If I ask you , what is the risk in investing , you would answer , the risk of loosing money. But there 2 risks. One is to loose money & the other is to miss an opportunity .
You can eliminate either one but not both at the same time .
The video is not correct.... or confusing at least...
When the Federal Reserve buys T bills, they are effectively printing money. The govt spends $$, borrows, and the Fed Reserve prints money through buying the debt....
Yes, others buy government debt too, US citizens and organizations, foreign organizations, etc... but the largest single entity holder of US debt is the Federal Reserve.. which not only buys US debt, but also lends to banks, who in turn lend to borrowers, thereby increasing the money supply or "printing" money...
🤣🤣🤣 The comments are hilarious! 🤣 Nobody wants to admit their ignorance kept them from seeing the genius behind Bitcoin. Big respect to the author for having the guts to own their mistake and poke fun at themselves for it! With a crypto market cap over $3 trillion and still climbing, the skepticism is looking pretty absurd now! 🤣🤣🤣
Your friend “ Marcelo, who wouldn’t stop talking about this thing called Bitcoin. His eyes practically glowed as he spoke: digital gold, money without governments, freedom baked into code. A way out of the monetary tyranny we’d seen firsthand in Argentina. You couldn’t have shut him up at gunpoint.” Gee who does that sound like? Saylor? Or Milei? Now I’m not saying that Milei is all bad but Saylor sounds like nothing more than a religious fanatic. And the $LIBRE rug pull makes Milei seem very inept. How dumb is he to let himself be manipulated into believing a con artist? And he is the president? Wow 😮
Just a thought experiment.... I get the thesis of understanding new but important paradigms. This is what media and education have monopolized. People can understand new paradigms but only from accepted sources. They will dismiss it otherwise. Whether it's a deference to authority, or a lack of self reliance.
The thought experiment that came to mind with this article, was that Bitcoin or any investment only.makes someone rich - because so few bought in initially. If the whole population bought Bitcoin initially, does it have any value at all today, let alone $100K?
The actual and real concept that escapes attention from all, since it is not taught in school or media that could make all of society much wealthier - is that we are mistakenly renting our currencies, instead of creating them. Our governments give banks the right to 'create' currency and profit off the rental payments.
Can a currency be considered 'created' if it disappears entirely with each loan repayment? We don't have currencies, we have mortgage agreements masquerading as currency.
Not disputing that one has to look, think and act to participate in transformative opportunities. Disputing that non participants in Bitcoin invariably failed to look and comprehend. I think there were (and still are) reasons to have sensible misgivings about the long term prospects of Bitcoin. But just because Bitcoin now sells for 110k, doesn’t mean it was a an obvious winner from the start. (Charizard in PSA 10 now sells for 300k!) Same for gene therapies, cell stem treatments, monoclonal antibodies, cloning and the rest. Lots of looking and thinking. Few winners. Of course one needs to look, think and participate. As the advertisement for the Lottery goes “You’ve got to be in it to win it”. And as Wayne Gretzky said “I missed 100 percent of the shots I didn’t take”. But looking and thinking will still result in missing many winners and picking many losers and is no guarantee of a (positive) transformative experience.
That is a great story. And, my kudos to you for confessing that you saw something early in Bitcoin but then lost interest before fully grasping its significance. That's not an easy public confession.
Tyler Durden, the pseudonymous curator of Zero Hedge, recently wrote an article about Bitcoin. The article is interesting in its own right. He essentially traces a dozen or so inventions that changed humanity over the past thousand years or so, then recited why people around at the time would have rejected it. The final invention he discusses is Bitcoin.
More fascinating to me were the comments. 90% of them were negative, arguing why Bitcoin is a scam. Many defended the current fiscal and monetary system -- recency bias if I have ever seen it. But, most surprising to me was that none of them understood what they were talking about. Bitcoin was dismissed because they had all heard of crypto scams not involving Bitcoin, or many claimed that Bitcoin is a "Ponzi scheme."
