
If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto? - letsjaam
https://ifyouhadboughtcrypto.com/
======
jacquesm
There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins
and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you
had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and
had successfully liquidated your position.

That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something
since the liquidation tends to depress the price.

And in the world of Bitcoin you might end up with nothing if the exchange
accidentally loses your loot (chance of which goes up as you have more money
outstanding).

So any realistic scheme dealing with the liquidation of such an amount of
crypto coins would be to spread out the sale over a longer period of time in
small amounts to be taken back out.

Which makes me wonder how much the largest successful one-shot liquidation
anybody on HN has ever done and how they did it?

~~~
ucha
To put it in perspective, the daily volume in BTC is a few 100,000s. 5-600'000
BTC is $10B. Sure the Winklevoss twins can't liquidate their entire holding in
a week but if you only have a few million dollars worth of bitcoin, you can
liquidate in a few days without moving the price significantly.

The other major crypto-currencies are more or less liquid in proportion to
their market cap.

~~~
etr-strike
Not sure what you’re measuring... gdax alone averages around 25k btc traded
per day. At today’s price that’s 450mil usd

~~~
ucha
Thanks, I mistakenly wrote million instead of billion. Edited.

------
mmastrac
"If you had played these lottery numbers last year - how rich would you be?"

~~~
AETackaberry
Seriously...why do people love articles like this? Why not just sum them all
up into one big article, "What if you had a time machine"

------
paloaltokid
This is fun but also pointless. There’s no guarantee you would have made any
money. And the model assumes that you’d buy and hold this whole time.

So if you’re looking at this and beating yourself up...don’t.

~~~
letsjaam
As the developer I couldn't agree more - it's pointless... but hopefully a
little bit of fun along the way.

Isn't that what the internet is for?

~~~
paloaltokid
Totally! I’m not knocking the site itself which I think is super cool. But
these “what if” games are very dangerous.

There’s a term in economics for it...when you think you’ve lost something that
you never even had.

------
justboxing
Beautiful site, nicely done.

I do personally know a lot of people in San Francisco who had bought bitcoins
when it was fractions of pennies. Some lost all of it in the MT GOX hack /
bankruptcy, and most others sold what they had off after that incident.

Just 1 guy, my boxing trainer, held on to the bitcoin 1 of my friends paid him
with, for Personal Training. In his case also it was about 300$ worth of
bitcoin paid to him in 2013, and it was more like he forgot he even had it,
and then all of a sudden, last month, he realized it was now worth 20,000-ish
and sold it all off and 'invested' it back into Litecoin and Etherium. 2 days
after he bought Litecoin, Coinbase froze all trading of Litecoin on their
platform.

The funny thing about this is that the friend who paid my trainer worked for a
Bitcoin startup and had 1000s of bitcoins. He sold it all off in 2015. Didn't
even keep 1 coin. If he had held on to it, he'd have had about 20 million USD
worth of bitcoin today.

So the site should really be
[https://ifyouhadboughtcryptoandarestillholdingontoit.com](https://ifyouhadboughtcryptoandarestillholdingontoit.com)
:)

~~~
AJ007
I offered to pay my contractors in bitcoin years ago and no one was
interested.

I told my friends they should by it, no one did, until this year. Some of them
managed to do brilliant things like actively buy and sell yet not make a
penny. This is like Howard Marks describing day trading as making $3 when the
price went up $30.

While I'm optimistic about Bitcoin, no one can defend the value of barely
functional, abandoned, and centralized altcoins. This is completely out of
control. It is a commodities trading video game where the underlying assets
are completely imaginary. The bad altcoins will be worth absolutely nothing at
the end, much like the dot com bubble. The real estate bubble was kinder, sans
leverage.

~~~
justboxing
Wow, interesting story. Speaking of altcoins, what are your thoughts on
Ripple? It seems promising to me in that nearly a 100 banks are using their
BlockChain technology to process cross border payments and cut fees and
transfer time (down to seconds from days).

At the same time, I'm wary of investing in altcoins, after reading a whole
bunch of scams that people have perpetrated online in this space.

Also, is Ripple ( XRP ) considered an altcoin in the first place??

------
munchbunny
This is an interesting but dangerous thought experiment, like all of the other
instances where you ponder what would have happened if only you had picked the
right investment and timed the market right.

If there is a lesson to be learned about reading the markets, learn it, but
don't dwell on the money you didn't make because it can cloud your judgement
next time.

------
benjohnson
I'd still be broke:

If I was was the type of person that invested in Crypto, I would have also
"invested" in all the other fads: lottery-tickets, slot machines, ostrich
farming, classic cars, overpriced college degrees, Flooz.com, and Gold right
at the top of the bubble.

Edited: spelling per the helpful editor below.

~~~
natalyarostova
A good collage degree should only be $10 or so, it's not that hard to
cut/paste pictures together.

------
sowbug
Usability suggestion: tapping one of the icons at the top should change the
drop-down to that currency.

Also I'll echo others' comments that cryptocurrencies are hijacking the word
"crypto," which most definitely does not mean "cryptocurrency" to the crypto
community.

~~~
koolba
It's hijacked the word "coin" too.

Gone are thoughts of the halcyon days of arcades. Now it's just get rich quick
schemes and #ad.

------
mhasbini
meta -- But there's more to cryptography than cryptocurrency.

------
lechiffre10
That's assuming your wallet wasn't hacked and/or you didn't hold your coins in
MtGox.

------
Peter-W
Buying into pyramid schemes is always profitable as long as you are the one
who gets to cash out

------
joshmn
It's like gambling: shoulda/woulda/coulda.

Why do people like these things? Pipe dreams?

------
soared
How to make a bubble bigger: "How rich would you be if you had done X?"

