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Comment by 07d046 | Hacker News Reader

Because this is Less Wrong, I'll say that they're making a logical fallacy. A prediction was made that Bitcoin would go well, and it did, but the fact that it went well doesn't mean that the prediction was rationally founded.

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Yeah. The prediction of $10,000 was predicated on:

> I estimate that bitcoin has somewhere between 0 and 0.1% chance of eventually replacing a decent size fiat currency, which would put the value of a bitcoin at anywhere upwards of $10,000 a bitcoin.

Likewise the other prediction mentioned:

> If Bitcoin becomes the new global monetary system

Let's see the results of the people who are holding on with that expectation (and some still are). That $116,000 isn't there until after you move money out of Bitcoin.

But maybe you put money in knowing that it's a speculative bubble, and are willing to pull that $116,000 out now? Sure, but bubbles are irrational. If you had people advocating a schedule for pulling your money out of Bitcoin (the first comment mentions one), than that makes sense, though the amount you would be holding would be a lot less than $116,000. Without that schedule you're left with trying to time a bubble, which is the issue with every bubble. The article doesn't give any indication of why people should sell now, and they shouldn't have sold at $11,600, or why they shouldn't try to hold on until $1,160,000.

I have the impression most predictions on modern companies or technologies are completely random.

Some people tell you X will change the world.

Some people tell you X won't change anything.

We wait some time and look how X did and then say one of the two groups were totally right and saw it coming, while the rest was completely elusive to how the world works.

To me it seems like there will always be some people who get it right if the questions are simply answered by enough people...

I mean, just look at companies like Kodak or Nokia, who were filled with really smart people that simply failed to acknowledge the fact that their industry, which they knew deeper than anyone, were chaning.

How's the old scam go? Mail 500 people your promotional flyer claiming Stock A will jump and 500 people a version that says Stock A will plummet. Split the 500 people who got the correct prediction into two groups and repeat with Stock B. Then sell 250 people your third, 100% accurate prediction. You'll have 125 loyal followers to evangelize you.

Sounds awfully familiar.

I strongly believe that the prediction was rationally founded. I think casting a lot of doubt on this is a sign of regret/motivated reasoning.

It's of course possible that Bitcoin had less than a 1/10000 chance of hitting $10,000, and we're just living in an extremely unlikely world. But given that it _did_ happen, it's probably fair to bet that it was possible at the time to give it better than 1/10000 odds.

LessWrong is all about the Bayesianism, which means being comfortable with probabilities, even though it means you can never be "sure".

There aren't that many predictions being made on LW though. If you expect this has only come true by chance, there should be a large amount of similar predictions that haven't come true in the LW archives. Are there?

As another comedic twist, the LW community is probably the biggest proponent of publishing long-dated predictions and calibrating their confidence based on their results and priors. If ANY group of people has a defensible history of trying to make verifiable/actionable predictions, it is LW.

If you think my predictions are bad in general and this is just cherrypicked, one can always review my 2,000+ expired predictions since ~2008: https://predictionbook.com/users/gwern (I also have a profitable track record of personal & prediction market betting going back to ~2003.)

> A prediction was made that Bitcoin would go well, and it did, but the fact that it went well doesn't mean that the prediction was rationally founded.

This just looks like a naked assertion to me.

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