RE: Ever wondered why you are not one of those guys who hold thousands of BTC/ETH?

I thought about this a bit more while at the grocery store just now, and I think your conclusion that not investing in BTC/ETH back in the day was due to lack of wisdom is incorrect, and I'll attempt to explain why.

Back 8 - 10 years ago, the risk of investing in Bitcoin was HUGE. Even with fully understanding what it was and the promise it held, it was completely unproven from many different perspectives and there was a high chance it would simply fail, or be replaced by something else. In hindsight it's easy to say that it was obvious that Bitcoin would become what it is today, but in reality no one could know that back then.

It was a very very high risk / high reward situation, and in most cases it's actually wise for most people to not put money into things like that. I think that investing in BTC 8-10 years ago can be compared to going to a casino. Let's say that your friends invite you to go to a casino, but since you don't have much free money available to gamble with you make the wise choice not to go. Then later you find out your friend played the exact machine you would have played if you had gone and won a huge jackpot. Does that mean you made an unwise decision? No. Sometimes you can do the right thing and it doesn't work out in your favor and vice versa. That's life. But if you continually make wise choices chances are things will work out in your favor more often than not - and vice versa.

So if you had a bunch of extra cash you could easily afford to lose back then, then yea it would have been wise to put some in BTC/ETH if you really understood and believed in the potential. But otherwise I think it was the right choice to wait. I personally learned about BTC in 2012, at around the same time my son was born and I had just bought a house. I didn't have much extra money available and I think that it was the right choice considering the circumstances not to invest in such a high risk thing as Bitcoin was at the time - even though that obviously did not work out in my favor in hindsight.

BUT I still kept following Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and come 2017 the situation had changed considerably. The risk at that time was MUCH less, yet the reward was still unusually high, and I was in a better financial position. At that point I decided that the wise choice was to invest into BTC and crypto.

Fast forward to now, and the risk has dropped way more from even 2017. The chances that Bitcoin is going away now are incredibly low, but there are still really high potential returns to be had by investing in it. That's why a lot of people are referring to Bitcoin as an asset with "asymmetric returns". Typically an asset's expected return is in line with it's risk (i.e. high risk / high reward or low risk / low reward or somewhere in between), but Bitcoin today (as well as ETH to a lesser extent) is low risk / really high reward, meaning it's "asymmetric".

Before 2017 or so I don't think that was the case, and it was still too risky for most people. For all the people who got rich by getting into crypto early there are far more stories of people who lost everything putting money into high risk ventures that they couldn't afford to lose. You just don't hear about those as much.

The really wise people wait for the opportunities for asymmetric returns (low risk / high reward). They wait for things to prove themselves before investing. Sure they miss out on the 1000x potential gains and only get 10 - 100x, but they also aren't risking losing all of their money. This is what most high net worth and institutional investors do, and that's why they're all starting to get into Bitcoin now and not earlier.

Anyway, sorry for the super long reply...I'll shut up and get back to work now :-)