Bitcoin is my potential pension: What’s driving Kentuckians to join the craze

washingtonpost.com

7 points·willbw··5 comments

These folks need to fully understand the amount of luck and timing they need to benefit from this. Early adopters easily cashed-in, but will be much harder going forward. Everyone is a genius when it's going up, not so much on the way down.

I think the success of early adopters from bitcoin is driving many to some of the altcoins. For example, ADA is sitting around 40 cents right now. With the $1500 that was invested by Knight from the article that could've been shifted to get around 3750 ADA coins. Think of all the profits to be made if it just goes up to $1/coin! The problem is many people don't necessarily understand the risks of investing in altcoins and just see it as a way to be another early adopter.

What you are describing is basically how pump-and-dump of penny stocks works.

I suspect that much if not all of blockchain consulting (including bitcoin) will be regarded as opportunistic charlatanry by future historians. Blockchainism is the alchemy of the internet age: a long, costly and (in the short term) counterproductive dead end quest to reify, through successive rounds of epicyclic tweaking, a fundamentally flawed system of philosophical premises that its most vocal and ideologically inclined proponents have mistaken for conclusions.

Yet just as alchemy inadvertantly fostered the development of the scientific method and attendant apparatus for quantification of natural phenomena, blockchainism may yield insights and instrumentation with similar impact potential, this time pertaining to the phenomena of human nature through quantification of social interaction and value formation process.

Previous post with slightly more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16305197

Reply on news.ycombinator.com