I have been involved in crypto for quite a while (though not as early as you). I'm not a fan of Bitcoin, although I still own the few I bought a decade ago. Bitcoin, to me, is a pet rock. It did not achieve what it set out to achieve. Back when I got involved (2015), Bitcoiners were still talking about building smart contracts on top of Bitcoin, paying for a cup of coffee with it, and how it would be a medium of exchange in the future. Now it's nearly all "store of value." Still, even I'm not arrogant enough to dismiss something that has withstood everything thrown at Bitcoin, and managed to flourish without any down time. Bitcoin is a wonder.
If the dollar ever is displaced, it will have to be displaced by a credibly neutral asset. That, to my way of thinking, is Bitcoin. (I'm not saying the dollar will be displaced; I'm saying the leading candidate to unseat the dollar as of this moment in time would be Bitcoin, however unlikely that may be.)
Thanks for the great comment, Laramie. Your observation about the comments on Tyler’s article pretty much confirms my original point.
But I also think there’s something else going on. You probably know the old fable about the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes, so he walked away saying they were probably sour anyway. Same thing here—I think it’s mostly just a coping mechanism buried somewhere in the human psyche.
Haha. I have had that same thought many times when reading comments. And, even if you bought Bitcoin early, there's still some of that. (Why didn't I buy MORE!)
I agree that some of this is sour grapes. I just think there's an even larger universe who dismiss things without ever really looking -- and that's at least partly the point you made in your article. Thank you!
I actually think those two groups can overlap:). You can dismiss something without really looking into it, and then later get salty when you realize what you missed. Thanks, Laramie!
I disagree. The same could be said about Fartcoin or any Trump memecoin or Ethereum. Fartcoin is up 10.38k% all time. Crypto is built on pure speculation. It fails the 3 functions of money test. It has no utility. So, using your argument, I could have looked under the hood of Fartcoin and made a fortune if I had just understood Fartcoin more.
This analysis is retrospective narrative bias dressed up as a lesson in "vision." Any asset that happened to go up 10,000% in hindsight could be wrapped in the same fable. Was Monster energy, formerly Hansen's Natural, really a change in the game for energy drinks? No. But it's stock ballooned 77,000%. You could write a manifesto about how understanding energy drinks could have changed your life urging people to "study the taurine to-caffeine ratio." What Monster proved was returns don't require speculation like crypto. Monster wasn't driven by FOMO or a techno-utopian narrative like Bitcoin, it just worked. Monster has utility, there wasn't some psychological arbitrage pushing the narrative.
You don't need to study game theory, you just need to buy something real, early, and hold. Your analysis just cloaks speculative success in the language of philosophical insight. Instead it is luck dressed up as understanding. To say, "If you deeply understood Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be rich now." isn't proof of causation, it's survivor bias. Foresight only looks like genius when the bet hits. All this is is a post hoc fallacy.
A question for you: What about the thousands of similar tech ideas that never took off despite real understanding? Take the drone industry for example, drone companies have not taken off. It is an awesome concept and revolutionary but the only companies doing well are the defense industry drones. Agricultural drone companies, logistics, emergency response, or private have missed the mark. Drones have much more utility than Bitcoin.
So was the drone industry a missed “psychological arbitrage,” too? Or did it just prove that even great ideas, backed by real understanding, don’t always generate life-changing returns?
That’s my issue with the “you just didn’t get it” argument. It applies just as easily to ideas that failed. The success of Bitcoin doesn’t validate the framework, it just survived the Darwinian shakeout of speculative tech. The same framework would have led someone to go all-in on Theranos, Segway, or 3D printing stocks a decade ago.
The market is drowning in narrative-driven assets. Let's not pretend that understanding alone is enough, sometimes the market just doesn't care.
