Comment by yellowapple
5 days ago
> 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
> Crypto currency wasn't a new thing. There has been digital currencies going back decades. They had all failed and become worthless.
That didn't make them unreasonable bets. Lots of smart ideas fail to gain traction in spite of being smart ideas, for a variety of reasons. The electric car market (for example) had its share of false starts, too, in the late 19th Century and throughout the entirety of the 20th Century - and yet the people betting on EVs weren't irrational in doing so before the 21st Century, and still weren't irrational to do so afterward. It ain't like the problems with fossil fuels were completely unknown before 2000, after all.
There's been electric car companies and projects since the 1800s - literally hundreds of companies. They all failed at a rate of 100% for over a century.
If you're saying you saw Tesla as a success way before they put out there first car because of some rational eventuality, I don't believe you.