Say what you will, but this irrational exuberance is precisely that; irrational. I knew about Bitcoin 6+ years ago, when I read a blog about someone buying a sandwich with this newfangled currency. But I didn't rush to mine it. I didn't rush to buy it either. I was simply indifferent to the prospect of it, and I don't regret it.

Here's why. Bitcoin's thesis is that it possesses inherent value because it will become a medium of exchange i.e. people will trade in bitcoin, thereby using it as a store of value, and making it valuable. And yet, that hasn't happened yet. While it's hard to estimate the velocity of money for something like Bitcoin, and the "Bitcoin days destroyed" metric isn't accurate either, it is quite clear that as Bitcoin as a store of wealth rises rapidly in value, its utility as a currency correspondingly drops in value; thereby invalidating the central thesis on which the question of its value rests.

Here are rough estimations for the velocity of money for BTC;

http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/

https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity

Even if these are filled with inaccuracies, the general trend seems to be quite clear. People use BTC as an asset not a currency. And as such, the idea that it's a savvy investment belies the fact that it's value as an asset is entirely psychological in nature and completely ungrounded from actual metrics like fiat currency (though again fiat currency does run on trust, but the difference is that it's a marker of exchange thereby measuring the economy and its productivity gives an estimate of its value).

Further, even if it was a valid currency, then what we're witnessing over here is hyperdeflation in action, and it is fundamentally irrational to expect it to continue.

The reasoning for the above points is quite straightforward and simple. The magic of money and capitalism isn't that you can hoard gold and get rich. No, it's that you can make money. It's the idea that value can be created and destroyed through the economic actions of human beings, and that money as a concept serves as a measure of wealth as opposed to wealth. It's why we moved away from the gold standard - it was fundamentally irrational and in the long run, would have caused the exact phenomena we're seeing with BTC.

If you really think that somehow as a store of value BTC is going to become some significant fraction of human wealth, then go ahead buy this. But if you give it any rational thought whatsoever, then you'll see clearly that this is the tulip mania in action and that timing your actions to beat the market is even more irrational.

So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be.

Right now, the most rational thing to do is to bet for it to fail. And then figure out how to time that bet. Because the farther it rises, the harder it will fall.

Good luck.