Appreciate the comment, but like I said below, the piece wasn’t really about Bitcoin. That said—if we’re going to talk Bitcoin, the comparison to Fartcoin, Trumpcoin etc. misses the point. BTC wasn’t one of many. It was a completely unique innovation at the time, with no copycats or hype. There was nothing else like it in 2010/2011.
I appreciate the clarification and I do see your point about early Bitcoin being a unique innovation. But my core issue still stands: the broader lesson you draw from Bitcoin Pizza Day, that "deep understanding leads to outsized returns" seems retrospectively applied and not universally reliable.
Look at Tulip Mania in 17th-century Holland. At its peak, someone holding rare tulip bulbs could have claimed they “understood” the horticultural demand, the novelty, even the cultural craze. A tulip farmer might’ve looked like a visionary...until the market collapsed.
So was the key insight there “understanding tulips”? Or was it riding the wave of speculative timing?
Or look at railroad stocks in the 1840s. There were genuine technological revolutions happening railroads were changing the world. But most early railroad stocks in Britain went bust during the Railway Mania because prices had far outpaced fundamentals. Many investors understood the tech, and still lost everything.
Even radio stocks in the 1920s follow the same arc: groundbreaking innovation, early excitement, wild speculation, and collapse. RCA was the Bitcoin of its day. For a while, everyone who "understood the future" looked like a genius until valuations disconnected from reality.
And what about more recent history? In the late ‘90s, there were tons of people who deeply understood the internet and the dot-com shift. Most of them bought pets.com or Webvan and got annihilated. A few held Amazon but not because they knew it would become Amazon. They just happened to hold the one that survived.
Understanding doesn’t guarantee returns. Hype doesn’t always mean stupidity. And being early doesn’t always mean being right.
Likewise, in 2010, Bitcoin wasn’t being adopted for its deep monetary philosophy. It was mined on hobby rigs, passed around in IRC chats, and traded for pizza. The people who made fortunes mostly weren’t Michael Saylors, they were lucky early users who happened to hold. That doesn’t invalidate Bitcoin’s long-term potential. But it does make me question whether the big lesson here is really about deep understanding or just being early and lucky enough to catch something that later found a narrative.
And again, what about the drones, 3D printing, CRISPR tech, or even Monster Beverage? All of these had legitimate innovation and real-world utility but didn’t explode in value just because someone “understood them.” If understanding alone were enough, more “geniuses” would be billionaires. Kodak is another example, invents the digital camera but they're dead now.
So yes, Bitcoin may have been different. But your argument seems to suggest that if someone had just thought harder, they’d be rich. History tells us the world doesn’t work that cleanly. Most of the time, the line between insight and luck is invisible until it's too late.
Bitcoin could collapse like the tulip mania did but currently speculation is still raising the tide. I see no utility in bitcoin and having a finite amount is a silly idea for money. It turns into the game monopoly.
Reasoning by conclusion and confirmation bias are frequently involved in the reconstruction of later happenings as obvious at an earlier time. But they are also completely useless to investors. Tell me what’s inevitable tomorrow and I’m interested. Yesterday? Not so much.
Admiring a jackpot idea after its success is easy. If Bitcoin ultimately fails, those predicting its demise will crow just as loudly. Let’s also not forget all those failed decisions and investments that took place after plenty of deep thought and careful study.
Don’t you think there were lots and lots of highly intelligent and motivated individuals who looked under the hood then (and now) who came to a different conclusion? The idea that they passed on bitcoin because they didn’t really look or comprehend appears to be a myth based on the clarity of hindsight IMHO.
Fair point—and I’m not suggesting that there weren’t smart, motivated people who looked and still passed on Bitcoin. But while understanding doesn’t guarantee conviction, lack of understanding almost always guarantees missed opportunity. And most people just don't bother, which, again, goes back to my original point.
True. But I’ll betcha there are far more buyers of bitcoin that have no comprehension of what it is or how it works than there are buyers who fully researched and critically evaluated it.
