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by zen_boy 3604 days ago
This is always a good reminder. Then again, had I not done that investment or cashed out earlier, that 20k€ would be nowhere near 1M€. There simply doesn't exist many ways to achieve 50x ROI in <5 years. Seems like majority of people are happy with lower yield plans, but I personally would have not achieved my goals without some aggressive increase in wealth.

Hard to say what I would be saying had I lost everything though. It's easy for me to rationalise the decision now that it paid off. And yes, we have to remember to look at the graveyard too.

The non-linear utility of money puts an interesting twist on things though. The effort and risk one should take to achieve additional wealth seems to reduce logarithmically after a certain point. I guess that point seems to be further for me than most people, but I feel it's close now.

2 comments

If someone won the lottery for $1m and proceeded to dump their entire proceeds back into lottery tickets, you'd rightly think that they were insane. Yet that's exactly what you're doing.

You don't have to liquidate your entire stake. Heck, you could keep a full 100k in Ethereum—if it has a run-up on the scale of Bitcoin, you'd be making millions. But you wouldn't have all your eggs in one basket.

I definitely understand the desire/impulse to make big bets, but as with any gambling operation it's important to consider when you cash out. Right now you're betting $1m on the potential to make $50m, when you could have a guaranteed $900k with the potential to make $5m.

You could probably say that about playing roulette if you happened to win your first spin. Doesn't mean it's a good bet, though.
Comparing an educated crypto investment with a negative EV gambling game seems a bit too farfetched. I'm quite considerate and picky investor, and did extensive research beforehand.

I do get what you are saying, but I think this is over-simplifying things. There were a lot of interesting facts and conclusions available to be made early on about the possibilities.

Again, extremely hard to say what the odds of failure still are and were in the past. And hard to say what my stance would be had I lost the initial investment. It's easy to rationalize the investment in hindsight.