A hindsight solution for rationalists to have reduced the setup costs of buying bitcoin would have been either to have had a Rationalist mining pool or arrange to have a few people buy in bulk and serve as points of distribution within the community.
This suggests that if a future opportunity appears to be worth the risk of investment, but has some barrier to entry that is individually costly but collectively trivial, we ought to work first to eliminate that barrier to entry, and then allow the community to evaluate more dispassionately on risk and return alone.
I like this much much better than the other proposed proposed solution, of effectively pressuring people to buy. Removing inconveniences (trivial and otherwise) would probably have been the most helpful thing someone could do. (I can’t honestly remember if I was in the LW community yet when I started in Bitcoin, as they were both so long ago, but I was definitely not part of an IRL rationalist community, and it didn’t occur to me that rationalists would be interested in Bitcoin at the time.)
A hindsight solution for rationalists to have reduced the setup costs of buying bitcoin would have been either to have had a Rationalist mining pool or arrange to have a few people buy in bulk and serve as points of distribution within the community.
This suggests that if a future opportunity appears to be worth the risk of investment, but has some barrier to entry that is individually costly but collectively trivial, we ought to work first to eliminate that barrier to entry, and then allow the community to evaluate more dispassionately on risk and return alone.
I like this much much better than the other proposed proposed solution, of effectively pressuring people to buy. Removing inconveniences (trivial and otherwise) would probably have been the most helpful thing someone could do. (I can’t honestly remember if I was in the LW community yet when I started in Bitcoin, as they were both so long ago, but I was definitely not part of an IRL rationalist community, and it didn’t occur to me that rationalists would be interested in Bitcoin at the time.)
That’s a smart idea!