Thanks for the comment, Dr. B; but I’d argue the comparison misses something important.
Bitcoin wasn’t a lottery ticket where you just get lucky by picking the right random number. It was a completely unique, once-in-a-generation innovation. The information was out there for anyone willing to dig in and understand what made it different—monetarily, technically, and philosophically. That’s a very different dynamic from blindly hoping you picked the right ticket.
Not talking about lottery tickets. As a 30 year investor in biotech stocks, I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of products and companies which appear (even after deep digging) to be monetarily, technically and philosophically fabulous turn out to be complete losers. After a product hits it big, it’s always clear in the retrospectoscope. But the idea that they are lying about for anyone willing to look, study and think critically is a fallacy. One should also congratulate oneself on the number of losers you manage to not pick.
Thanks for your perspective—but again, you’re talking about one of the many. If I were trying to sell you on some memecoin today, your point would be absolutely valid. But it doesn’t apply to Bitcoin in 2010, which was a completely unique and singular innovation. And yes—anyone willing to take the time to look under the hood could see it for what it was, assuming they had the capacity to understand it. And you know what? With time, many have—which is exactly why it’s trading at $110K today.
You know what? I’ve read a lot about btc and the understanding is more word salad than anything original. Blockchain is a write once database, nothing original about it. If it was useful banks would be using it. They are not. Relational databases that can back out of transactions are more useful to customers. Not to mention that bitcoin has abysmal transaction volume
P.S. My larger point wasn’t really about Bitcoin. Bitcoin was just a useful lens to illustrate it. The point was that most people miss transformative opportunities—not because they think deeply and get it wrong, but because they never take the time to understand them in the first place. That’s what the piece was really about.
If I ask you , what is the risk in investing , you would answer , the risk of loosing money. But there 2 risks. One is to loose money & the other is to miss an opportunity .
You can eliminate either one but not both at the same time .
Howard Marks 🤷♂️
What do you all think ?
The video is not correct.... or confusing at least...
When the Federal Reserve buys T bills, they are effectively printing money. The govt spends $$, borrows, and the Fed Reserve prints money through buying the debt....
Yes, others buy government debt too, US citizens and organizations, foreign organizations, etc... but the largest single entity holder of US debt is the Federal Reserve.. which not only buys US debt, but also lends to banks, who in turn lend to borrowers, thereby increasing the money supply or "printing" money...
🤣🤣🤣 The comments are hilarious! 🤣 Nobody wants to admit their ignorance kept them from seeing the genius behind Bitcoin. Big respect to the author for having the guts to own their mistake and poke fun at themselves for it! With a crypto market cap over $3 trillion and still climbing, the skepticism is looking pretty absurd now! 🤣🤣🤣
Your friend “ Marcelo, who wouldn’t stop talking about this thing called Bitcoin. His eyes practically glowed as he spoke: digital gold, money without governments, freedom baked into code. A way out of the monetary tyranny we’d seen firsthand in Argentina. You couldn’t have shut him up at gunpoint.” Gee who does that sound like? Saylor? Or Milei? Now I’m not saying that Milei is all bad but Saylor sounds like nothing more than a religious fanatic. And the $LIBRE rug pull makes Milei seem very inept. How dumb is he to let himself be manipulated into believing a con artist? And he is the president? Wow 😮
Jared Bernstein, almost realized he didn't know what he was talking about but gave up before he got there!
Just a thought experiment.... I get the thesis of understanding new but important paradigms. This is what media and education have monopolized. People can understand new paradigms but only from accepted sources. They will dismiss it otherwise. Whether it's a deference to authority, or a lack of self reliance.
The thought experiment that came to mind with this article, was that Bitcoin or any investment only.makes someone rich - because so few bought in initially. If the whole population bought Bitcoin initially, does it have any value at all today, let alone $100K?
