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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

If by 'early adopter' you mean 'in it before the price skyrocketed', then yes.

I don't believe I'm a slow learner, but it took me about 1 year from first learning about Bitcoin to becoming comfortable enough with the technology to speculate on it.

I honestly believe it will replace Gold as a store of value, but it will take a very long time for the general public to understand it enough and/or trust it enough that they'll sell any amount of gold for bitcoins. But when they do, perhaps in a slow process that peaks around 15 years from now, the value of a single bitcoin could end up somewhere around $300k.

I personally estimate the likelihood of this being around 10-15%. So yeah, I'm still buying more today.

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Gold and BitCoin don't compare well. Here's why. Sure, gold is "useless", except for the fact that its value is historically verified (over centuries) and culture-independent. If nothing else, it's used in jewelry (and drugs, and electronics).

There aren't many elements on the periodic table, and even fewer are viable as metallic currencies: rare enough to have value in small weight, not so rare as to be foreign (historically) to many cultures. Gold has a visceral, visual advantage, too: it's the only yellow metal.

On the other hand, anyone can launch a new cryptocurrency. There's no natural monopoly there. The idea is valid, but all Bitcoin has to defend itself against competition is the brand/reputation. And people hate Bitcoin because it was clearly set up to favor early adopters for no good reason.

Silver was historically verified too. But it lost it's value in the 20th century, when people stopped using it as a money.

Silver took a sizable hit, but it has retained value. It still has two aspects to it that are very valuable: industrial and jewelry / fashion. Those are likely to remain for a very long time, providing silver with a value base.

It's gold ratio fell from 16:1 in 19th century to 100:1 in 1930s.

Getting only 15% of your savings is not a good result :)

It's not so bad either, imagine you held the continental dollar or the zimbabwe dollar, or even just the USD since 1975. They did worse than silver.

If it hadn't favored early adopters... there wouldn't have been early adopters.

Well, it has favored the early adopters a few magnitudes too much. I am not comfortable with someone holding 10% of currency.

If Satoshi came out of the high tower and announced plans for his stash, I would feel a little bit better. When/if BTC hits 1m/BTC his stash would be worth 2T and that is a lot of claim checks on society.

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