1 - The historical returns would obviously have been ludicrously high. I assume advice will be worse going forward. There has not been all that much investing advice on lesswrong and some of it was to buy crypto relatively early. If some of your investments 200-2000x you don’t need to be right about much else. And it is not like all the other advice would have gone terribly. Tech stocks are doing great. Some of the advice was also boring stuff like ‘buy index funds’. Do you think there are hundreds of examples of investment ideas on lesswrong that went to near zero? Which examples are you thinking of? Why do you think the normal investment ideas even underperformed the S&P500 (or whatever your favorite index is).
2 - It does not seem like a ‘really hard problem’ to me. I don’t think I am especially talented. I know many rationalists who are doing much better than I am. The reason you are hearing from me is that I am the one willing to break the norm against posting such threads. Now is an unusually easy time to make money but rationalists are also making good money on things like prediction markets. If someone is a smart rationalist it seems to me they can pretty reliably find a way to ‘beat the market’.
It’s worth noting that I talk to many people who are actually professionals. They agree the trades I discuss are good. I agree it is a hard problem for most people. But the idea that good rationalists cannot make money trading part-time seems based purely on theory. Experience, over quite some time in many cases, begs to differ.
I also disagree with the framing. In many cases the community agreed the advice was good but just failed to act!
How many LWers bought Bitcoin in 2011 and ended up with poor returns due to the demise of Mt. Gox?
I almost ended up losing a little of my money that way, but was stopped when my KYC evidence was rejected for no clear reason. I ended up doing well by buying Ripples a couple of years later, but I don’t know whether I would have done that if I had lost money in my first attempt.
More broadly, someone aggregated reported BTC theft from 2011-2020. The spreadsheet linked from the article includes a graph where you can see that about 1-5% of BTC was stolen each year from 2011-2014. Since 2015, BTC theft has been lower, around 0.02-0.7% annually. For comparison, 3% of the US money supply is about $150 billion.
I’d be curious to know how that compares to other forms of theft. Unfortunately, statistics seem to include crypto theft in larger theft statistics, so it’s hard to evaluate whether crypto or dollars is safer from theft. I have to imagine that dollars are generally safer (FDIC something something?).
1 - The historical returns would obviously have been ludicrously high. I assume advice will be worse going forward. There has not been all that much investing advice on lesswrong and some of it was to buy crypto relatively early. If some of your investments 200-2000x you don’t need to be right about much else. And it is not like all the other advice would have gone terribly. Tech stocks are doing great. Some of the advice was also boring stuff like ‘buy index funds’. Do you think there are hundreds of examples of investment ideas on lesswrong that went to near zero? Which examples are you thinking of? Why do you think the normal investment ideas even underperformed the S&P500 (or whatever your favorite index is).
2 - It does not seem like a ‘really hard problem’ to me. I don’t think I am especially talented. I know many rationalists who are doing much better than I am. The reason you are hearing from me is that I am the one willing to break the norm against posting such threads. Now is an unusually easy time to make money but rationalists are also making good money on things like prediction markets. If someone is a smart rationalist it seems to me they can pretty reliably find a way to ‘beat the market’.
It’s worth noting that I talk to many people who are actually professionals. They agree the trades I discuss are good. I agree it is a hard problem for most people. But the idea that good rationalists cannot make money trading part-time seems based purely on theory. Experience, over quite some time in many cases, begs to differ.
I also disagree with the framing. In many cases the community agreed the advice was good but just failed to act!
How many LWers bought Bitcoin in 2011 and ended up with poor returns due to the demise of Mt. Gox?
I almost ended up losing a little of my money that way, but was stopped when my KYC evidence was rejected for no clear reason. I ended up doing well by buying Ripples a couple of years later, but I don’t know whether I would have done that if I had lost money in my first attempt.
I have 2-3 friends I know about who lost $5k+ on Mt. Gox going down, and didn’t hold crypto anywhere else.
More broadly, someone aggregated reported BTC theft from 2011-2020. The spreadsheet linked from the article includes a graph where you can see that about 1-5% of BTC was stolen each year from 2011-2014. Since 2015, BTC theft has been lower, around 0.02-0.7% annually. For comparison, 3% of the US money supply is about $150 billion.
I’d be curious to know how that compares to other forms of theft. Unfortunately, statistics seem to include crypto theft in larger theft statistics, so it’s hard to evaluate whether crypto or dollars is safer from theft. I have to imagine that dollars are generally safer (FDIC something something?).