If they invested in 2016 when bitcoin was $900 (December 2016), they’re probably not too happy at this precise moment, but still:
The value is $29,000 at the moment, so at $900 that’s still a 32x return. If they
sold everything we had – house, cars, motorbikes, holiday home, clothes, toys, furniture
Let’s estimate they cashed out into $200,000 worth of bitcoin, say 22 of them there bitcoins? They now have $6.4m! The crazy guy was right!
Me, I’m just amazed bitcoin is still around, honestly. That’s a test of … something, but I’m still not sure exactly what. If it’s still here, it’s useful for some purpose, so… ?
Some people got rich with Ponzi’s original Ponzi scheme, so from a certain narrow point of view that was… useful?… as well.
The only hope for a happy ending with this guy is that he chooses to cash out of bitcoin at some time when everyone else isn’t doing it. If he got out now, he might end up with more real-world money than he put in.
But if he’s the kind of person to dump his life savings into crypto, he’s probably also the kind of person to hang onto it past the point where it makes sense. Or to use his BTC to “buy the dip” and stock up on Terra now that it’s “cheap”, or something like that.
If I read that he sold his bitcoins for US$6million (and paid Dutch taxes on that!) and bought a nice house or something, then good for him. But until then, deciding whether he’s winning or losing is extremely premature. When you see a guy with glazed eyes dripping with sweat at a roulette table, you don’t assume he’s set up for life even if he has a big pile of chips in front of him.
People have been buying stars for hundreds of dollars for decades now. People have been buying penny stocks for decades. People are buying Ty Beanie Babies again. The list goes on and on. As long as you can make SOMETHING that people will pay money for, there will be scams to create the money. That doesn’t mean the objects used in the scam have value, and certainly something lasting 7 years is not proof it’s “here to stay.”
The dot-com craze to bubble to crash occurred in about 7.5-8 years, and you know that, because you were around for it too
Especially since crypto speculation and gambling are zero-game - my winning bet on the Eddie vs Thor fight came from people losing a bet that Eddie would win.
Before the credit cards blocked it, plenty of people transferred wealth to people who bought in earlier with credit card debt.
I dunno, I think if I was going to lose all my money, I’d rather lose in a casino, where at least I can get some free drinks and have fun playing games. Or lose it on belief that my sports team is the best and not that “line goes up.”
Even as an air quotes “tech person” I just don’t know what to make of crypto in general. Even after personally experimenting with the eco-friendly proof-of-stake (proof-of-space) Chia one… what is it really? What purpose does it serve? Who benefits? I was in the trenches there for a while and I was like “what are we fighting for” like in a damn Joseph Heller novel.
But 2009 to 2022 = 13 years.
The only lesson I can glean is “somehow, bitcoin still manages to exist.”
