[jakelazaroff]

"So it was dumb of me to buy my lottery tickets just in the slim chance that I won? Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me."

(See also: https://xkcd.com/1827/)

[SirMaster]

I don't see how that relates to me. I made a singular choice. I am going to put in $1000 one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here.

I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.

I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.

[KolmogorovComp]

The point is that, your "investment" was pure gambling. See how I can replace bitcoin with lottery ticket.

> I am going to buy $1000 in lottery tickets one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here. > I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10 hours or it will be worth a lot.

[SirMaster]

But it's more than just a binary. Do you not think that the chance that bitcoin blew up big was more or less than my chance at winning a million on a $1000 lottery gamble?

I bought bitcoin because I perceived more potential around blockchain tech becoming either useful or at least drawing hype to explode the value. I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket because the odds of winning are astronomically low. I perceived there to be a far greater chance in bitcoin blowing up than winning the lottery, or even winning big at a casino.

Do you think I really over-estimated bitcoin's odds early on? At least with blockchain there were some potential real-world possibilities to it and that was a big factor in my choice to gamble on it. Is that kind of thought not at least somewhat more sound than buying a simple lottery ticket? To me it was.

[jakelazaroff]

You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out.

It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.

[SirMaster]

I guess my argument is that turning $1000 into 1 million was probably a significantly more probable outcome than winning 1 million in a lottery which is specifically why I decided to put my money into bitcoin instead of lottery tickets.

I just don't see the equivalence in comparing it to buying a lottery ticket.

There are way way way more bitcoin winners than there are lottery winners.

[jakelazaroff]

The lottery analogy is reductio ad absurdum analogy — like, yeah, your odds of doing basically anything are better than winning the lottery (that's why the comic is funny). The point is that the positive outcome doesn't retroactively make your risky investment decision less risky. That's survivorship bias!

[ForHackernews]

Why didn't you buy $1000 of NVDA instead? It would have paid off better. Clearly, NVDA shares are the future of currency.

[SirMaster]

No it wouldn't have.

I bought 10 bitcoin for about $1000 in late 2013. It's currently worth about 900K and was a peak of about 1.2M.

$1000 in NVDA shares in late 2013 was about 35 cents per share, so about 2850 shares. That's currently worth 521K with a peak of 590K.

And why? Because in 2013 I thought there was a greater potential for bitcoin blowing up substantially due to the new concept of blockchain and what it could potentially do, or at least the hype around what people perceived that it could potentially do. Compared to what I thought the potential for NVDA to do.

[hlynurd]

I mean it was a lucky guess but still just a guess.

[SirMaster]

Nobody is saying it's not luck... But people are comparing it to buying a lottery ticket. I am pretty sure the odds of this gamble are way better than the odds of winning this big in a lottery. Probably by more than an order of magnitude.