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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I was going to buy a bitcoin at 6K but thought it risky. Now I feel dumb.

I put 2k in at one point and was up to 40k in a month trading alt coins. Then btc started to tumble. I realized it caused a massive amount of subconcious anxiety. I ended up walking away with a very generous ROI. My buddy told me to get in again at 10k. Id could have paid off my house last week if I did.

But thats how investing goes. If you could nail every investment you'd quickly become the wealthiest individual in the world.

You were right. It was risky. It's even more risky now. Hindsight is a terrible way to value assets.

> It's even more risky now

How so? The bigger it gets and the longer it lasts, the more it's derisked. It was more risky 10 years ago (i.e., odds of going to 0, finding a critical problem, lack of adoption, would've been easier for governments to ban it).

For approximately the same reason it's more dangerous to climb on the roof of a hundred-story building than a one-story building: there's much farther to fall.

I also think its price has become thoroughly decoupled from actual use value. Back in the day one could plausibly (if optimistically) argue that it was going to become the new cash, the new credit/debit transaction. But it has obviously failed at being the digital cash it set out to be. (With the exception of the untraceable envelope/briefcase of cash popular with criminals of various sorts.) There's also now a much richer market manipulation apparatus. That increases risk directly, but also indirectly via increased regulatory interest. Tether, for example, is under heavy investigation.

I bought $100 worth in 2014 when it was $580. Now I wish I'd bought $1000. But of course I never would have, because it was a crazy risk at the time, and still is today.

Betting 1000$ is not a crazy risk.

Depends how much spare money you have.

If you don't live in the 3rd world, there is in any case a high likelihood that you can earn it back. It is on the scale of a months salary, not years.

Have you ever heard of the term "disposable income"? There's a reason it's a separate concept from non-disposable income.

It is if it means you may not be able to feed your family for the month.

Tell that to those who don't have $1000.

It's nevertheless a sum you can make back, eventually.

I think it was around 2014/2015 but didn't remember exactly when. I was in a programming bootcamp there was someone in my cohort on a temporary visa to the US. He managed to stay in a decently expensive area near our bootcamp, paid the bootcamp fee, and other cost of living. We asked him how, he said he was selling bitcoin to fund it. He sold it at $500 each.

If I calculated correctly he probably sold more than 20 bitcoin lol. He could retire now if he kept it.

Imagine how he feels right now, lol. But as long as he made profit, that's all that matters. Hindsight always 20/20

You are in good company:

"I made my money by selling too soon." ...Bernard Baruch

I probably could have bought BTC at either $25 or $250 because I had a colleague who was really into it, but I shrugged because nobody can predict the future and it seemed dodgy as fuck. Eh, hindsight. In hindsight I should've bought google, apple, tesla etc as well.

I sold my bitcoin at 6k when I lost my job. IDK how I feel.

Feel good that you were able to extract 6K or so of value from it. If you held it until it busted, you would feed dumb.

When did it bust?

It last hit 5k in March. It hit 5k three years before. Wait a bit, it will drop before raising again.

Or it'll be end of the line for BTC as the institutions crack down on it.

A Twitter thread the other day (probably linked to from HN) showed a strong correlation between the BTC price and Tether's money printer going brrrt, warning that once they get sued (and they will), they'll go down and take the artificial price increase of BTC and all other crypto along with it.

I was trying to buy at 3K from a bitcoin machine last winter. There are several machines in Helsinki from different companies. They did not work. I decided this not a "free open market". These "banks" are only buying cheap and selling only when they themselves make a profit.

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