Maybe we should not be so hard on ourselves. Afterall, we still have a heartbeat. Did we truly make a mistake, or did we narrowly avoid getting consumed by avarice?
There are probably 75 year olds today regretting that they didn't spend an extra $0.12 in 1962 when they were at the comic book store to pick up an extra copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 to preserve. That was the first appearance of Spider Man and and a copy of that in near NM+ condition ("A very well-preserved collectible with several minor manufacturing or handling defects") sold at auction in 2021 for $3.6 million.
I did buy an extra copy of X-Men #137 (the death of Jean Grey) for $0.75 in 1980 and promptly bagged it. If I could actually find it and it actually is still in mint condition it might sell for around $400. From $0.75 then to $400 now is 15% a year growth.
But that $0.75 would have been better invested in Apple stock. That would be around $1600 now which is 18% a year growth. But in 1980 there were other exciting tech companies to invest in and most did not grow like Apple, so it is pointless to consider not buying Apple stock instead of X-Men #137 a mistake.
Nor would it have been a mistake to just put the money in an S&P 500 index fund. That would only have earned about 11% a year over the subsequent 45 years.
The thing is, there were so many coins popping up and all this talk about coins surpassing BTC that it’s easy to look at BTC today and think that was the only choice. But people were speculating on a lot of soon to be dead coins.
There are stock plays you could make today that could make any of us rich off dumb luck.
There's no point kicking yourself over not foreseeing a far-fetched future scenario, if you were at a casino and a roulette spin landed on 12 - would you feel bad for not betting on that happening, despite having no good information it would land on that?
I get some of it works off dividends etc, but so much is sentiment driven and also based off of someone else making a loss.
To make a lot of money with bitcoin you either need to have been a true believer for a ridiculously long period of time, or find the password to an old wallet you'd forgotten about.
And crypto today is extremely accessible and safe, compared to 10+ years ago. The first crypto I bought, was by paying some random seller on a forum with PayPal, and hoping that the deal was legit.