This. If in 2012 you bought a pizza with 1 BTC and now feel silly, don’t. You also bought pizzas for $20 which you could instead have converted to BTC and held until now had you only had a working crystal ball.
This is kind of the emotional mechanism behind a lot of crypto investment. It's not intentional, and it's kind of sneaky, but with the strong fluctuations and chance of "hitting it big" there's always the "what if..." feeling. As someone who doesn't care much for crypto (in its current form anyway) and was never involved in it at all, even I have this to some degree as I was aware of it very early on (when it was still interesting, instead of what it's become now).
This is probably a big reason why there are so many "amateur" investors compared to more traditional investments/trading.
This is probably a big reason for why many cryptocurrencies have a high value as well. Nobody actually uses these things to trade for goods and services (well, maybe for drugs), everyone just expects the USD price to maintain or go up and values it based off of what they think they can get in USD in 5, 10 or maybe even 100 years.
As the comment you're replying to points out, that same opportunity cost applies to literally any non-essential ~$20 purchase they made with any currency in that time period.
Similar to the Monty Hall problem [1], the mistake you're making is calculating the opportunity cost at the time of sale, rather than within the context of perspective. Opportunity cost is dynamic, not static.
If I approached you in 2012 with two envelopes, one with $20 worth of US bank notes, one with $20 worth of Bitcoin, you'd most likely take the cash. If I approach you again in 2021 with the same envelopes (unopened) from 2012, only a fool would take the cash.
Speculative assets would not exist if your theory held water.
The critical difference between spending BTC on a pizza and the Monty Hall problem is that you only receive additional information once you no longer have any option to change your mind.
If Monty Hall asked you if you wanted to change doors before opening one the problem would not be much of a problem.
Except the OP was (almost certainly) in possession of $20 USD in 2012. The opportunity cost of buying that Pizza with Bitcoin rather fiat totals ~$34k at the time of comment.
That is some dumb shit and not only should you feel silly you should feel stupid for saying it.
If you buy anything at $X with intention of "hodling" it to increase it's value, unless you have a plan (i.e. I will sell at $Y) then you are just holding on to nothing. You will either sell too early or too late (now talking about the absolute maximum gains) and then you will always "feel silly".
Unless OP actually put in, say $300k (a price of a small house) and that was stolen he didn't lose "a house worth of money" since he had no exit plan. I don't play crypto, but I could still say that I lost $600 when the market crashed couple weeks back conveniently forgetting that my initial investment was only $10 back in the day. I could even be more dramatic and say that I lost half of my bitcoins just in the crash and not mention that I only had $1.2k.
> If you buy anything at $X with intention of "hodling" it to increase it's value, unless you have a plan (i.e. I will sell at $Y) then you are just holding on to nothing.
I don't think that's holding on to nothing just because there's no exit plan in place.
If I invest 30k in index funds that are managed by my bank, with the expectation that the value will rise and thus beat inflation, i wouldn't say that I'm holding on to nothing.
Similarly, if the value would rise to 35k over time, but something (like an economical crash, or any reason) would have me withdraw my money before that, I think it would be fair to say that my actions made me miss out on the total value of 35k.
I don't see how the case of Bitcoin is that much different - most people won't have sold at its highest point, but the average value has indeed increased bunches compared to when it was not popular.
I don't think you always need an exit strategy for every investment you make - wanting to diversify and perhaps beat the inflation seem like valid goals, regardless of whether you're putting money in index funds, are buying BTC, or are burying pots of gold in your back yard.
Volatility and risks are probably another story, though.
Reasoning that way can only conclude that the opportunity cost is always the investments that an oracle would make.
I.e. you would have to not only account for losing $34k but also lose nearer a few hundred thousand because you could have sold at each peak and bought at each trough.
