I’m one of the 3% who made over $100K (I made ~$500K).
I have to agree with other commenters that it was genuinely difficult to buy the cryptocurrency in the first place. It took me about 5 solid hours to learn how it worked, and then several days to funnel the currency through the various necessary conversions, any of which might’ve unexpectedly eaten my hard-earned cash for some incomprehensible reason.
In hindsight it’s easy to see this as “5 hours’ work for $100,000/hour, plus some waiting”, but at the time there was no such guarantee of success. The only reason I persisted was because I was interested in the cryptography aspect and wanted to be a part of an up-and-coming technology.
The only reason I persisted was because I was interested in the cryptography aspect and wanted to be a part of an up-and-coming technology.
And that is a reward I guess a very high fraction of the people actually ‘investing’ in Bitcoin had. Those hackers, nerds, tech enthusists didn’t need high fractions of likelihood times payoff.
And maybe the true lesson to draw from this is not to look at an abstract payoff but at the social dynamic: Are there enough people attracted to something.
I’m one of the 3% who made over $100K (I made ~$500K).
I have to agree with other commenters that it was genuinely difficult to buy the cryptocurrency in the first place. It took me about 5 solid hours to learn how it worked, and then several days to funnel the currency through the various necessary conversions, any of which might’ve unexpectedly eaten my hard-earned cash for some incomprehensible reason.
In hindsight it’s easy to see this as “5 hours’ work for $100,000/hour, plus some waiting”, but at the time there was no such guarantee of success. The only reason I persisted was because I was interested in the cryptography aspect and wanted to be a part of an up-and-coming technology.
And that is a reward I guess a very high fraction of the people actually ‘investing’ in Bitcoin had. Those hackers, nerds, tech enthusists didn’t need high fractions of likelihood times payoff.
And maybe the true lesson to draw from this is not to look at an abstract payoff but at the social dynamic: Are there enough people attracted to something.