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Comment by cryptofits | Hacker News Reader

If you will look hard enough, you can find FOMO in so many different things.

If you were lucky enough to purchase 100 shares of McDonald's when it was at $22.50 on its IPO date, you would have spent $2,250. Based on McDonald's closing stock price on October 28, 2018, the investment would be worth $12.89 million.

We can also talk about Bitcoin but I think you got my point

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A colleague was big on Bitcoin in mid-late 2009. I declared it to be stupid and didn't bother. By the time I realized that was a mistake it was too late, the days of normal people mining coins was long gone.

I've convinced myself that I'd have lost my wallet long before it became valuable anyways. It helps me sleep at night.

If it makes you feel any better there were a lot of alt-currencies around that time. Many were marketed as being untraceable to avoid government interference and taxation. And many were used for laundering, drugs, and childporn.

Around that time I was aware of bitcoin but I was paid for some dev work once in e-coins and had the hardest time converting that to cash, which is how I paid rent. And while it made up a small part of my compensation I thought it was ridiculous. Something tinfoil hat wearers cooked up.

It's easy to say it bitcoin was going to be big, in hindsight. I used one of their early ATMs to pay for pizza. At the time it was trading for ~$2. I didn't think much of it until years later when it got a meteoric rise.

Or you would have sold it the moment your holdings had any real value. 99% of all people would have done this. You need a very uncommon «speculator’s» or «investor’s» mindset to be this deep into _anything_ as an individual.

If you buy any single asset with the idea that it might increase 10x to 10000x in value, any degree of success will put you in a position where continuing to own it is in direct violation of a «sensible» investment policy.

Yeah, the main issue with listening to all the FOMO here is how many people automatically assume they would've held the investment from then until now without selling it at any point. The best shot most people had at that fantasy is to've bought a bunch of Bitcoin, lose the hard drive, and somehow find it again.

I tried out the WWW when it was ~1000 pages mostly at CERN, and was unimpressed... These things happen.

The thing with Bitcoin is that we were right -- it is stupid. But that didn't stop the early adopters from making lots of money. That's highly annoying.

Were you right? Only time will tell. I'd expect more humility from someone who just admitted to having been horribly wrong about webpages being a big hit... on a webpage.

Yes OP were right. Bitcoin could never scale to the point of being used for every transaction. Thats a different thing than realizing it would have a bubble with massive profit potential.

"Used for every transaction" is a high bar; I suppose USD and the gold dinar have both failed, oh well.

If we used a more reasonable metric, like "will bitcoins being worth significantly more in ten years than they are today," OP may well be wrong. You can think I'm crazy for saying that, but neither of us can really know at the moment.

USD works as currency because it has a pretty stable and small rate of deflation, a property that the fed tries to maintain. It works to trade value and gives a subtle nudge to promote trading.

Bitcoin had the mission statement of being a currency, which it has failed at. It's instead a highly volatile (and potentially highly profitable) investment.

So someone could be right that Bitcoin would not succeed (at being a useful currency) and still have been wrong to not buy in (they should have gotten in when the getting was good for the very reason it would fail to be a currency).

But it was and is more like gambling and less like "mattress money".

Never heard about Lightning Network I guess?

"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."

- Isaac Newton on the South Sea Company Bubble.

Haha, I had a similar experience back in the day! Online services such as Compuserve and AOL were popular, and I was with Compuserve. I heard about the web and loaded a few pages in Navigator - I was disappointed; Compuserve seemed way easier to use, had a lot more content, and was much richer in media.

I chortled, shook my head and went back to Compuserve.

How monumentally wrong I was!

Think of all the other things you also declared to be stupid and didn’t bother with, that turned out to be stupid and would have cost you a bunch if time or money.

People always say, “if you had bought Microsoft at IPO....” For some reason they never say “if you had bought Enron at IPO....”

I can only laugh when I think about mining bitcoin when it was ~$15. I could get 0.1 BTC per day out of my GPU. Not much then, but if I had managed to hold it to today that's $1000 per day. I didn't hold it, obviously, but it's insane to think about. I feel like I missed out, I can't imagine what it's like for the people who mined thousands of BTC a day on a laptop CPU in the very early days and then forgot about it.

"The value of the first bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the bitcoin forum with one notable transaction of 10,000 BTC used to indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered by Papa John's."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin

EDIT: 10,000 BTC in USD is currently $100,375,000

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