The most downvoted comment in the Github issue seems totally right.. why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto? Even without making any mistake this seems like a dumb move.
Nitpicking slightly, but "OP" is whoever started the thread in the forum where it is being discussed, not whomever wrote the original article. Only saying this because it keeps getting misused here on HN.
A non-diversified portfolio is the predominant risk factor here. This guy lost his life savings in crypto, while other people poured everything into Worldcom, their dream home in Miami, etc. Crypto might be riskier than those classes of asset, and its evangelists might be at fault for encouraging first-time investors to make potentially ruinous bets -- but the story of people becoming overly invested, emotionally and financially, in the new hot thing is much older than ethereum.
It was also in poor taste to scold him on the GH issue. It can wait, poor guy is just asking for help.
Bug trackers are no place to even post the sort of message that OP posted to begin with. Once you permit that, then all bets are off on trying to keep out stuff that's "off topic".
Dealing with people is sometimes annoying. Give anyone anything with a text box attached to a carrier than can convey a message, and it will devolve into people treating it like email or a general purpose message board(). Such is life in the GitHubiverse.
(even ostensibly smart people who should be capable of dealing with semantic nuance, like people who write code)
If watching someone lose $50k USD equivalent doesn't prevent someone else from doing this sort of thing, a random internet meanie will definitely not dissuade them.
Random internet meanie aside, if this happened to a friend or a family member, I would absolutely try to explain to them that they were an idiot for putting their life savings into crypto in the first place.
Ever thought about that its simply not true?
He wants help to get a significant amount of money back.
People do everything in such a situation including making up a story that gets the maximum attention.
Maybe it really was all his savings but lets assume it was only halve of it the story would almost certainly read exactly the same.
> why did this guy put his life savings in a crypto
Good point, (which was my first reaction.)
But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings.
Perhaps dawidkabani13 just happened to buy some tokens at the right time? A lot of people don't save.
Otherwise, this is a good example of why dumping all of your life savings into cryptocurrency is irresponsible.
Part of managing an investment portfolio is making sure it remains suitably balanced.
If you bought $100 of crypto back in 2008, then when the price swung rapidly and it became a substantial proportion of your net worth, you probably should have thought "I only invested a token amount as a joke. Has anything changed since then? If not, I should sell all except the token amount I actually intend to own".
> But consider this: If, when you were young, you bought a few $1000 of Microsoft stock, Apple stock, Google stock, ect, when they went public, that investment could have grown to be the majority of your life savings.
And if you did it in lots of other promising stocks at the same time, it would have been a major error.
If you have reliable information from the future, sure, it makes sense to dump your life's savings into one basket that is going to pay off. Or if you are young and your “life’s savings” is a trivial fraction of even your annual surplus income, it might make some sense to take an all-in risk speculatively. But, generally, it's a bad idea.
I suppose that would be an example of "easy come, easy go" similar to if someone rode a stock way up and then it crashed. It does make sense to lock in profits at some point but, of course, you may not maximize your profits that way. Certainly there are stocks I've made modest gains of that would have been big wins had I held.
Let's put aside the comparison of cryptos and stocks for now.
It is absolutely valid to do risky investments. Just as others have written you don't do them with your live savings. I really thought people would know that by now.
"You didn't learn. In what universe do you think a small mistake like that could crush your entire life? Not to mention all the hacks and scams threats. I am not sorry anymore for you, you seem irresponsible."
I agree with you, I hope OP doesn't have a wife and children. He's totally careless and men cannot afford to be careless.
Obviously putting some % of your savings into it can be rational, but putting 100% of your savings in a volatile security just isn't wise.
>That's a dumb move indeed, unless you win of course.
No, betting everything you own on red when playing roulette is still a dumb move even if you win. Sometimes you can still be lucky while being dumb, but that's it. Similarly, it's dumb to wrestle a grizzly bear on a bet, even if you come out alive and win the bet.
It sounds dumb to you (and to me for that matter), but plenty of people have made a lot money like that (and plenty who have lost it). Regardless, neither me, you, or the down voted commenter are in a position to tell him he's dumb for doing it. Maybe there is good reason, maybe there isn't, it's not up to us to tell him he's right or wrong in this scenario.
I'm not validating a bad decision. I'm saying that we don't know anything about why he made that decision, and until we do, we have no right to judge him for it.
It being a dumb decision is a reasonable null hypothesis. Sure maybe someone held a gun to his head and forced him to put his life savings into ethereum, but there's no reason to believe that to be the case.