Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

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You get in early enough, and you'll pretty much be always be up on your investment. I got in on Ethereum the day the announcement popped up on Hacker News that it was added to Coinbase, and the price per coin was $11 then. Even after it's massive 50% crash from it's peak, it's sitting at $200 a coin right now. That's still up almost 20x.

That being said, I didn't have a ton of money to invest at the time, so I'm not rich or anything, and I tend to be a long term holder, but I highly doubt it's ever going to get all the way back down to $11 a coin.

I could have bought Bitcoin when it was $4 a coin, as I was paying attention to it back then, although the infrastructure for it wasn't in place and it was really difficult to buy, so I gave up on it. If I had, I would have made 625x whatever I put into it by now. And Bitcoin is not likely to ever get back down to $4 a coin. There will be buyers for sure if it ever gets that cheap (or the landscape will have changed so obviously that I probably would have sold a long time ago).

>You get in early enough, and you'll pretty much be always be up on your investment

These sorts of statements explain a lot. You hear the same thing in every bull market, as investors conflate luck or the point in the cycle with investment acumen.

I'm not making any judgement on the usefulness or future of the blockchain et al, but this ico craze has a lot of similarities with the penny stock market, where many investors are simply relying on the greater fool to make them rich. Ultimately someone is always left holding the bag, and it is very often one without value.

The issuers and promoters always make out well. Many of the activities in the current ico market would be quite illegal if they were done in regulated markets.

Well I'm still buying a small amount of bitcoin every week, and ethereum every two weeks. I have an automatic purchase set up, and I've been doing that for over a year now. If the market does good or bad, it doesn't matter, I'm still investing the same amount. It just means I get a little more or less fractions of a coin that week.

I'm using the concept of dollar cost averaging and holding long term to help minimize the risk I'm taking, but I am certainly taking a risk. I did make a larger purchase early on with Ethereum but I'm still buying now.

My point is, if you bought two months ago when it was near its peak, and panic sold two weeks ago during the middle of the crypto downturn, you might be looking at things a bit too short term. I made a larger investment during a downturn two years ago and watched my investment go down to 25% of what I paid, and stay there for over a year, but now two years later it's up 300%.

You need to be patient and only invest what you can afford to lose, just like any other investment.

That being said, I don't disagree with you in regards to ICOs or the speculation on some altcoins feeling like the penny stock market. It absolutely does, and I mostly stay out of that (I have put small investments into some 'penny altcoins'). But I mostly stick to the big three (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin).

If a flaw is ever found in bitcoin that renders it useless, it'll drop to 0. Don't hold all your eggs in one basket!

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