It wasn't a mistake. In 2013, as in every year, there were plenty of speculative things you could have invested in without having any reasonable way of knowing if they would turn out to make a lot or lose a lot.

There are probably 75 year olds today regretting that they didn't spend an extra $0.12 in 1962 when they were at the comic book store to pick up an extra copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 to preserve. That was the first appearance of Spider Man and and a copy of that in near NM+ condition ("A very well-preserved collectible with several minor manufacturing or handling defects") sold at auction in 2021 for $3.6 million.

I did buy an extra copy of X-Men #137 (the death of Jean Grey) for $0.75 in 1980 and promptly bagged it. If I could actually find it and it actually is still in mint condition it might sell for around $400. From $0.75 then to $400 now is 15% a year growth.

But that $0.75 would have been better invested in Apple stock. That would be around $1600 now which is 18% a year growth. But in 1980 there were other exciting tech companies to invest in and most did not grow like Apple, so it is pointless to consider not buying Apple stock instead of X-Men #137 a mistake.

Nor would it have been a mistake to just put the money in an S&P 500 index fund. That would only have earned about 11% a year over the subsequent 45 years.

I worked with some crypto kids back in 2013. One retired in his twenties after 2017 or so. I know this as his instagram account became nothing but travel photos that never stopped coming year after year. Another colleague announced his retirement at 27 one day. He must have had 20 million in the bank. I still think it’s dumb that people got rich that way, but being dumb luck rich is certainly a thing. I don’t hold it against them. Interestingly I knew a lot of others that talked about crypto all the time but they’re still working to this day.

The thing is, there were so many coins popping up and all this talk about coins surpassing BTC that it’s easy to look at BTC today and think that was the only choice. But people were speculating on a lot of soon to be dead coins.

There are stock plays you could make today that could make any of us rich off dumb luck.

BTC is a (roughly) net-zero enterprise, every dollar taken out of the system comes from someone else putting a dollar in. Sure, if you had a crystal ball you could have made millions, but if everyone else ALSO had that same crystal ball you couldn't, since traders are mostly just shuffling money between themselves anyway.

There's no point kicking yourself over not foreseeing a far-fetched future scenario, if you were at a casino and a roulette spin landed on 12 - would you feel bad for not betting on that happening, despite having no good information it would land on that?

A lot of the stock market is built on this model too surely?

I get some of it works off dividends etc, but so much is sentiment driven and also based off of someone else making a loss.

The best antidote to this kind of thinking is to realise you would have been tempted to sell so may times over the last decade, that there's close to zero chance that you'd still be holding it today.

To make a lot of money with bitcoin you either need to have been a true believer for a ridiculously long period of time, or find the password to an old wallet you'd forgotten about.

I take comfort in thinking that it wasn’t for early buyers/sellers, there wouldn’t really have been any traction.

And crypto today is extremely accessible and safe, compared to 10+ years ago. The first crypto I bought, was by paying some random seller on a forum with PayPal, and hoping that the deal was legit.

It was NOT a mistake. Do you consider not buying the winning lottery ticket a mistake? No. You don't know which ticket is going to win in advance, and buying a random ticket is ill-advised because the odds are against it being the winning one.