[CamperBob2]

While it wasn't the biggest money mistake of my life, it's certainly a whopper in retrospect. Don't be like me ;)

I have a problem classifying random things like this as a mistake. You didn't have enough information at the time to predict that BTC would exceed $1000, and you don't have enough information now to predict what it will do, either.

It's just a game of musical chairs. The only "mistake" is to play. Some mistakes we pay for, while others ultimately benefit us.

[behold-]

IMHO it would be a huge mistake not to invest a few days worth of income in bitcoins . Most likely you'll loose them, but there's a reasonable chance you'll get 100x back in a few years. I invested $2500 in the summer of 2012 and just last week cached a small part to buy a Citroen C5 saloon.

[vworldv]

100x back in a few years? So the market cap will be >1T, and Satoshi will be the richest man (?) on earth? Don't think so. Maybe 10x, and the chance of this is probably not great enough to balance against a crash.

Good call divesting some of your BTC in favor of physical assets.

[behold-]

IMHO China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Abu-Dhabi, etc. can't be happy with US printing trillions of USD every year. They need a stable currency to keep their enourmous savings in, but the Fed monetary policy is eroding those savings. Bitcoins would be a perfect alternative. If governments start buying them, the total value can easily go > 1T.

Plus are you implying that hackers, like Bill Gates, Larry Page and Satoshi, can't possibly be (or deserve to be) ultra-rich?

[XorNot]

If any of those places were unhappy they would stop buying US treasuries. But they keep buying them.

There isn't a "can't be happy" feeling to a market - just what people actually do. At the scales and volumes involved, it is literally impossible for any of those countries to divest themselves of treasuries suddenly (for one thing, bonds don't work that way).

Moreover, governments only invest in real things. The productive output of the US is a real thing because all those places buy tons of US goods and services. Bitcoins are not real things. Perhaps moreover, why would any one of those places invest in a currency at a scale which would simply let them purchase the computing power to take it over permanently?

[iiAAIiajj98]

If an individual or group were to purchase the computing power to "take over" the currency Bitcoin would lose all of its value.

[XorNot]

Which perhaps should highlight why nationstates aren't going to buy it?

Because the money levels being talked about are large enough that you could trivially destroy it. Which means your entire foreign exchange rate is subject to whether someone wants to screw with the blockchain.

Which means at any junction, some third actor can hold the entire currency hostage - unless the governments invest in huge amounts of hashing hardware to protect it. Which is (1) a colossal waste of money and energy and (2) would, in turn, give them the capability to do the exact same thing.

Bitcoin will never be a currency held or traded by governments.

[marvin]

You could make the same argument about investing in the stock market. It is not a mistake to participate, but know the risks before you do.

[Udo]

I think the decision to sell what would now be quite a nice Christmas bonus is, as you say and as I said above, a mistake only when viewed in retrospect. Now, however, I do have more information to go on. Yes, it's still a gamble.