Comment by jamal-kumar

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.

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.

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.

Yeah actually, I did a lot of travelling&living outside of such culture (Like a decade) on other earnings and while I was gone not fucking my life up with drugs stuff I watched a ton of my friends die or end up really messed up because of exactly that so your comment wasn't far off the mark like whatsoever. Some ended up in the news for shit like attacking paramedics or murder after fucking their minds up badly enough.

Very North American/European kind of problem with the way I seen people go hard and the sort of things being used here, primarily the appetite for stimulants and opiates that I'm glad I never stuck around to develop in the culture I was from. I have a few other friends who have managed to spend most or enough time away from the continent who feel the same.

I think there's a lack of family cohesion as a huge factor of difference here. Ties into shit like higher suicide rates jn the developed world and other sad shit

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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