Investing 100K then to have 18M now or whatever is a gamble you can only take if you're already doing quite well.
I didn't.
And it hasn't displaced anything, has it? I still don't expect it to do anything of the sort.
1. I'm jealous because they were born rich
2. I'm jealous because they made a lot of money with betting correctly on Facebook
3. I'm jealous because they also made a lot of money on correctly betting on Bitcoin
4. I'm jealous because they made the news and are probably getting all the hottest chicks.
So let's all agree to only say negative stuff about them, and blame all their luck on them being born rich.
We are not rich, so therefore are excused for not buying bitcoin at <$10.
A tennis player who reaches exactly the same goal as another one (e.g. winning a grand slam) yet without rich parents is more impressive. Their circumstances gave them a harder time in life within the sport, and outside of it. Think of material, training costs, quality of life (that goes far!), etc etc. There's some sports which are simply elitist while others are more free for all due to lower barrier of entry.
Speculating with Bitcoin, including starting a business around such speculation in order to stimulate your speculation (huh-huh, sounds less brilliant than it is now) requires savings. If you got 100M USD and you spend 100k (0,1%) on speculation there's virtually nothing you will lose. Because even if that 100k evaporates, you're still a multi-millionaire. Compare that to a poor, hard working woman from Bangladesh who's making our Nike shoes so Bob can win his grand slams. She can only speculate with say a dollar, and that's a huge cut in her budget which she'll feel for time to come. Oh wait, she doesn't even have a computer to start with. Even if she did, 0,1% of her entire savings is still essentially nothing cause like the vast majority of people on earth she either cannot afford to spend that 0,1% or it isn't much so doesn't yield much. Like, she can't even afford fee costs with that. So much for this world-wide cryptocurrency called Bitcoin.
The fact is that the vast majority of people on earth, and even the vast majority of people in rich countries such as the United States cannot afford to speculate with large sums of money. And if they did, they'd be belly up if their speculating would go wrong.
These factors make their achievements a lot less impressive. Note that I'm not saying "unimpressive"; (and I'll repeat once more): I am saying a lot less impressive. Subtle difference.
And fuck being reliant on luck. That is a silly excuse from losers which I heard in gaming all the time (the other one is "not having their day"). Skill is what matters. Good players work around bad luck turning the odds in their favor. They end up with a good long-term ratio or track record. Provided the playing field is equal. The playing field in life is not equal. Some people are born rich, and that gives them an ample amount of chances to score in life. The Winklevoss Twins are a perfect example of that, and that makes them a boring example. The life stories of personae who became rich and famous via hard work and who wasn't rich to start with, like J.K. Rowling, are much more inspiring for the general population.
People are trying their luck all the time in the lottery. They're losing, but false hope keeps that "game" alive. By ignoring the circumstances of the Winklevoss brothers whilst articulating their successes, you're doing the same. Please stop it.
(And that's a post written without going much into the problem of speculation regarding Bitcoin, ignoring issues like Mt. Gox and Tether.)
You assume one wanted to be part of this specific pyramid scheme. I already experimented with another in the '00s and figured that I'm not fit for MLM (it involved sales though), or pyramid schemes for that matter. I'm a terrible salesman because I am too honest and extensive. I didn't expect the world would fall for this pyramid scheme either. Cause frankly, I found it sucked, cause the various times I checked I couldn't use it as currency anywhere (still pretty much true). Which would mean I'm locked, sitting on gold nobody wants to have. What good is a currency you cannot use? You never know beforehand for which ones they're gonna fall for and which ones they won't. Furthermore, it isn't anonymous either, so you can't use it to avoid taxes. At this point, its still difficult to execute transactions due to latency and cost. Its also difficult to find a shop which accepts it as currency.
The only thing Bitcoin has going for it, is that its the first cryptocurrency. The flaws it has cannot be solved easily without a full reset, or consensus of a majority. Plus, the question is if people are responsible enough to own a hardware wallet.
So yeah, what I was doing with my savings is I was investing and I had it on the bank. Which are both luxuries a lot of people in this world cannot afford. And yet, we're talking pennies compared to what Winklevoss owned the moment they were born. All cause of mom 'n pop. You cannot just take that out of the equation.
Also I'm not sure how "prescient" their seeing the potential of bitcoin was. They were literally sitting on a beach in Ibiza when a stranger approached them and told them about investing in bitcoin.
