It's not that simple...

How do you know how long to hold?

I bought a bunch of bitcoin for under $100 each and sold them for ~$1000 each at one point.

Should I have held them longer? Sure, but how could anyone really know that? How do you resist the urge to realize the >10x gain in a short term?

After it went up to ~1200 it crashed down to 200-300 for years before it recovered and skyrocketed to new heights.

If you had bought bitcoin for something low like say $100, are you telling me you would really have resisted selling it when it hit $1000? or $2000? How about when it hit $10,000 or $25,000 or even $50,000? Knowing that it could come crashing down at any second as well.

The peak was nearly 70K, and now it's only about half that.

So simply holding isn't a complete strategy.

I knew about bitcoin before 2012. I had a friend try to convince me to mine some with my beefy desktop, since “its the future”. I thought it sounded like a dumb ponzi scheme. It might still be a dumb ponzi scheme but i fucked up bad on thay one.

Well, life happens and you can't know the future. I was poor as fuck in 2012. I had just moved back to the US after spending all my money on a couchsurfing adventure in another country. I was living in a house with my girlfriend who didn't tell me I wasn't supposed to live there until I had actually flew to Tacoma, a city halfway across the country from everyone I knew. I got a job working at a gas station and I imported nootropics from China to sell on a couple of message boards. This guy offered to buy $100 of noopept with Bitcoin so I accepted. I had heard of Bitcoin from Silk Road and thought it was a really cool concept. I lost some bitcoins in an exchange hack/inside job? Bitfloor. Traded on BTC-E and actually came out ahead on that. Didn't sell in the 2013 bullrun. Got bored of crypto and sold almost all of it in 2016, just before the next bullrun. Got into stocks and lost money there. Played around with some defi stuff in 2020. Cashed out some profits on that next bullrun. Lost $20k on Anchor. I think I still have like $50k left of crypto. Need to check into that. Got .65btc, 11 eth, 1000 atom, 3000 polygon, and small amounts of other random stuff. It's funny how I'm not even a whole coiner anymore. I think when I got into crypto BTC was almost $10

I heard about it 2009/2010 and didn't buy it then because it just seemed like some scammy way to make money. When I learned more about its use and effects as a currency, I became interested and bought some, but its use as a legitimate currency just won't happen. In practice, it's just a scammy way to make money, always has been. The most useful thing about crypto was that you could convert it to USD for a profit, but the days of ez money have passed.

I've known about it since 2009 or 2010, I'm not quite sure anymore. When it was still fractions of a cent per.

My read on it at the time was that it was an ideological project from a pseudo-right tech libertarian sphere that I have always despised. At that point you could not yet use it to buy illegal porn and drugs on the internet, but the people who were into bitcoin were SO EXCITED that you soon would be able to.

I figured it would never be useful. I was right about all of that, I think? I didn't predict that people would get rich from it despite these things though. I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything for me.

We knew about casinos even longer. It doesn't compel us to go all-in on zero. And from the technical point of view bitcoin was maybe an interesting idea for the few early ears, and then it was clear that it failed for any legitimate use. It was true 10 years ago and still true today.

I remember buying a few BTC at around the $20 mark, think I sold around $100. Seemed like a nerd's fever dream at that time :) I even got my CPU mining in a pool back before the GPU kernels were around and the ASICs came out. Crazy times!

"If you know of an ethically dubious way to profit, why not do it?"