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After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

nytimes.com

31–40 of 143 posts

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#31
post #8

Nothing new. When you see ads in the subway to buy cryptocurrencies, and you have people buying cheaper coins because they don't realize they can buy a fraction of a bitcoin, this happens. There is no fast way to get rich if you are dumb.

The moment for me is when a Jack in the Box TV commercial mentioned Bitcoin

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#32
post #19
post #14

> Now, eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened. > “I got too caught up in the fear of missing out and trying to make a quick buck,” he said last week. “The losses have pretty much left me financially ruined.” I think it's distasteful to criticize the decisions that lead to someone's downfall, but maybe someone will read thi…

I don't think any investor saw this as anything else than a bubble, they just wanted to enjoy the ride up. I would go all-in in a bubble if I had the confidence someone would tap on my shoulder to let me know when it's going to crash. Investing requires discipline.

> I would go all-in in a bubble if I had the confidence someone would tap on my shoulder to let me know when it's going to crash.

literally you and everyone on earth would do this

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#34
post #14

> Now, eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened. > “I got too caught up in the fear of missing out and trying to make a quick buck,” he said last week. “The losses have pretty much left me financially ruined.” I think it's distasteful to criticize the decisions that lead to someone's downfall, but maybe someone will read thi…

> I got too caught up in the fear of missing out and trying to make a quick buck

People that aren't FOMOing are still making money. Many people are still up for the year.

Just requires more calculation and precision and that can remove an outsized influence of luck, just like every other market on the planet.

I think it is disingenuous to make an article about retail traders that had never entered the market, and not mention how institutional investors and accredited traders are faring. They don't care if the market sold off 80% if they got a 90% discount, as they're probably still up 100%.

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it was 23k not 100k

Unfortunately, from later in the article: > Kim Hyon-jeong, a 45-year-old teacher and mother of one who lives on the outskirts of Seoul, said she put about 100 million won, or $90,000, into cryptocurrencies last fall. She drew on savings, an insurance policy and a $25,000 loan. Her investments are now down about 90 percent.

This is crazy. People don’t go from saving up 90k in their 40s to sinking all that into a gigantic lottery. Do they?

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#36
post #3

Every Bitcoin market decline brings out stories like this. Here's one from 2013 that's worse than anything in the NYT article: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r88vl/need_advice...

Holy moly, I hope that was just some elaborate troll.

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#37
post #27

When everyone starts talking about cryptocurrencies, one should stop investing. A variant from a stock market quote.

Yeah, last year when my 76 year old mother asked me about bitcoin, I knew the bubble was about to pop. I've never been a bitcoin gambler myself, and I told my mom to stay the hell away as well. That continues to be my advice.

I still think it looks like a big well-constructed scam designed to pull vast amounts of money from starry-eyed naive people and transfer it to a very small number of sharks.

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#39
post #3

Every Bitcoin market decline brings out stories like this. Here's one from 2013 that's worse than anything in the NYT article: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r88vl/need_advice...

He got himeslf in over his head with arbitrage. Hindsight is always 20/20, but if he had waited a bit, he could have turned that into what... a 10 million profit?

Re: After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

#40
post #20

Where do they find these people? Is this what a lot of "ordinary" people do? Take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to invest in cryptocurrency? Are the people profiled in the article a representative sample? Or are we hearing about the worst cases only because they are so notable and out of the ordinary? Will this post ever stop asking questions?? Stories like these are full of anecdote and short on facts, i…

I work in a software firm. Last autumn half of my team was "investing" in cryptos. People who never traded before, who didn't knew what a bid or an ask was, and who complained to me that exchange interfaces were terribly complicated. Some of them were mulling breaking their 401k (or whatever the term is) so that they could invest the money here. In January they were saying to me "it's not a loss if you don't sell, ri…

> People who never traded before, who didn't knew what a bid or an ask was

and the more amazing thing to me was that they also didn't even want to know

the markets were moving too fast to learn anything, too fast to learn about the history, too fast to put any asset under scrutiny because there is another shiny new thing to trade with a cool name and interesting founding team

or as the ZCash employees and fans are programmed to say "the math is interesting and the cryptographers are highly regarded so--" THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CRYPTOCURRENCY TRADERS

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