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Comment by tebbers | Hacker News Reader

In London they are advertising bitcoin on the side of buses and in the Underground with the slogan 'when you see bitcoin on the side of a bus, it's time to buy'.

I thought that was outrageous and actually was a sign to sell. I mentioned this to a foreign exchange trader friend and we even finished each other's sentence with the above!

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There is a relevant quote apparently from the 1920s.

"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."

https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...

But these days we do expect every cook and taxi driver to be in the market, because dollars in a savings account are getting returns below inflation.

That's the real tragedy of this uncontrolled fiat money printing. Any way you cut it, the poorer one is, the lower the % of assets to cash one owns (all the way to 0). Small bouts of token helicopter money don't fix this. Bitcoin doesn't fix this.

Agents are forced to play to avoid getting robbed by inflation thus wealth is transfered to owners from no-owners.

Luckly for the working class, nowadays everybody can invest with a cheap smartphone and their little capital thus there is nobody to rob from and the system collapses.

The original "shoeshine boy" story featured Joe Kennedy (as the speculator), father of JFK.

It's a sad possibility that people are actively getting newcomers to join the game at the worst of times.

I bought some millibitcoins in 2018, at almost the worst time

Last week it has become my best investment so far

Although now I wonder if I should sell them

Yes long term it's no biggie, the thing is, as a newcomer, good luck sitting on big losses when you never experienced that before.

Or the best!

Totally depends on the psychology. To some speculator buying at 40k will be the best move of your life.

With lockdowns I've been wondering when this tipping point was going to hit, it's been really hard to judge the 'taxi driver' phenomenon not going out often or being able to overhear conversations.

Makes it a lot harder to time any bubbles, which I honestly think may be contributing a bit to how high this one got.

I've seen that, it's so scammy. I feed bad for people who'll fall for it.

What can we do to improve financial literacy so that nobody ever takes investing advice from a bus ad?

Increased financial literacy is precisely why people are drawn to Bitcoin. If Bitcoin didn't exist, there'd simply be a mad rush on stocks and gold (well, there has been one).

The media has spent years teaching people about what happens in countries with high inflation, and people are now rightfully scared it's coming to their countries too.

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