The actual and real concept that escapes attention from all, since it is not taught in school or media that could make all of society much wealthier - is that we are mistakenly renting our currencies, instead of creating them. Our governments give banks the right to 'create' currency and profit off the rental payments.
Can a currency be considered 'created' if it disappears entirely with each loan repayment? We don't have currencies, we have mortgage agreements masquerading as currency.
Not disputing that one has to look, think and act to participate in transformative opportunities. Disputing that non participants in Bitcoin invariably failed to look and comprehend. I think there were (and still are) reasons to have sensible misgivings about the long term prospects of Bitcoin. But just because Bitcoin now sells for 110k, doesn’t mean it was a an obvious winner from the start. (Charizard in PSA 10 now sells for 300k!) Same for gene therapies, cell stem treatments, monoclonal antibodies, cloning and the rest. Lots of looking and thinking. Few winners. Of course one needs to look, think and participate. As the advertisement for the Lottery goes “You’ve got to be in it to win it”. And as Wayne Gretzky said “I missed 100 percent of the shots I didn’t take”. But looking and thinking will still result in missing many winners and picking many losers and is no guarantee of a (positive) transformative experience.
That is a great story. And, my kudos to you for confessing that you saw something early in Bitcoin but then lost interest before fully grasping its significance. That's not an easy public confession.
Tyler Durden, the pseudonymous curator of Zero Hedge, recently wrote an article about Bitcoin. The article is interesting in its own right. He essentially traces a dozen or so inventions that changed humanity over the past thousand years or so, then recited why people around at the time would have rejected it. The final invention he discusses is Bitcoin.
More fascinating to me were the comments. 90% of them were negative, arguing why Bitcoin is a scam. Many defended the current fiscal and monetary system -- recency bias if I have ever seen it. But, most surprising to me was that none of them understood what they were talking about. Bitcoin was dismissed because they had all heard of crypto scams not involving Bitcoin, or many claimed that Bitcoin is a "Ponzi scheme."
I have been involved in crypto for quite a while (though not as early as you). I'm not a fan of Bitcoin, although I still own the few I bought a decade ago. Bitcoin, to me, is a pet rock. It did not achieve what it set out to achieve. Back when I got involved (2015), Bitcoiners were still talking about building smart contracts on top of Bitcoin, paying for a cup of coffee with it, and how it would be a medium of exchange in the future. Now it's nearly all "store of value." Still, even I'm not arrogant enough to dismiss something that has withstood everything thrown at Bitcoin, and managed to flourish without any down time. Bitcoin is a wonder.
If the dollar ever is displaced, it will have to be displaced by a credibly neutral asset. That, to my way of thinking, is Bitcoin. (I'm not saying the dollar will be displaced; I'm saying the leading candidate to unseat the dollar as of this moment in time would be Bitcoin, however unlikely that may be.)
Thanks for the great comment, Laramie. Your observation about the comments on Tyler’s article pretty much confirms my original point.
But I also think there’s something else going on. You probably know the old fable about the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes, so he walked away saying they were probably sour anyway. Same thing here—I think it’s mostly just a coping mechanism buried somewhere in the human psyche.
Haha. I have had that same thought many times when reading comments. And, even if you bought Bitcoin early, there's still some of that. (Why didn't I buy MORE!)
I agree that some of this is sour grapes. I just think there's an even larger universe who dismiss things without ever really looking -- and that's at least partly the point you made in your article. Thank you!
I actually think those two groups can overlap:). You can dismiss something without really looking into it, and then later get salty when you realize what you missed. Thanks, Laramie!
I disagree. The same could be said about Fartcoin or any Trump memecoin or Ethereum. Fartcoin is up 10.38k% all time. Crypto is built on pure speculation. It fails the 3 functions of money test. It has no utility. So, using your argument, I could have looked under the hood of Fartcoin and made a fortune if I had just understood Fartcoin more.
