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Comment by rauchp | Hacker News Reader

On a ski trip I took in 2017, I was in line to buy a lift ticket one cold December morning. I remember overhearing the winter bros (the ones that usually talk about gnar and their steezy tricks) talking about installing Coinbase and buying Bitcoin.

I wouldn't underestimate the amount of retail investors that speculated on Bitcoin during that time. It was on major news networks in America, but also on national networks outside the U.S. My uncles and aunts were calling me asking how to buy Bitcoin outside the USA. The FOMO was real back then. Did Tether play a part in the grand pump? I'm sure it did, but I imagine it was more of a catalyst, and not the primary driver as the original study suggested.

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The day after our company Christmas party in 2017 I had to take an uber the next morning to go pick up my car. I was anxious mess like I had been for the last 3 weeks riding the insane wave up on a mish mosh of alt coins. Phone clasped hard in my hand I couldn't go 5 minutes without checking the market.

My uber driver, a middle aged black women cheering about her Christmas plans and whole family coming to visit, suddenly breaks off track and excitedly brings up bitcoin. Her and her husband got their account set up and were putting "all their money" into it. "I don't even know what the hell it is but people are making money left and right!" I told her that it was probably a terrible idea.

The next day I liquidated all my holdings.

I did miss the final run up, but I came out a lot better than most.

Similarly, in June 2018, I was chatting with my Uber driver and I told them I was interning as a software engineer and the driver started asking me about the AI/ML usage at my company (without me starting that discussion). Even before then, I thought AI/ML was overhyped. That interaction just confirmed it for me.

Years ago I took a random day off.

I remembered after breakfast I had some old stock options that were never worth much and some stock I had been buying via an employee stock plan.

I knew the company stock was doing well so I log in and find that day the stock had jumped a fair amount.

It occurred to me that "I'm never going to see a return like this any other time and I almost forgot this was even here"... so I sold it all.

The stock sold at a penny or two less than the all-time high that it would ever reach.

That was a few months before everything hit the fan with the mortgage crisis.

I like to tell that story about how calling a high or bottom in the market is pretty hard and the only time I ever did it it was because I took the day off on the right day.

Late 2017 was nuts. I recall my brother texting me “Hey should I buy XRP?” out of the blue.

Wish I had had the presence of mind to realize it was time to get out.

Bitcoin has a usecase that makes sense, rare, government free money.

Xrp, centralized money. Just as unreliable as government money.

To this day, alt coins seem utterly useless. (Save privacy coins)

good luck with all that government free infrastructure, but as your fellow coinhead told us, we should think about the poor people...

IMHO A lot is hanging on Monero's ASIC resistance, version coming up this month: true decentralised hashing power is essential to the concept.

I can remember Bitcoin going to $200 thinking it was nuts.

I can also remember it going to $700 thinkin it was nuts.

Now it's over $9000.

So when was there really a reason to get out?

Back when it was $20000.

Well, in hindsight, $18k would have been a great time to get out.

Well if foresight were 20/20 we'd all be rich.

To be fair it was pretty obvious if you had been in the space for a while. When random people start texting you up asking how to buy XRP and telling you why LTC is better than BTC you know it's a bubble and know it's time to get out.

Look at Charlie Lee for example. Everyone blames him for dumping his LTC at $200 or whatever it was but frankly it was extremely obvious that it was a bubble and a smart decision.

You missed k__'s point which is that no matter what peak price you think was the best time to sell out, it has always been followed 2-3 years later by an even greater peak.

You have hindsight in the past but you are still lacking foresight into the future.

Because predicting the future based on the past has always worked well.

I'm not predicting the future. cwkoss is (by assuming Bitcoin will never surpass $20k)

Pure hodling means you never take profit. Ideally you sell high and rebuy low.

And will always work well!

Hume on induction in a nutshell.

Probably when it was $19,000.

When it hit around the $30 mark I was thinking that was going to be where it levelled off and I was actually excited for it to become a stable currency.

I was pretty wrong, both about it being a stable and a currency.

As another commenter mentioned, I'm also excited to have been here for it all and stille excited to see where it leads. Ultimately, whether you love it or hate it, Bitcoin has made its mark on history and has kind of become the giant shoulders that the next generation can stand on.

I still remember the first thought that went through my head when it hit $30...

"Well that shit is gonna crash tomorrow"

Well, it did go from 30 to 3.

And from 1200 to 120, and from 20k to 3k, but today is 9k, so on the average year-to-year the price was always on the rise. You do know there are right now more millionaires on Earth then the total number of bitcoins that will ever be. So when bitcoin going to be all 21 millions mined, there will be not enough for all millionaires to buy one. Let that sink.

There are also more millionaires on earth right now than there ever will be of my exclusive cryptocurrency, MoonCoin. I’d be happy to sell you one for 1,000 USD

I’ll give you 50 cents for a billionth of 1 coin.

There it is. Market validation that each MoonCoin is worth $500M a piece.

> ... so on the average year-to-year the price was always on the rise.

Really? Even in 2018? It wasn't, it started at $17K (when I sold) and ended at $3k.

> So when bitcoin going to be all 21 millions mined, there will be not enough for all millionaires to buy one. Let that sink.

And? There's not enough millionaires in the world to buy more than 1 Transamerica Pyramid, either. That means absolutely nothing. There's not enough millionaires on earth to buy 1 BTC each today and it means nothing.

I thought it was nuts when BTC crossed the great Rubicon that was $1/BTC thinking how could this thing I generated on my laptop be worth more than a real dollar? I sold then bought in again after Mt Gox. I get the same vibes today it might take 10 years but nothing is different now, Bitcoin will be $100k eventually.

The market can always remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. There were and continue to be myriad reasons to get the heck out. You can ignore them and bet on irrationality but that isn't a substitute for looking a "reason to get out" - there's boatloads.

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