Just wondering how those of you who have known about Ethereum for a while but didn't buy it feel about missing out on >3000% returns this year. I didn't buy any and dislike knowing I could've been rich.
I used to go to these Wednesday night Bitcoin meetups at "Bitcoin Decentral" in Toronto.
Half the people who attended these were idiots looking to make easy money for no work. A quarter were guys who had gotten into bitcoins when they were cheap and had decided that they were geniuses, and not simply fortunate. The first half loved listening to these guys.
The last quarter were actually interesting people, into crypto and crypto-currencies, doing cool stuff. And some of them were into this thing called ethereum. Sometimes there were talks with that Vitalik guy.
And I did not buy even a single coin.
It was a bad investment. It was some random guy at that weird house on Spadina Ave who said he was making a better Bitcoin. Sane people do not give money to schemes like that. Those crazy idiots who wanted to get rich for no effort, let them throw their money at this ethereum thing, just like they'll throw money at every pyramid scheme and the Toronto housing market.
Wow. I could have written this and every word would still hold.
I think the one thing that was clear to me is that this Vitalik guy was some kind of genius. But, still I didn't buy/mine.
I wish my coding skills had been better at the time and that I had looked into the code (and not just the whitepaper which is kinda like a fairytale to me) and realized its value.
Were you at the creepy house on Spadina too? If so, we may have met. I only went a handful of times, but if you really scouted them out the good people there were fascinating. I wish I'd kept in touch.
I went to an Ethereum Hackathon and wasn't convinced at the time, that is why I passed. Hopefully/probably their technology has matured since then, but I stopped following their progress.
It's really easy to look back and say, "I could have been rich!" But when I catch myself doing that, I try to look at the basket of equivalent choices at the time. I'm sure there were a zillion random guys in weird houses proposing schemes they thought were brilliant.
It's the same thing with startups. There are a million people who think they'll be the next Jobs, the next Zuckerberg. Approximately one of them is right. The people who come up with that guy will, exactly as you say, decide that they're geniuses, not just lucky.
It's no different than missing out on AAPL or AMZN. You can't see the future and it makes no sense to judge yourself against an expectation of seeing the future. (Cryptocurrency price movements aren't based on fundamentals, so no amount of research can accurately predict them.)
Also, Bitcoin had a roughly three-year lull; it's entirely possible that another such lull could happen after you buy.
Do you believe they should not be rewarded for their work?
Vitalik had 500 000 ETH, and sold 25% at $5. The whole foundation had 12M ether which they used to support close to fifty developers worldwide. This is what crowdfunded innovation looks like.
I don't believe in prescriptivism, the world is chaotic and reward is a fiction. My point is simply that in the context of crypto markets, there most definitely is a house, and they are doing as expected.
I knew about Bitcoin back when Bitcoin faucets were a thing, and I don't really feel bad for not having bought like a hundred bitcoins then.
I still do regret the $50 I paid to crowdfund App.net, the Twitter competitor that was run by person with strong business sense, launched at a time when it was clear Twitter had no business plan and was killing its existing customer base and would be dead soon, and widely praised on HN. That was a much surer bet than this weirdo questionably-legal currency that only a bunch of nerds with heterodox view on finance were interested in.
Got over it. Only heard about it when the DAO got hacked, then when it spiked to 40, 60 and decided to get back into crypto when it hit 90, took a while for money to go through and got in at 200.
It's impossibly unlikely to capture all the gains, but you still can win. Even if it's not 30x+. I'm okay with anything that beats regular investment vehicles over time. Win some instead of griping about all that you could have won.
If it makes you feel any better, I know a guy who didn't buy any BTC back a few years ago, but now is in the newspapers as a millionaire, pretending that he did.
I had that feeling although I am don't go into hypes or basically gambling, but I do like some of the fundamental ideas behind the tech and the tech itself (and I see it coming up more and more in my field in talks) so I read a few books and bought 1 BTC in february (knowing very well it could easily be lost money). I have that 1 BTC back in my bank in Euros and I have now a lot more BTC after months of a bit of trading (mostly altcoins) on bittrex. It is free coin as long as it lasts and you can play with profits. The thing is just; don't play with money you will need and take out your initial investment when you can so you run 0 risk after that (yes time, but it's fun and I made a bot early on copying how I traded and so far it out trades me and it can work 24/7). Now that just simply doesn't happen a lot with actual gambling in casino's. I probably will end up with what I put in, but it was a fun experiment.
I also definitely think this tech will mature and interesting things will come of it. That is already happening, but, for most people, it is very hard to see the good from the bad when 'investing'. I did do a few ICO's because I wanted to try (again, with profit so no risk) that I found interesting and I'll just see if that was easier or harder coin than trading.
Oh yes. 6 months ago I was planning on buying 10 or so, but my credit card was acting up and I gave up because it was just too painful.
Kind of regret that decision now :P
But in the end I still don't trust all these tokens. None of them have so far been able to make me understand what they hell they're supposed to do (in terms of benefit to me, other than shitloads of money).
If it makes you feel any better you could be missing out on being a millionaire in a few years right now. There are tons of altcoins being sold at early Bitcoin and Ether prices. If one of them blows up in a few years you will feel like you missed out yet again since you have a opportunity to buy super cheap right now.
Not suggesting its wise to do so, but it keeps things in perspective.
You miss out on countless opportunities every second.
Back then I evaluated Ethereum and decided against it. That is all there is to it. I don't know how justified the current hype is.
How rich would you have been - 3000%, so 30 times - would you have invested 100000$ in Ethereum, yielding 3 Million $? Or more likely just 1000$, yielding 30000 - nice money, but not really rich?