This analysis is retrospective narrative bias dressed up as a lesson in "vision." Any asset that happened to go up 10,000% in hindsight could be wrapped in the same fable. Was Monster energy, formerly Hansen's Natural, really a change in the game for energy drinks? No. But it's stock ballooned 77,000%. You could write a manifesto about how understanding energy drinks could have changed your life urging people to "study the taurine to-caffeine ratio." What Monster proved was returns don't require speculation like crypto. Monster wasn't driven by FOMO or a techno-utopian narrative like Bitcoin, it just worked. Monster has utility, there wasn't some psychological arbitrage pushing the narrative.
You don't need to study game theory, you just need to buy something real, early, and hold. Your analysis just cloaks speculative success in the language of philosophical insight. Instead it is luck dressed up as understanding. To say, "If you deeply understood Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be rich now." isn't proof of causation, it's survivor bias. Foresight only looks like genius when the bet hits. All this is is a post hoc fallacy.
A question for you: What about the thousands of similar tech ideas that never took off despite real understanding? Take the drone industry for example, drone companies have not taken off. It is an awesome concept and revolutionary but the only companies doing well are the defense industry drones. Agricultural drone companies, logistics, emergency response, or private have missed the mark. Drones have much more utility than Bitcoin.
So was the drone industry a missed “psychological arbitrage,” too? Or did it just prove that even great ideas, backed by real understanding, don’t always generate life-changing returns?
That’s my issue with the “you just didn’t get it” argument. It applies just as easily to ideas that failed. The success of Bitcoin doesn’t validate the framework, it just survived the Darwinian shakeout of speculative tech. The same framework would have led someone to go all-in on Theranos, Segway, or 3D printing stocks a decade ago.
The market is drowning in narrative-driven assets. Let's not pretend that understanding alone is enough, sometimes the market just doesn't care.
Appreciate the comment, but like I said below, the piece wasn’t really about Bitcoin. That said—if we’re going to talk Bitcoin, the comparison to Fartcoin, Trumpcoin etc. misses the point. BTC wasn’t one of many. It was a completely unique innovation at the time, with no copycats or hype. There was nothing else like it in 2010/2011.
I appreciate the clarification and I do see your point about early Bitcoin being a unique innovation. But my core issue still stands: the broader lesson you draw from Bitcoin Pizza Day, that "deep understanding leads to outsized returns" seems retrospectively applied and not universally reliable.
Look at Tulip Mania in 17th-century Holland. At its peak, someone holding rare tulip bulbs could have claimed they “understood” the horticultural demand, the novelty, even the cultural craze. A tulip farmer might’ve looked like a visionary...until the market collapsed.
So was the key insight there “understanding tulips”? Or was it riding the wave of speculative timing?
Or look at railroad stocks in the 1840s. There were genuine technological revolutions happening railroads were changing the world. But most early railroad stocks in Britain went bust during the Railway Mania because prices had far outpaced fundamentals. Many investors understood the tech, and still lost everything.
Even radio stocks in the 1920s follow the same arc: groundbreaking innovation, early excitement, wild speculation, and collapse. RCA was the Bitcoin of its day. For a while, everyone who "understood the future" looked like a genius until valuations disconnected from reality.
And what about more recent history? In the late ‘90s, there were tons of people who deeply understood the internet and the dot-com shift. Most of them bought pets.com or Webvan and got annihilated. A few held Amazon but not because they knew it would become Amazon. They just happened to hold the one that survived.
Understanding doesn’t guarantee returns. Hype doesn’t always mean stupidity. And being early doesn’t always mean being right.
Likewise, in 2010, Bitcoin wasn’t being adopted for its deep monetary philosophy. It was mined on hobby rigs, passed around in IRC chats, and traded for pizza. The people who made fortunes mostly weren’t Michael Saylors, they were lucky early users who happened to hold. That doesn’t invalidate Bitcoin’s long-term potential. But it does make me question whether the big lesson here is really about deep understanding or just being early and lucky enough to catch something that later found a narrative.
