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How do you know what not to invest in then? Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency fifteen years ago. It wasn't even the first digital currency. If you hop on every bandwagon, you'll go broke far more then you become wealthy. Just look at all the people who poured money into NFTs or digital real estate in the metaverse or Dogecoin or whatever.

It's easy to say "well of course I would have invested in Google in 1999" but there was nothing in 1999 to say that Google was going to be as big as it was. Why not Lycos or Dogpile or AskJeeves?

How many people dedicated their careers to Flash, only to have it die at the hands of Steve Jobs and HTML5? It's not just about bailing out: lots of folks had to start over because taking advantage of the opportunity means actually investing real time and money. "As a tulip bulb producer, I would have simply stopped producing tulip bulbs when it started to seem questionable." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

I don't think you're understanding my point. Hopping on the bandwagon is explicitly not "maximizing your foothold while minimizing your downside," nor is it early-stage almost by definition. An early stage technology with an uncertain future cannot have a bandwagon.

I think the logical thing to do is to invest a minor amount of time/money across a broad spectrum of new promising tech. If you had been aware of and bought $500 of Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be a billionaire today. The early people involved with NFTs also did very well.

The Flash example is specifically the opposite of my point. Flash was a lucrative skill for a period of time, but at a certain point it became very clear that it didn't have a future.

If applying that advice were as easy as it sounds, there would be many more billionaires in the world.

If only Mt Gox didn't vaporize all of my bitcoin in the early 2010's :(

I didn’t say it was easy, I was just thinking theoretically, as a strategy that was the opposite of the OP.

What is the broad spectrum of new promising tech today? How much time and money should you invest in each one?

This question is easy to answer in hindsight but it's not trivial to answer in the moment. I like your mindset though

Ah yeah, the beauty of hindsight knowledge.

> That is, be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable

Counterpoint, I sold all my Bitcoin in 2011 when Mt Gox got hacked and the price plummeted 80%. Would have done it again after their 2014 hack too if I had any left.

> Bitcoin is a good example: if you bought it 15 years ago and held it, you're probably quite wealthy by now

But you just said bail the moment it's future starts to be questionable. If you follow that you would have never held it for 15 years.

But you can't be on the cutting-edge of everything, and there are opportunity costs.

> be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable

The problem is this leaves you undifferentiated from every hype chaser in Silicon Valley. Our world is littered with folks who went to coding school, traded Bitcoin, did something in the metaverse and blogged about AI. That jack-of-all-trades knowledge can be useful. But only if you’re making unlikely connections. Having the same cutting-edge familiarity as every tech journalist doesn’t that make.

Better: develop deep knowledge and expertise in something. Anything. Not only does this give you some ability to recognize what expertise looks like from afar, it also lets you dip into new topics and have a chance at seeing something everyone else hasn’t already. That, in turn, gives you the ability to be a meaningful first mover.

> Having the same cutting-edge familiarity as every tech journalist doesn’t that make.

You are giving too much credit to tech journalists. How many of them truly understand Bitcoin or AI?

Maybe - but that's also a style of life definition, isn't it. I did not care at all about Bitcoin, and I'm still pretty fine. I even think, sitting Bitcoin out was better for me, because who (vrosdly speaking) cares about it today (besides speculating with it)?

Yeah it looks reasonable when you only pick success stories for your examples.

If you sold the farm to get in early in the Metaverse, you're totally hosed now because that was a dead end. The idea of digital real estate was as terrible then as it is now.

I specifically wrote this:

> Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside.

If you bought into NFTs when they were hot you would have lost money. Not every new tech is worth investing immediately.

When they were hot is not when they were new.

Except that strategy gets you killed through a thousand paper cuts.

What would have you done when the Bitcoin fork happened 50/50? Would you have gone int ICOs? Which ones? Etc…

There’s simply too many “new things”, so by trying to get exposure to them you’ll be massively in the red.

Let’s say you get into 1000 “new things”, and you strike it lucky and hit BTC. You’d had to buy BTC in early 2013, hold it over the whole period and sold at the historical maximum for you to be at break even.

If instead of buying 1000 “new things”, you’ve put your money into the S&P you’d be at +250% by the same time.