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Comment by amir734jj | Hacker News Reader

As an owner of 50 bitcoins that I bought in 2010, I must say I agree with you. I don't see bitcoin as a future of money nor payment.

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Congratulations. You can now retire.

Nope. I'm doing PhD in computer science now and I work full time as a software engineer and teach at university. I'm not retiring anytime soon :)

I'm curious, did you originally own more than 50? If not, do you have a plan for when you will sell? I know if I'd bought 50 bitcoins back in 2010 I would have sold them, or at least most of them, many times over by now.

There was a YouTube video explaining how to buy bitcoin and I got curious. I bought 50 because I originally wanted to but 5 and I accidentally added 0. I intended to spend 10 dollars but I accidentally spent 100 dollars. I tried everything to get my money back but it was too late. Fast forward to 2015 I remembered bought some bitcoin in highschool and I have my key stored in a flash drive. That flashdrive was like external hard drive for me at that time.

And you weren't tempted to take some money off the table when your $100 investment hit $100,000, $500,000, $1M, $2M? Or are you saying you've lost the key?

I have the key. I was very tempted to sell some when it hits $20k but I have a full-time job so I just sit back and watch the prices rise :)

Well, congrats on your wealth! I occasionally kick myself for not buying a few when I got interested in it back around the same time, but I console myself with the certain knowledge there's no way I would have held on to nearly these prices. I would've felt the need to diversify away as soon as it became an appreciable fraction of my portfolio. A bitcoin millionaire, I was never destined to be.

what about Ethereum?

ETH is great, but it has some scaling issues that are going to take years to sort out.

One benefit of ETH over BTC mining is that PoW mechanism (ethash) has, so far, kept most ASICs off the network (1). This has prevented the speed / power race BTC faces. In addition, the fastest GPUs are not necessarily the most ROI efficient, so people aren't EOL'ing their hardware every week. Even better is that GPUs still have life after mining.

(1) Yes, there are ethash asics, but being a memory constrained algo means that at the end of the day, the limiting factor is memory, not asic chips. The other issue is availability... shipping asics out of China is expensive.

Disclosure: very very large ETH miner

I didn't know what Ethereum was at that time. I was 16. Cryptocurrency I think is a bubble. I hope it bursts.

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