And again, what about the drones, 3D printing, CRISPR tech, or even Monster Beverage? All of these had legitimate innovation and real-world utility but didn’t explode in value just because someone “understood them.” If understanding alone were enough, more “geniuses” would be billionaires. Kodak is another example, invents the digital camera but they're dead now.
So yes, Bitcoin may have been different. But your argument seems to suggest that if someone had just thought harder, they’d be rich. History tells us the world doesn’t work that cleanly. Most of the time, the line between insight and luck is invisible until it's too late.
Bitcoin could collapse like the tulip mania did but currently speculation is still raising the tide. I see no utility in bitcoin and having a finite amount is a silly idea for money. It turns into the game monopoly.
Reasoning by conclusion and confirmation bias are frequently involved in the reconstruction of later happenings as obvious at an earlier time. But they are also completely useless to investors. Tell me what’s inevitable tomorrow and I’m interested. Yesterday? Not so much.
This hits hard. I almost put $1k into bitcoin in 2012 at 5$ a coin. sadly “almost” only works in horseshoes and hand grenades.
“Opportunity is a haughty goddess who wastes no time with those who are unprepared” - Richest man in babylon
Perfectly put. 'Almost' is probably the most expensive word in investing and many other things in life.
Admiring a jackpot idea after its success is easy. If Bitcoin ultimately fails, those predicting its demise will crow just as loudly. Let’s also not forget all those failed decisions and investments that took place after plenty of deep thought and careful study.
Don’t you think there were lots and lots of highly intelligent and motivated individuals who looked under the hood then (and now) who came to a different conclusion? The idea that they passed on bitcoin because they didn’t really look or comprehend appears to be a myth based on the clarity of hindsight IMHO.
Fair point—and I’m not suggesting that there weren’t smart, motivated people who looked and still passed on Bitcoin. But while understanding doesn’t guarantee conviction, lack of understanding almost always guarantees missed opportunity. And most people just don't bother, which, again, goes back to my original point.
True. But I’ll betcha there are far more buyers of bitcoin that have no comprehension of what it is or how it works than there are buyers who fully researched and critically evaluated it.
Agreed. Most people are in it for a quick buck, not to build generational wealth.
Thanks for the comment, Dr. B; but I’d argue the comparison misses something important.
Bitcoin wasn’t a lottery ticket where you just get lucky by picking the right random number. It was a completely unique, once-in-a-generation innovation. The information was out there for anyone willing to dig in and understand what made it different—monetarily, technically, and philosophically. That’s a very different dynamic from blindly hoping you picked the right ticket.
Not talking about lottery tickets. As a 30 year investor in biotech stocks, I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of products and companies which appear (even after deep digging) to be monetarily, technically and philosophically fabulous turn out to be complete losers. After a product hits it big, it’s always clear in the retrospectoscope. But the idea that they are lying about for anyone willing to look, study and think critically is a fallacy. One should also congratulate oneself on the number of losers you manage to not pick.
Thanks for your perspective—but again, you’re talking about one of the many. If I were trying to sell you on some memecoin today, your point would be absolutely valid. But it doesn’t apply to Bitcoin in 2010, which was a completely unique and singular innovation. And yes—anyone willing to take the time to look under the hood could see it for what it was, assuming they had the capacity to understand it. And you know what? With time, many have—which is exactly why it’s trading at $110K today.
You know what? I’ve read a lot about btc and the understanding is more word salad than anything original. Blockchain is a write once database, nothing original about it. If it was useful banks would be using it. They are not. Relational databases that can back out of transactions are more useful to customers. Not to mention that bitcoin has abysmal transaction volume
P.S. My larger point wasn’t really about Bitcoin. Bitcoin was just a useful lens to illustrate it. The point was that most people miss transformative opportunities—not because they think deeply and get it wrong, but because they never take the time to understand them in the first place. That’s what the piece was really about.