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Comment by 9nGQluzmnq3M | Hacker News Reader

He bought in at $3, and as of 2017 he had a 1000x return on his investment. Today that would be circa 3000x.

https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-30...

Interestingly, he was very wrong about the 2nd reason to buy BTC (it hasn't exactly replaced the existing financial system), but the other two -- past performance and "civil liberties" (for drugs, ransomware etc) were close enough.

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I bought it at the roughly same price, but sold like 80% of it once it hit $200. Once I actually made 50x my money the price just seemed way too high.

Shrug. At least I got a decent return. Calling the top is hard.

This is how I (and perhaps others) console myself for not buying at all. With the capital and risk appetite I had at the time, I would have made a nice five-figure profit before selling thinking 'this is the top, for sure'.

As for past performance, absent a rational basis for the price, you could equally write a post "Why I'm Putting All My Savings into Tulips (1635)".

And as for civil liberties — Ross Ulbricht might want to have a word with the author regarding the drug use case. And I don't think even the most hardcore libertarians would consider the ransomware business a civil liberty.

What's more free market and "personal responsibility" than allowing ransomware to weed out the weak/unfortunate? That sounds exactly like libertarianism to me.

Didn't read the links completely, but isn't this just a case of survivorship bias?

In 2011 maybe what he spotted was how human greed was going to make the whole thing skyrocket, but over-analyzing it made him think BTC is a solution for the future, etc, etc.

It was a pretty ballsy bet either way, and I could see it being reposted even if BTC had crashed and burned to $0 like many expected it to.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for John McAfee to consume his reproductive organs on TV:

http://dickening.com/

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