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by bogomipz 3107 days ago
I'm not sure how "prescient" not accepting the first settlement offer is.

Also I'm not sure how "prescient" their seeing the potential of bitcoin was. They were literally sitting on a beach in Ibiza when a stranger approached them and told them about investing in bitcoin.

This same stranger fom the beach them puts them in the touch with the Bitinstant folks. When the brother meet Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhes from Bitinstant they observe how much those two believe in the potential of bitcoin. See:

https://qz.com/405950/ibiza-the-hamptons-downtown-manhattan-...

1 comments

Early bitcoiners met with a lot of people with the means to invest. Almost all of them passed. Committing to investing and sticking with it through the ups and downs takes good judgement, courage, and healthy dose of luck.

It's no different from startups. A lot of investors were pitched by AirBnB and almost all of them passed. Fred Wilson from USV even had PaulG badgering him with emails telling him to invest and he still passed.

Please reread my comment. I was refuting this insistence that these two people were "prescient" when they weren't. They didn't have their finger on the pulse of crypto currencies and their potential. It was their dumb luck that some stranger talked up bitcoin to them while they sitting on a beach in Spain.

All this talk about how "prescient" they are and how they have now been "vindicated" is all pretty ridiculous. This is revisionist history. The NYTimes piece reads like a press release.

There 's a fair amount of luck involved in investing. They've been lucky twice. You notice there is no mention in this fluff piece about the investments they have made that have gone south because.