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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

They took the risk, gambled on Bitcoin when others were too afraid to. They were rewarded for their gamble. Seems fair to me.

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If you're already a multi millionaire, gambling a few million on bitcoin isn't really a risk. If you're poor, you aren't "afraid to" take a gamble - you can't afford too. Maybe this is all fair by the rules of the current economy. But maybe the rules aren't fair to begin with.

> gambling a few million on bitcoin isn't really a risk

They didn't just invest a few million, they also stuck their necks out in a very public way and made efforts to bring Bitcoin to the investment masses (via the ETF). A failure in Bitcoin would have reflected very poorly reputation-wise.

Again, a slight social hit that is completely excusable (no investor is perfect) is a far cry from losing your home, savings, car, job, etc like a middle class person would have.

Ah, so what non-millionaires like me are doing wrong is we're not starting a bitcoin ETF. I'll have to start one in the spare time between my two jobs. Meritocracy!

And if everyone started out with the same amount of money in life you'd still be bemoaning the unequal distribution of advantageous genetic traits.

I'm not saying everything must be equal. It's people saying "meritocracy" who act like everything already is.

Oh the world is definitely not a pure meritocracy, I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.

Sure, and how did they have the money to gamble (sic) on Bitcoin?

By successfully pursuing their claim against Facebook till the end to the tune of 65million USD

Of which they put 1/5th of the Facebook shareholder money into Bitcoin

They were entrepreneurial enough to get entangled with Zuckerberg and Facebook.

And to do that they had to be at Harvard at the right time, which involved being born in the right circumstances of course.

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