Comment by FpUser
9 days ago
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row."
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
In the beginning you didn't really buy BTC. You could mine a few off of your nvidia card in less than a week.
I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things with it.
Regret on a different level.
We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days.
I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home.
This was 2009, months after the official launch.
We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.
It could be worse: you could have bought bitcoin when it started and then have sold it for a profit of $40. ;)
There was a website back when I was in college where you'd click through some presentation or tutorial or something about bitcoin and at the end they'd just give you 0.5 bitcoin for free.
I could have retired making early iPhone apps but I was already so burned out on how shitty mobile carriers were behaving that I just sat it out.
Hey at least you didn't aggressively "day trade" it all away with your idiot friends who moved in and tried to start a "fund". Good times.
I have decided that the “start investing early for compound interest” advice is actually a very clever white lie told to young adults everywhere.
The point of starting early is not compound interest. It’s to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you can put in, and if you don’t understand Let it Ride and rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of hundreds of dollars, you’re gonna have a bad time.
The only compound interest that really matters is what you get when you have a substantial stake that you also haven’t blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is technically true but also technically beside the point.
> The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
"Forty quid for a string of hex digits? Nah, I don't think so..."
- me, some time in 2010.
- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.