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Comment by joeblau | Hacker News Reader

What a wild ride. I bought Ethereum almost two years ago at 12 dollars a token on Coinbase and it's changed the financial trajectory of my family. I still have high hopes for cryptocurrencies, but I think this pullback is necessary to clear out the speculators and let the developers work on the core infrastructure of a lot of these tokens.

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Did you turn it into real money or are you still speculating (now with the future of your family at stake)?

I turned it into "real"(fiat) money. I expect to be sitting on the sidelines for another 2ish years. We bought a Model X and took the remainder and invested it into a pretty strong (IMO) YC startup.

#ThisIsNotInvestingAdvice

> and took the remainder and invested it into a pretty strong (IMO) YC startup

Congratulations on becoming an accredited investor.

Investing in a single company (even YC) is just about as risky as investing in crypto.

Disclaimer: I own a portion of about 100 YC companies. And some crypto.

It depends on what stage, but yeah it's risky.

Investing that large of a percentage of one's portfolio in any single company is extremely risky; even if it is a large, publicly traded giant like Microsoft or Amazon. In order for the investment to be successful, not only does the company have to do well, but their sector has to do well, their country's economy has to do well, and stocks as an asset class have to do well.

If you don't have hedges to insure against those risks, you are still essentially gambling with your principal. Even a Series A/B Ycombinator company probably has a double-digit percentage failure rate.

Well the company is not A/B and it's not a large percentage of my portfolio. All I said is that it's the remainder of the money from cashing out of crypto, you're making a bunch of assumptions beyond that.

Also I agree with everything you said.

Sorry - when you said it altered your financial trajectory I assumed that to mean it represented a majority of your net assets. I'm in the process of diversifying a very concentrated portfolio (a year ago >95% of my net worth was in Uber stock) and may have projected my own concerns onto your situation.

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