[id]

There are also those of us who played with Bitcoin when it emerged, found it promising and mined it or bought some. Who took some profits along the way and never promoted it. Who still think it's a useful concept, _despite_ the hype that gets too much at times.

For what it's worth, you seem consumed by your envy. Accept that crypto investors, even the most stupid ones, took a risk you didn't take and were rewarded handsomely.

[noduerme]

When I launched a home built casino in 2011, I bought 5000 BTC to initially bank it. I didn't want to take BTC, I wanted to get licensure in Malta and take credit cards. But I didn't have any investment, or $500k to buy a license. I just had good software, so I launched it in BTC as a proof of concept and to try to earn enough to bootstrap the cost of licensing.

Long story short: That project is long gone. I viewed BTC as an interesting payment method that might have some inherent value as an efficient and anonymous means of transfer, which it's not anymore. I never trusted it and I didn't want to gamble on its fluctuations since the casino was denominated in USD and I was already exposing my savings to literal gambling risk (albeit playing as the house - still scary). So eventually I took to just getting rid of BTC daily, trading out the day's rake, and only buying it to do payouts. Closed the casino in 2013 and never saw any major profit, stakes being as low as they were.

I'm a middle aged working coder with a net worth short of $1m. I've thought a lot about what my life could have been like if I hadn't done ANYTHING except hold that initial 5000 BTC instead of getting out of it. And you know what? I'm not sorry about it. I did what seemed smartest to me at the time: I got rid of what I thought was a bad investment. And by then I knew plenty more about Bitcoin than most of the people who've bought into crypto since. Under the same set of conditions, where that was a meaningful chunk of my savings, I'd do the same again every time.

You're absolutely right that there is nothing healthy about being bitter or angry towards people who strike it rich - even, or perhaps especially, if they do so by pure luck.

Life is a casino. Envy gets you nowhere, and it's not a good look. Show a little class and you might get comped for the show.

[edited for readability]

[Layke1123]

When 9 people in a group of 10 see one person get lucky by owning more than 90% of the available assets around them and not seeing an iota of it going to them, you are about to get a lesson in how unlucky you can also be.

[noduerme]

But this is the nature of a casino. One out of ten people gets a big payout for the same basic actions. If you're among the other nine people like I am, you take it in stride. You don't jump and cannibalize the guy who won. Not least because your self-esteem shouldn't be contingent upon how much money you have compared to someone else. People who win big randomly can't really be proud of what they have. But if you know you earned and deserve what you have, you can have pride. True pride in yourself is more valuable than money. I see this every single day with the ultra-rich I work for. The ones who got it by luck have no self control or pride. They'll soon lose it. I really don't care if they have more goodies than me. But that's because I have pride in myself, and it's ugly and despicable to base your self worth on comparing what you have to other people's material wealth.

In fact, frequently I feel sorry for them because they seem so desperate to be friends with me - because my life experience had been "real" and presented me with real shit they never had to deal with. They lack more for true friends than you or I. And I can't covet what they have when I can see, plainly, that I wouldn't want to trade places with them. And that a lot of times they want to trade places with me.

We all die. Happiness and bliss is just as likely to find you in a park behind a dumpster as in a penthouse. All the rest of the angst about judging who deserves what is just a waste of the time you have on this earth to define yourself independently.

[Layke1123]

This isn't about losing 1% of your wealth gambling.

This is about wealth inequality. This is about watching as resources are entirely captured for a very small few. But history will continue to teach lessons about what happens when the rich get too big for their britches.

[noduerme]

Who said 1%? I know people who have just lost most of their life savings in this crypto crash. My view is that they gambled big, and some won and others lost. My point is that I'm not angry at the ones who won, nor particularly sympathetic to those who lost, because I'm happy with my decision to stay out of the game even though I at one point held a winning ticket.

[Layke1123]

You are by yourself and will never understand the solidarity that workers have in each other. That communities have in each other if this is how you view life.

[mjburgess]

Transfers of wealth from productive to unproductive industries arent risks worth rewarding, neither economically or with praise. It's slothful both as a personal vice, and as an economic activity.

[robocat]

> Transfers of wealth from productive to unproductive industries arent risks worth rewarding

Down that path lies authoritarianism: who decides what is productive?

Is art productive? Is your comment on HN productive? Is beer productive? Is Haskell productive? Are you productive? It isn’t hard to argue most everything is non-productive. Remove all non-productive uses of money or time, and what is left?

[erulabs]

It's not surprising to me whatsoever that within that same sentence that as you said, "leads to authoritarianism", is a reference to absolute morality and sin.

The scariest part of this line of thinking being so common is that it has happened! We've bench-marked humanity towards productivity before: dosed drinking water with amphetamines instead of fluoride and outlawed art and mandated labor at tank factories. Productivity!

Down that path lies authoritarianism, but more than that: down that path lies mass murder. What could be more productive than removing those who block productivity?

I appreciate your comment but I am always blown away by how kindly people respond to that idea of "unworthy activity", as if its not one of the cruelest ideas a person can possibly have. It's more common here because it's a community of engineers - we work with complex automations all the time - so it's only a natural mistake to see humanity as a complex automation too, and want to engineer it. But I still can't forgive the callousness.

[robocat]

Thanks: I hadn’t thought of it as say Puritan echos; but yes, telling others what they should and shouldn’t do with their time and resources definitely has religious (any kind) and political (both left and right) facets.

