Plenty of people on less wrong have heard about bitcoin for years now, and most probably have done nothing about it, and feel like they missed the boat.
Same is true for Microsoft, and Apple, and Google stock, for example -- a lot of people feel they missed the boat on those. Funny how the wish of having bought AAPL at the bottom sticks in the mind, while the memory of people bankrupted by the dot-com crash, for example, doesn't. You could almost think that there was some... bias there?
Maybe people should think about taking it seriously for a bit, and actually consider whether it is a worthwhile investment.
Sure. Care to make a case for it? With numbers, please. Most of bitcoin promotion that I see is generally based on the greater fool theory.
Here were the numbers that I used to decide to buy up until the spring of 2013 and start selling last fall.
I sold more than half of my holdings last fall/winter, but I'm still holding a bunch while I wait for the Winklevoss twins to get their ETF approved and for enough exchanges to be set up around the world to enable the remittance use case to really take off (once neither the sender nor the receiver needs to hold BTC).
Once those things either happen or seem like they're not going to happen, I plan to sell a large portion of what I have left and then kee...
LW readers have unusual views on many subjects. Efficient Market Hypothesis notwithstanding, many of these are probably alien to most people in finance. So it's plausible they might have implications that are not yet fully integrated into current asset prices. And if you rightfully believe something that most people do not believe, you should be able to make money off that.
Here's an example for a different group. Feminists believe that women are paid less than men for no good economic reason. If this is the case, feminists should invest in companies that hire many women, and short those which hire few women, to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs. And I can think of examples for groups like Socialists, Neoreactionaries, etc. - cases where their positive beliefs have strong implications for economic predictions. But I struggle to think of such ones for LessWrong, which is why I am asking you. Can you think of any unusual LW-type beliefs that have strong economic implications (say over the next 1-3 years)?
Wei Dai has previously commented on a similar phenomena, but I'm interested in a wider class of phenomena.