Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things with it.
Regret on a different level.
I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home.
This was 2009, months after the official launch.
We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.
The point of starting early is not compound interest. It’s to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you can put in, and if you don’t understand Let it Ride and rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of hundreds of dollars, you’re gonna have a bad time.
The only compound interest that really matters is what you get when you have a substantial stake that you also haven’t blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is technically true but also technically beside the point.
"Forty quid for a string of hex digits? Nah, I don't think so..."
- me, some time in 2010.