100x their money in a couple years? Who else takes a credit card cash advance and is right about it?
Sold some more at $6k CAD, overall I've cashed 250x my investment and still have some, but right now it's worth 2000x my original buy price and it's a bit batty to look at the current price. Could have bought a really, really nice house in Toronto if I'd just held on until today.
But you know, 2000x is, on a log graph, not that far from 250x. So unless bitcoin goes to $50k or $500k a coin I'm not going to be a touch sour.
Edit:
Also, this reminds me. I should go through my comment history and find people like tptacek that were very confident that bitcoin couldn't be securable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2607706
It was a pain in the butt, but I secured bitcoin just fine. Bitcoin is one of those thing where you can go through what you said 10 years later and say "What did I say there? Yep that was right, nope that bit was a bit off, yep it wasn't banned by x, nope that person was wrong that it'd get shutdown within the year."
So much of what we arguable is unknowable, like generics in Go or whether mutable state is a good thing for certain programming applications. But the nice thing about investing is you get to find out how right you were.
And you're only really, truly right after the gains are realized.
while I don't think it will ever fully replace fiat currencies, it will - and already is - acting as a secondary money/value exchange, so there is NO downside to getting in. None.
Well except the part about possibly losing everything you put in...
Fractional reserve banking oesn't create coins or notes, it creates credit (or bank money). These credit (IOUs) are liabilities of the bank that are denominated in central bank money (central bank liabilities). When a bank makes a loan this does not in any way affect the central banks balance sheet -there are no changes in the liability side of its balance sheet.
When the loan is withdrawn, this still won't cause a change in the liabilities of the central bank. Other than what bank owns what liability at the central bank. (But even this isn't necessary. It depends on what type of payment the customer made with the loan and what payment system it was cleared through: if it went through a gross settlement system or a multilateral net system,etc.).
The supply of central bank money is dependent on how central banks implement monetary policy. Everywhere in the world (and what has probably always been the case) central banks will supply as much of central bank money as is demanded from the banking system.
Fractional reserve banking will when the bank credit is denominated in Bitcoin doesn't create more Bitcoin, it just creates more claims in Bitcoin. The supply of Bitcoin is independent from this.
for instance, coinbase only allows for a certain set amount of money in/out per week - and its actually quite low comparatively. $15-25k i think? maybe someone has seen more?
Obviously don't put your life savings in bitcoin, anyone who does is not making an intelligent choice. But if you have money to spare that your willing to lose, I wouldn't consider it a horrible investment.