This same stranger fom the beach them puts them in the touch with the Bitinstant folks. When the brother meet Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhes from Bitinstant they observe how much those two believe in the potential of bitcoin. See:
https://qz.com/405950/ibiza-the-hamptons-downtown-manhattan-...
It's no different from startups. A lot of investors were pitched by AirBnB and almost all of them passed. Fred Wilson from USV even had PaulG badgering him with emails telling him to invest and he still passed.
All this talk about how "prescient" they are and how they have now been "vindicated" is all pretty ridiculous. This is revisionist history. The NYTimes piece reads like a press release.
There 's a fair amount of luck involved in investing. They've been lucky twice. You notice there is no mention in this fluff piece about the investments they have made that have gone south because.
If you settlement was 10Mi (example), sell 1Mi shares in cash: congrats, you're rich now, then invest the remaining 9Mi in higher risk stuff
Ergo; in the context we discuss, that's less of an achievement for rich American kids than for poor people.
Therefore not a good delimiter.
And certainly not inspiring. The circumstances for the vast majority of people on earth are different. To start with, their financial circumstances.
Less impressive because they're rich, sure, I'm with you. It makes it easier. But dismissing it as not a good delimiter and not inspiring is pretty ridiculous.
For me, it depends on the sport. Some sports are simply elitist. Cricket is an example, tennis is another, hockey yet another. There's many more. You could even see the very notion of sport is elitist. Poor people need to focus on the bacon alone.
Furthermore, when I learn about the circumstances of certain sports(wo)men I get touched. Lance Armstrong was an example of that because of his illness. Unfortunately he was a fraud, and I watched him win the Tour de France 7 times. We had Sochi as well, where so many Russians suddenly were winning while normally that isn't the case, now is it?
Then there's the stories of poor people winning in sports. Those move me as well, but they seem to be rather rare.
These 3 realizations destroyed a lot of the respect I had for Olympics or sports in general. Even though I am a hobbyist sporter myself (jogging), and have been a competing gamer in the past (the same is true there: if you got rich parents you're one step ahead). Its a personal value, YMMV.
The world is full of people who want to tear down other peoples accomplishments - "Accomplishment X isn't that impressive because of starving people in country Y." Using that standard, nothing done by anyone who "won the ovarian lottery" by being born in a 1st world country would qualify as "impressive".
When faced with a beautiful sunset, you can say "Meh, I'm not impressed. The sunsets in Hawaii are much better." or you can appreciate the beautiful sunset for what it is. The latter approach is happier path in life I think.
It means it gets lost like tears in the rain. At one point, one gets bored by the accomplishments and its about outliers within the winners. That's how an overstimulation of signal tends to work out.
> The world is full of people who want to tear down other peoples accomplishments - "Accomplishment X isn't that impressive because of starving people in country Y." Using that standard, nothing done by anyone who "won the ovarian lottery" by being born in a 1st world country would qualify as "impressive".
I'm arguing these [of the Winklevoss] are no accomplishments; they're expected. If something's expected of you, how is it an accomplishment if you reach that goal? You'd only be disappointed when you wouldn't reach the goal.
> When faced with a beautiful sunset, you can say "Meh, I'm not impressed. The sunsets in Hawaii are much better." or you can appreciate the beautiful sunset for what it is. The latter approach is happier path in life I think.
Moot comparison. At one point in your life, you've seen so many sunsets that it becomes pointless to care about them. You focus on different things, or on one of those sunsets which has something special. Such as that one time in Hawaii. Keeping caring about things which don't move you, seems like a one way ticket to endless depression.
Although everyone's free to enjoy sunsets, and I have no intention to take that liberty away from one, I am equally free to describe they're not that beautiful.
I think you're just mistaken about the percentage of rich people who achieve something like participating in the Olympics. I don't think it's expected in the way you seem to think it is.
At the time I thought they were foolish for not having a contract and for not having built up enough technical skill to understand that Zuckerberg was taking them for a ride. This is definitely true, but they corrected the problem and have recovered brilliantly.
And its not just with start ups. People who are more closer to work, generally tend to maximize returns for themselves above those are who are away from it.
This is true even in Big companies. Most product managers I know barely contribute anything to the product, most of the times its the engineers doing all the work and the product manager is just there to provide the validation 'This looks fine to me'.
There is a good reason why carpenters, plumbers, drivers, <skilled_worker> generally do better on the longer run than the supervisor ever does.
Let's add some ambiguity to our "poor genius"/"brilliant thief" scenario :)
Then again, being able to anticipate irrational investment in bitcoin is arguably also a skill, assuming it’s not just dumb luck.