In early 2000, I registered my personal domain name weidai.com, along with a couple others, because I was worried that the small (sole-proprietor) ISP I was using would go out of business one day and break all the links on the web to the articles and software that I had published on my "home page" under its domain. Several years ago I started getting offers, asking me to sell the domain, and now they're coming in almost every day. A couple of days ago I saw the first six figure offer ($100,000).
In early 2009, someone named Satoshi Nakamoto emailed me personally with an announcement that he had published version 0.1 of Bitcoin. I didn't pay much attention at the time (I was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at that point), but then in early 2011 I saw a LW article about Bitcoin, which prompted me to start mining it. I wrote at the time, "thanks to the discussion you started, I bought a Radeon 5870 and started mining myself, since it looks likely that I can at least break even on the cost of the card." That approximately $200 investment (plus maybe another $100 in electricity) is also worth around six figures today.
Clearly, technological advances can sometimes create gold rush-like situations (i.e., first-come-first-serve opportunities to make truly extraordinary returns with minimal effort or qualifications). And it's possible to stumble into them without even trying. Which makes me think, maybe we should be trying? I mean, if only I had been looking for possible gold rushes, I could have registered a hundred domain names optimized for potential future value, rather than the few that I happened to personally need. Or I could have started mining Bitcoins a couple of years earlier and be a thousand times richer.
I wish I was already an experienced gold rush spotter, so I could explain how best to do it, but as indicated above, I participated in the ones that I did more or less by luck. Perhaps the first step is just to keep one's eyes open, and to keep in mind that tech-related gold rushes do happen from time to time and they are not impossibly difficult to find. What other ideas do people have? Are there other past examples of tech gold rushes besides the two that I mentioned? What might be some promising fields to look for them in the future?
Oh, you meant the domain name itself as an asset, not the use you were getting out of it. Yes, I suppose it has on paper, but past performance is no guarantee of future returns. There's no reason to hang onto it. (How much do you know about domain names? Will additional TLD releases by ICANN reduce the value of weidai.com? Or is the reason it's worth $100k time-sensitive in any way? It seems like a boring domain name, why is it worth $100k anyway?)
You're taking on a huge amount of uncompensated risk here. Would you put $100k into a single stock? For example, buy a single share of BRK.A? No, of course not, even if that got you exposure to 'insurance' or 'railroads'.
Unless you're orders of magnitude wealthier than I think you are, your exposure to an opaque illiquid minor hard-to-price asset like domain names should look more like $10 than $100,000.
Last I read you said you'd made more money buying bitcoins than you had doing anything else, and you still hadn't sold any. Has that changed?
Edit: went looking for the comment I remembered reading and didn't find it, but I did find this comment where you mention advising someone else to diversify out of bitcoins. So that makes me think either a) I misremembered what you ... (read more)