[werdnapk]

You simply can't get hung up on what could have been. Same applies to trying to time the stock market... should have bought, should have sold. Best thing is to know there's nothing that can be done about the past and move along and deal with what you can do now instead.

[xp84]

You're right. What gets me though is that unlike the stock market, bitcoin was an incredibly rare occurrence where anyone could have gotten extraordinarily rich without even incurring any risk! (besides a couple evenings spent learning how to use it.) Whereas to have $10MM today in GOOG stock, I would have had to invest over $300k in 2010.

[ux266478]

> without even incurring any risk!

That's not true at all, any number of things could have killed bitcoin in its infancy. The stakes were just low. Somewhere out there is a lost collection of wallets of mine, collectively holding ~100btc ($1000 at the time). If regulators cracked down hard, that 100btc would have become just as worthless and either way I'd be out $1000.

"Risk" is an epistemic claim about the future taking the worse path. Obviously looking back it looks like risk-free money. That's not how it looked at the time. The "currency of the future" thing was always niche, especially after the crash in 2013, until a much larger cultural shift happened around 2015-ish.

Plenty of people will chime in with early bitcoin stories, and how they always believed it was going to go to the moon, etc. I always find it curious because my memory of the time period is that it was a means to an end, and that's how the overwhelming majority saw it and treated it. Funnily enough, it was thanks to that overwhelming majority that led to it being worth anything at all. If it was just a bunch of yahoos clamoring about the "currency of the future" thing, it probably would have gone absolutely fucking nowhere. The irony that the yahoos ended up becoming the majority I think is underappreciated.

[werdnapk]

You could have bought bored apes (and any of the other scammy NFTs) and ended up losing your shirt in the end. Overall, who cares if you miss the boat on something, it's not good for the mind to dwell on it.