Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway-571 1965 days ago
Is there a spoiler tag on HN ? These ones still hurt:

There is a lot of thing one could have done "for the LULz" but decided to browse HN, Imgur or Reddit instead.

- Bitcoin. I heard about it when it was still possible to mint it on CPU, but chose to run SETI@Home instead.

- Bitcoin when it was at merely $9000.

- Ethereum when it was going under $1.

- Dogecoin like anytime before yesterday (up 6x or something today).

- #GME when options where pennies on the dollar, or even the stock at $20 in early January.

- $Tesla in January, February, March of 2020 or anytime before the split.

- $Tesla instead of putting down $1000 to reserve a slot to buy a model 3 at its announcement, put it in the stock, or even better, in long dated calls.

- $Amazon or $Apple last march or anytime before that.

- $SPCE after it crashed in March (a WSB hyped stock)

6 comments

The key to managing this FOMO for me is really committing emotionally to the concept of hindsight bias.

We remember the winners we missed way more than the losers, because the winners are still present in our lives today, whereas the losers never became noteworthy (because they lost).

But it’s extremely difficult to tell them apart ahead of time. So current me needs to give past me a pass... past me failed at something that is very difficult; no shame in that. Wistful regret, maybe, in a “what if...” kind of way, but I think everyone has those in their life, and not just about money.

A mental exercise I do to manage FOMO is to try and remember duds that I pondered might be the next BTC. Admittedly, it's hard because the brain really tries to forget about those. Keeping a diary is probably the key here.
And then you get the ones like Dogecoin that were supposed to be a dud, and it's still around more than 5 years later and just had a massive spike today until RH decided to restrict the use of instant deposits to buy it.

Can't have the poors making money!

I have this unsupported idea that after I get a win I won't be as hard on myself for past errors. Like the 3 BTC I had to sell when it was at $3k.
Dogecoin is ... Just _why_?

There's no limit on the number of coins. Mining is designed to be forever-easy. The coin is _designed_ for rapid deflation.

Why are people treating it as anything other than the joke it was intended to be?

> There's no limit on the number of coins. Mining is designed to be forever-easy. The coin is _designed_ for rapid deflation.

Yes, but the increase in coins is constant. So as a percentage of available supply, the inflation rate approaches 0%.

Right now, there are 128,000,000,000 DOGE in circulation. The block target for Doge is 1 minute, with a reward of 10,000 DOGE, which gives a yearly minting of 5,256,000,000 doge, which gives and inflation rate of 4.11%. Next year, another 5.256T gets added, which is an inflation of 3.94%.

And of course, since it's a cryptocurrency, there are bound to be permanent losses in the supply because of people losing their wallet files. This is difficult to track because even with a public ledger, there's no way to be sure if unspent DOGE is simply not being spent, or if the private key to spend it was lost.

You can still make money of a joke if you are quick enough! Just @-mention Elon and here you go.
I really have no idea, but your question suggests its own answer: fiat currencies are also designed for eternal inflation (I think you swapped inflation with deflation) and many people consider that a boon.
The problem is the word inflation vs deflation.

When too much fiat is printed, it decreases its value and is called inflation.

But when assets lose value, it is called deflation.

So, do you call cryptocurrency a fiat currency or a speculative asset? Because falling value will happen, it will be just termed inflation or deflation.

Live long enough and there'll be plenty more. I'll have more regret over that girl I never spoke to.
Yeah, but (don't) think about where your life would be today if you had done those thing earlier. It's like you knew the winning numbers to the Powerball and just didn't tick the numbers at the shop. It just sometimes when life gets you down these thoughts just poke at you.

Same thing with the girl one never talked to.

At least Doge has a small transaction fee. 2¢ For Doge vs like $7 for Bitcoin. Might actually be useful as a currency like Satoshi intended in his paper (lower transaction cost than credit cards). But of course those low fees are because it’s not popular.
You can rest easy knowing that most of these things provide practically no utility to anyone (or even negative utility), and they are simply speculative bubbles.
I feel $SPCE still has a lot of potential upside.