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I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?

Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.

Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.

I dunno you can always drink beer and speed around in a Ford Fiesta. Irresponsibly is free.

You can drink a lot more beer if you don't have to show up for work.

I don't, and the worst I've been doing dancing for a whole weekend, staying awake until I get visual hallucinations. If I was 20, I would've played video games and worked on software side projects all day. That's what I was doing for the first 6 months of not going to work, after all. But it does depend on the person.

I think if I was 20 and independently wealthy, I would have worked on side projects for 6-18 months until I found something / someone to get sucked into.

But I will agree, it really depends on the person. When you're young and have a lot of energy, drinking 2-3 beers throughout the day might seem like a good idea. I never did; but the fact that many people are blissfully unaware of how 2-3 beers throughout the day impacts them still shocks me.

I think that’s what it is. Unemployment, and especially a lack of opportunities, can be dangerous whether it’s because there are no available jobs where you are or it’s because you made 20m in bitcoin when you were 22 and don’t know what to do with it.

Sure but that's has a somewhat less consistent feedback loop..

When I was new to driving I tended to drive around the ex-highways in the outer burbs and end up in little drag races at each light in the beater I could afford.. One time I looked over at the guy with the aggressively gunning the engine in his VW rabbit(?) and realized how utterly sad that was.

Plenty of Ferrari drivers, when they get negative feedback, probably get feedback that seems cool to rebel against instead of people exhibiting utter shame of association.

If you have enough money you can become more reckless because you don't worry about paying for fines or damage. Also coke makes you more reckless and it's not cheap.

The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.

If you win the lottery put it in a living trust. If you don't have experience managing large sums of cash the likelihood of you navigating that challenge correctly is basically zero.

Living a healthy life requires discipline and a certain amount of humility. Both of those traits are hard to maintain after a financial windfall IMO.

Elon Musk is living proof of this.

I feel compelled to ask: what side of that outcome do you think Musk exemplifies?

I'm surprised by the question. He isn't humble by any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah actually, I did a lot of travelling&living outside of such culture (Like a decade) on other earnings and while I was gone not fucking my life up with drugs stuff I watched a ton of my friends die or end up really messed up because of exactly that so your comment wasn't far off the mark like whatsoever. Some ended up in the news for shit like attacking paramedics or murder after fucking their minds up badly enough.

Very North American/European kind of problem with the way I seen people go hard and the sort of things being used here, primarily the appetite for stimulants and opiates that I'm glad I never stuck around to develop in the culture I was from. I have a few other friends who have managed to spend most or enough time away from the continent who feel the same.

I think there's a lack of family cohesion as a huge factor of difference here. Ties into shit like higher suicide rates jn the developed world and other sad shit

I have no idea. Likely just a combination of complete hyperbole and extrapolating a few poor decisions when young.

money leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.

Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.

In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.

Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.

-> thanx Chat.

Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.

Hmm, to me the worlds draw me in as soon as my eyes hit the paper, I love the world building, the detailed description, it make the whole reading experience so much richer for me.

It's like Peter F Hamilton, his stories are insane in length but you almost feel like you experienced the book, and what it is like to live in that world.

I find hard to dive into contrived realities. A good story with hints of a larger complicated world in which it happens is in my opinion much more enjoyable than painstakingly describing everything.

I do have that with fantasy, but with scifi I always feel like “Yeah if we progress enough this could become reality one day…”

That's immersion and an author in love with their ideas tends to ruin that for me. It starts to feel like smarts porn.

A very healthy life perspective, one you can't just get without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.

The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.

dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.

how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway

This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.

This is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.

I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.

There's almost no way to make really good decisions with crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on unfounded faith, like everyone else.

That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.

easy back then to generate btc

Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.

I'm guessing the reward was 50btc per block back then, so they might have mined a single or double digit number of blocks, so somewhere between 50 and 4999 btc.

Me and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.

this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there

That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.

/r/neckbeardNests

but what do you do for heating now?

mine bitcoins - on the NASL

lol