ESRogs comments on Look for the Next Tech Gold Rush? - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Wei_Dai 19 July 2014 10:08AM

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Comment author: gwern 21 July 2014 01:12:48AM *  7 points [-]

I registered the domain for <$10, last year it was worth $50,000, and now it's worth $100k.

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?)

The effect of selling it is just to increase the diversification of my investment portfolio (i.e., I would no longer have a substantial chunk of my investments in a single asset), which is a good thing since I'm risk averse, but that benefit is certainly not worth $100k.

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'.

Domain names are a different asset class from everything else I own, so ideally I ought to have some exposure to it.

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.

Comment author: ESRogs 23 July 2014 07:27:59AM *  0 points [-]

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 said, b) you advised others to diversify, but stayed heavily invested yourself, or c) you had made the claims I remembered, but diversified shortly thereafter.~~ [doesn't double-tilde do strikethrough?]

Edit2: Found it.

Comment author: gwern 24 July 2014 07:21:06PM 2 points [-]

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?

I have been periodically cashing out small quantities, since you're right, I'm not comfortable having so much of my net worth in bitcoins. It's not going very fast, though, since if I sell it all it'll cause tax problems and I don't understand taxation at all. (I'm not sure how much I can funnel through Coinbase before I trip various requirements.)

At least all the institutional interest seems to have tamped down on the volatility lately!

Comment author: ESRogs 25 July 2014 05:52:03PM 3 points [-]

I don't understand taxation at all.

Do you have questions that are not answered here? My understanding is that you just pay capital gains. That's what I did, and the IRS seemed to be happy with my tax return.