I don't know how I should feel, but I definitely know how I do feel about having owned 12 BTC that I bought for $300 about 10 years ago and then just traded until I lost it all, instead of just putting it on a usb key and forgetting about it for a while like I should have. Sigh. I did learn a thing or two about trading, so there is that. I learned enough to stop. (Along with the slightly tarnished feeling of having lost about half of it to the mtgox scandal.. also a good lesson, I guess.)
You really can’t let it eat you. It’s psychologically and economically almost impossible to have bought it that low and sold it high, as the short list of blocks of early coins sold years later demonstrates. There aren’t many Bitcoin millionaires through speculation or early mining alone.
Same goes for buying significant Apple or Amazon stock in the late 90s and holding until now.
Nah, it doesn't eat at me, only when a story like the one in this thread comes up. :/
The reality is that I was 25 at the time and knew absolutely nothing about the financial industry. I still know next to absolutely nothing, but I was serious about being happy to have learned some things due to playing with BTC. I consider it a fairly inexpensive lesson in how it all works... I'm no good at trading, but to this day I can follow stories about the markets a little better than I would have otherwise. I also learned that trading was fun! It almost gave me an appetite to get more into it, but I realized that at the end of the day I prefer spending my time making functional things than pushing money around.
The other thing that got me to stop was after trying to get into algorithmic trading, which I just couldn't get to work for me, I finally did a basic correlation analysis on prices and realized there is far more noise than signal into those indicators. Obviously there are ways to predict and profit, but I realized it was far too subtle an art for me, and I moved on to other interests.
> It’s psychologically and economically almost impossible
For you. But I know quite a few mid 30s retirees.
I agree that a lot of people seem to have a problem with impulse control and trusting their own valuation, when everybody say "it's wrong - it's a fad - it's tulip/beanies".
Eventually you tune out everyone and learn to laugh all the way to the bank at the HN nonsense.
BTW I wouldn't dismiss DOGE as a fad if I were you. Same mistake again and again on HN: regular people doing something? They must be wrong!
Turns out regular people want a crypto they don't feel bad about, and that's not owned by big banks like BTC/ETH or anarchists like XMR/ZEC. There aren't many that can deliver, and DOGE is one of them.
Do you have a position, or are you planning to fail again?
Because the WSB mob is out for blood, and if GME is any sign, they are foaming at the mouth. DOGE should have been a simple pump, but it's still around 900 sats
I give it 3 days (time for the deposits to clear and for people to coordinate) until it starts again.
Redditors have stated their goal: parity to the USD. They are half way though.
> There aren’t many Bitcoin millionaires through speculation or early mining alone.
The best way not to win is not to play, alleging it's psychologically and economically impossible.
EDIT: for the reply with a quote of DOGE in cents: They just did a 10x event. All they need is another 10x event to get DOGE on par with USDT.
They have already done one with minimal coordination and media attention, so I call that half way through because they already did half the work. It was done in a few days, thus a log scale seems applicable.
Of course, if you care about the linear value in fiat currencies, we have different values, so you may prefer a different choice of words.
It doesn’t matter how many you or I personally know as you can see from the transaction record that a short list of people held Bitcoin long enough to turn almost nothing into retirement money. I’m not saying people can’t retire from speculation, but most start with significant assets so don't have as many orders of magnitude to gain.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm in the same boat. I think I made about $100 profit from the 8 or so bitcoin I owned a decade ago.
But I also know that even if I'd made double that, I'd never have had the nerve to hold for a decade. The only way I would have made any serious money would be by forgetting about them.
These kind of "what if everybody did exactly the same thing" type thought experiments are not really relevant for anything. If you had some Bitcoin 10 years ago, and you decided to sell/hold/whatever, that has almost no bearing on what other people would have done. The scenario where literally everybody holds and nobody trades is not a realistic scenario and not a particularly interesting thought experiment.
If it makes you feel any better I lost about the same amount of bitcoin at about the same time frame playing blackjack in an online casino. I learned the lesson, I never gambled in a casino again. One of those expensive life lessons.
I rented a miner contract off ebay for 50 dollars back then, I recall that I linked it to a mining pool and it earned around 40 dollars worth of BTC. I would like to say I lost it due to the 3rd party wallet company going bankrupt, but if I'm being honest I'm pretty sure I gambled away 90% of it in a BTC dice scheme.
I remember considering to buy into BTC about $100 worth when it was trading at $2.70. My password management then was nowhere near as robust as it is now and I have little doubt that I would not have been able to recover the password for a wallet even if I had made the decision.
+1 on the lessons learned, now I just need to loosen up and accept a tad more risk in my life.
I had a bunch of BTC back in 2010 or so. I always used it, my rationale being "I want a future in which we use cryptocurrency, and using it is the way to help bring that future about".
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough, and in retrospect I should have bought $100 of it to hold, but I don't regret not just HODLing back then. The times were different.
Years ago I paid 22,000 Italian Lire for a cheap meal. This is the same thing with the numbers the other way up.
More broadly, this is now a world in which everyone is short sanity and long craziness, until the "correction" arrives. Meanwhile I need to figure out how to cash out the "litecoin" I was given for free by Keybase.io .. what's the reliable exchange for this?
