I couldn’t care less about crypto, but just for fun I bought 1 BTC in 2016. Still own it, and likely will never sell, but boy I wish I bought a lot more instead of my index funds, skipping one monthly contribution in VTI back then would have mostly set me up for life instead of just having a nice but inconsequential $100k bonus in my portfolio :-)
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
It seems we are truly ducking poor here in the EU. My parents have been running a farm for 40 years in the Netherlands and they’re doing well financially. Still, $100k is not inconsequential for them!
HN is a bubble of very rich folks compared to the vast majority of the global population. It's easy to fall into the trap of how people here talk about money, like a US$ 150k salary is too low, or like having less than US$ 300k in savings makes you poor.
Just remind yourself this place is an extreme outlier whenever you hear someone here treating life-changing sums of money for 90-95% of the global population as "inconsequential".
The world is split into two kids of people: the ones that have managed to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and the ones who haven’t.
> the ones that have managed to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world
This group is further split into two kinds of people: Those who had an opportunity to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and those who weren't afforded that opportunity.
The world was even more divided in the past. When I went to China in 1983 the GDP per capita per year was $285. Even adjusted for inflation they were poor. No more really. Trade and the internet have leveled things up.
My comment sounds overly cynical but I fully agree with you, there’s been so much progress in getting people out of poverty world wide. Yes there’s a big gap in wealth but it’s probably the smallest it has ever been on average, and way more people have their basic needs met than ever before.
Is this true? The few net worth government statistics I can find from a quick google search point at median net worth, excluding house equity, to be significantly higher than $1k, so I wonder what I am missing. Is the implication that a person with $100k in their 401k still cannot cash flow $1k in an emergency? Totally happy to be educated.
Would love to see some data, as anecdotally, living in the Bay Area, I cannot at all relate to your comment given the massive amount of wealth virtually anyone I know has. People routinely drop $1k on a couple of mid-tier restaurant dinners around here (restaurant prices show that a drink these days is $25, crazy, good thing I stopped consuming alcohol), which I do understand is an outlier. Thanks.
> When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 63 percent of all adults in 2023 said they would have covered it exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement [...] 37 percent of adults [...] would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent
Thanks, very helpful! I am still puzzled how this data reconciles with the median net worth figures that are also produced by the federal government (too lazy to google again).
I cry every time I think about the fact that I managed to CPU-mine 50 btc, and sold it for nothing.
Still, I did get a payout from the mtgox disaster and its a decent amount really, considering I put in less than 100$ from the start. Just far from life-changing amount, more like "ok, this gets us a nice vacation trip!"-money.
I still have the postcard from Japan from the legal proceedings!
There's a ton of things I could regret.
BTC price going up makes the counterfactual very easy to imagine in rough outlines, and thus more and more appealing.
But that's a fool's errand. There's absolutely no guarantee that in all the alternate timelines where you had not sold you would be better off now. Even with all the extra money. Windfalls tend to cause problems for lottery winners for example.
I mined 12 BTC from my gaming computer dual-booting between Linux/Windows that I also used for SETI@Home and Folding@Home, I ran the miner just for fun as I thought it was another distributed system doing computations and was fascinated by that concept at the time.
They were lost when I had to re-install Windows to play games and formatted the whole hard drive. I don't think much about it because it's so long ago but I'd have enough money to start realistically considering to retire...
>>Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
There was some person who invested $30 everyday in BTC since 2017, and has $1 million right now.
The tweet had gone viral on Twitter.
BTC bull/bear cycles have taught a lot of people many things about regular investing.
Like what this person did is called DCA(Dollar Cost Averaging).
>>>>Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!
Seems like showing up everyday is all there is to success. Mostly. Every once in a while, someone makes it big due to luck/help. But showing up everything is all.
I sometime use the word invested in the context of Bitcoin, but I don't really think of it as an investment. I don't know what a better word to use would be though. I think calling it gambling is needlessly antagonistic.
I don't know if I would even consider buying an NFT of a pointless thing gambling. There is a misguided expectation that just because it has a price tag it has value. The actual perceived value(as in market price) increasing reinforces that viewpoint, but it is an artifact of a pool of misguided people that has not been exhausted.
The point is, these people have an expectation of an increase in value. For most gambling there are two categories. The most skilled wins, and the House wins. There is no rising tide raising all boats. Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional.
'Investing' in NFTs, I feel is distinct because it relies on the sincere belief of a false premise. Participants believe that neither skill nor luck is a requirement and just being in the game is sufficient.
Coming back to Bitcoin, I think there are multiple levels of expectation based upon multiple premises. The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money. I don't think you can say this is outright false, merely quite unlikely. Others believe that Bitcoin will, at least, retain it's value. This premise is on sturdier ground but also not certain.
You could think of this as skill-based form of gambling if you think that the skill is in the ability to more accurately determine the truth of the premises. That puts it in the same field as a high risk investment though.
I agree with your points but I think that the attributes of gambling you described can also be applied to bitcoin pretty well:
- The most skilled wins: btc participants probably believe they're appying skill (with a heavy dose of luck) to know when to get in and get out of bitcoin. after all $1 million in btc is only useful if at some future time you can do something with it ("cash out").
- Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional: this sounds like a pretty accurate description of crypto "investing" as a whole.
> The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money
If that happens, how many btc will it take to buy a toyota? Nobody knows. Sure, USD may be worthless one day, or it may take $1 billion USD to buy a pencil. But (most) crypto investors weren't "investing" in USD before, the were using it as a stand-in for things of real value.
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
they said exactly that in 2018, 2021, and 2022 too
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!