There is not an equivalent 1st amendment “right” to spend our time and money as we will. Too many people just spout an opinion on what we should be “allowed” to do: without thinking of how that could be used against them.

It drives me crazy how willing so many people are to decide what is best for others: the rich, the poor, the disabled, the foreign. And how little insight people have that their own choices are definitely pure waste in the eyes of others.

When did liberty get debased?

[erulabs]

I always try to imagine a really reasonable reason for why people believe things like that. One that I can imagine is that humans are extremely biased towards seeing inefficiency. We seem to have a much easier time spotting problems than recognizing the product of years of slow labor. It makes sense: if we were able to appreciate the slow accumulation of value, we'd just stare at any living creature all day, totally enthralled. Instead we see suffering, the parts of the world life hasn't conquered totally yet. As an evolved creature that perspective seems very reasonable.

It's why it's much easier to walk around a city and spot an empty balcony, high up in the sunset, than to appreciate the city itself.

"Someone should be enjoying that balcony! Why is the rich owner somewhere else, and there are thousands of us pedestrians wishing we could spend just a moment up there? Inefficiency!"

is a much more viral thought than being completely overwhelmed by the amount of human effort your eyes are looking at. If we could properly understand it we'd all just be weeping with gratitude and humility all the time, and that wouldn't be productive at all! Being biased towards negative emotion should be assumed to be the default. So liberty didn't have to be devalued - it just hasn't been properly valued yet! Much more optimistic :)

Sorry for long reply!

[robocat]

The irony of saying sorry (to yourself?): why are wasting time thinking instead of working??

One underlying cause for complaining about the waste of others is status seeking, of which virtue signalling is a part of.

People don’t have to be reasonable, but your effort is admirable.

I think engineers look at the world with different eyes, as you say. I find our infrastructure systems as profound - and also the beauty of how our interfaces with those systems hide deep complexity. The average person doesn’t see flushing a toilet as amazing technology, nor understand the vast number of lives saved by civil engineering (doctors are window dressing on society).

[zelphirkalt]

There is a difference though. People, who produce art or any other kind of entertainment of thought provoking things, mostly at least partially do it to add something to society, or to make us think. Putting money into energy intensive speculation, which does have no real world value behind it is not in the same league as those activities and is definitely not productive. Even counter-productive, as it is using up energy, which could be used for useful things. At the end as in any such speculative endavour, one person's gain is another person's loss, no matter how many abstraction layers and smoke screens are put up.

[mrzimmerman]

I think you may be confusing economics terms with moral and ethical distinctions. I’ll grant that the idea of productive and unproductive labor is an outdated economic concept.

Regardless, academically defining something as more or less productive than something else is not authoritarian. Nor is deciding personally if something is “good” or “bad”.

Now if someone in government decided to create and pass legislation based on their personal academic or philosophical beliefs, and not based on some factual usefulness of the legislation, than I think that would fall under the definition of authoritarian.

[robocat]

> I think you may be confusing economics terms with moral and ethical distinctions

mjburgess’ comment appears to be using virtuous, religiously worded, moral arguments against the “waste” of cryptocurrencies. I am not making an economic argument and neither was mjburgess: my argument is about liberty and I am against people that imply that our personal choices or values are unworthy, because by their morals the choices of others are waste. I personally might agree that cryptocurrencies appear to be negative value for the economy, and I might see them bring negative value to some of my acquaintances. That is not the issue. We should aim for the ideal of being as free as practical to make wasteful choices: the waste of having a child, breathing, thinking, or doing absolutely anything, really. As you say, that freedom needs careful balancing against how our personal liberties affect others.

I am looking at that comment as an single example within a wider milieu: one dangerous opinion dressed up in what superficially appears to be a sensible economic argument.

> is not authoritarian

Strawman words in my mouth. I never said it was authoritarian, I said: “down that path lies authoritarianism”.

[id]

A lot of economic activity is exactly that. Look no further than the big tech companies...

[xtian]

Great point

[nathanvanfleet]

"Who still think it's a useful concept"

Narrator: It wasn't

[tommit]

I understand that this is what I get for clicking on a yet another HN crypto hate thread, but your comment is pretty snarky and offers nothing to the discussion. The comment you replied to was entirely in good faith, there is no need for such remarks, this isn't reddit.

[Layke1123]

This to me reads as such.

"Hey, look, just take risks, because if you don't, you'll be poor AND bitter."

[id]

Are you also bitter about people who win the lottery or in a casino?

I never asked anyone to take risks, and buying into unproductive assets is usually not a good idea. Neither is gambling. But holding this kind of resentment will eat at you. If other people get lucky, you should be glad, not hateful.

[Layke1123]

This isn't lucky, but besides that, no, I'm not happy when a very small percentage of our population "gets lucky". We should have 80% of this country be able to afford a home, a vehicle, have affordable healthcare, and a minimum of 4 weeks vacation in the modern 21st century.

Everything else is just a smoke screen to make "your lucky existence" justified compared to the masses who did nothing wrong except be born into this system.

[id]

Why only 80%? Why not 100%?

Assuming by country you mean the US, just being born there is already incredible luck. I have no idea what you're talking about really, there will always be people with less "luck". I work very hard, consider myself very lucky in general, but also unlucky in some aspects. And hell, I can't afford a home either, but I'm okay with that because I don't expect society to hand me one.