Comment by jamal-kumar

Comment by jamal-kumar 13 hours ago

35 replies

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I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.

Fraterkes 12 hours ago

I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?

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  • matwood 12 hours ago

    Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.

    Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.

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    • dullcrisp 9 hours ago

      I dunno you can always drink beer and speed around in a Ford Fiesta. Irresponsibly is free.

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      • gwbas1c 8 hours ago

        You can drink a lot more beer if you don't have to show up for work.

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        • dullcrisp 7 hours ago

          I think that’s what it is. Unemployment, and especially a lack of opportunities, can be dangerous whether it’s because there are no available jobs where you are or it’s because you made 20m in bitcoin when you were 22 and don’t know what to do with it.

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      • fordfastlane 8 hours ago

        Sure but that's has a somewhat less consistent feedback loop..

        When I was new to driving I tended to drive around the ex-highways in the outer burbs and end up in little drag races at each light in the beater I could afford.. One time I looked over at the guy with the aggressively gunning the engine in his VW rabbit(?) and realized how utterly sad that was.

        Plenty of Ferrari drivers, when they get negative feedback, probably get feedback that seems cool to rebel against instead of people exhibiting utter shame of association.

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  • retrac 12 hours ago

    The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.

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    • akira2501 8 hours ago

      If you win the lottery put it in a living trust. If you don't have experience managing large sums of cash the likelihood of you navigating that challenge correctly is basically zero.

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  • johnrob 12 hours ago

    Living a healthy life requires discipline and a certain amount of humility. Both of those traits are hard to maintain after a financial windfall IMO.

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    • copperx 9 hours ago

      Elon Musk is living proof of this.

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      • getlawgdon 7 hours ago

        I feel compelled to ask: what side of that outcome do you think Musk exemplifies?

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        • copperx an hour ago

          I'm surprised by the question. He isn't humble by any stretch of the imagination.

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  • freestyle24147 11 hours ago

    I have no idea. Likely just a combination of complete hyperbole and extrapolating a few poor decisions when young.

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  • paulpauper 12 hours ago

    money leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.

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juliangoldsmith 12 hours ago

The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.

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  • paulpauper 12 hours ago

    dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.

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teekert 10 hours ago

Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.

In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.

Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.

-> thanx Chat.

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  • namaria 9 hours ago

    Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.

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rqtwteye 13 hours ago

Me and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.

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  • paulpauper 13 hours ago

    this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there

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    • geor9e 12 hours ago

      That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.

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jajko 13 hours ago

A very healthy life perspective, one you can't just get without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.

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paulpauper 13 hours ago

how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway

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  • hunter-gatherer 13 hours ago

    This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.

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    • milesvp 11 hours ago

      This is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.

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      • gosub100 8 hours ago

        I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.

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    • digging 10 hours ago

      There's almost no way to make really good decisions with crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on unfounded faith, like everyone else.

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  • petercooper 9 hours ago

    That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.

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  • kristianp 6 hours ago

    I'm guessing the reward was 50btc per block back then, so they might have mined a single or double digit number of blocks, so somewhere between 50 and 4999 btc.

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  • anigbrowl 11 hours ago

    easy back then to generate btc

    Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.

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