Comment by yellowapple
5 days ago
> the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.
5 days ago
> the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.
Both are true. The world is complicated.
You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse.
Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton...
There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless"
or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world"
If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts.
These are all absurd things that happened.
You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.
> There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
True, but you can readily point to the things they were actually dumb about. Most people, I'd argue, had the simpler reason of "I'm willing to bet this will grow in value over the long term, given that it's finite and it has some advantages over normal money" - and those people ended up being very, very right.
Likewise, even in those "absurd" examples you bring up, there would have been entirely rational reasons to believe them, like
- "Fossil fuels are unsustainable so the automotive market will start to shift toward electric cars; I should invest in electric car companies, even early-stage ones", or
- "I think Unix is the operating system of the future, and Apple taking Unix mainstream by rebranding NeXT will give Microsoft a run for their money", or
- "These CRTs are obsolete, but so are vinyl records and some crazy audiophiles still pay big bucks for those decades later, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to toss these out"
Even without the benefit of hindsight, those seemingly-crazy bets could have been - and probably were - predicted via entirely rational and intelligent thought processes. Those rational people likely didn't put all their eggs in any one of those baskets, but they didn't do so for Bitcoin, either, and still ended up rich.
No it's not. There's dozens of companies where this didn't work out at all. Plenty that were terrible bets.
Crypto currency wasn't a new thing. There has been digital currencies going back decades. They had all failed and become worthless.
Looking at the these ones that became valuable and chin stroking with a monocle is silly.
You can rationalize anything but that's really just imagined story telling.
It's all fundamentally irrational. Wise people don't get on top, it's blustering audacious gamblers and those of fortuitous delusion.
You combine that together and you could everybody from SBF, to WeWork, to Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.
This is far more predictive of future events than writing stories after the fact and convincing yourself that everything is sensible
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A surprising (?) number of medium-term Bitcoin HODL'ers held because they lost access to their holding during an exchange collapse (Mt Gox etc) and then regained access because of government action. The irony is poetic.