Bitcoin

Riperino I wanted to invest later too. This aged like vinegar.

 

It's easy to tell when something is a bubble, but it's near impossible to tell when it will pop.

 

I mined what would now be about $200,000 worth of bitcoin, and sold it for ~some hundreds of dollars a year later when I really needed to put a new alternator in my car.

No regrets, really. It's always easy to look back and say "I should have held onto bitcoin", "I should have invested in Google's IPO", "I should have brought earplugs to that concert". Such thinking is useless. Sure, I'd like to have $200K that I don't, but if you put me back in that same situation in 2010 where I was living paycheck to paycheck and really needed to get to work -- I'd make the same decision. It was a rational choice.

I think that what's happening now is that crypto is gradually being folded into the normal economy, and as a result, it's basically being controlled by some combination of global elite financiers, and the Chinese government (who are mining crypto on a scale that's hard to imagine, with warehouses full of racks of FPGA servers). So, I think it's a pretty dumb thing for anyone who's not a very experienced market manipulator to get into now, as anything other than a gambling exercise. I am sure there are people going in now who are going to make some money, but I bet there are more people who are "investing" money that they really can't afford to lose who are going to lose their shirts as a result.

I see crypto speculation right now as having a lot more in common with Tulip Mania than it does with a 401(k). I'm holding on to a few hundred dollars worth of Ethereum at the moment, but that's not an investment, it's play money.