[RiderZone]

Bitcoin, and why I haven't bought any

Here I do not want to discuss the technical aspects of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, if it's legit or not. I only want to talk about the attitude of a low-level investor like me towards buying Bitcoin. Throughout this piece, I'll use Bitcoin and crypto interchangeably, because again I'm not concerned with the details, but only the bigger picture.

My aim here is not to insult crypto enthusiasts, I will attempt to be as logical as possible, but it's hard. Although I want to believe that I have made a logical choice by not investing in Bitcoin, the reasons behind that choice are sentimental to put it mildly. I will try to explain those reasons while trying to be as respectful as possible.

For most of my life I've had little to no savings, and lived paycheck to paycheck. It's only relatively recently that I've had the thought of putting something away for the future. I first thought of investing in Bitcoin when it was at the $5000 level, 2017 I believe. But the reasons for me not investing then are more or less the same as they are now. The reason I'm writing this piece is because with the crypto price crash, a lot of people are considering investing in these coins. I'm just trying to remind myself why I didn't do it.

The motivation:

I am not an ambitious person, and I've been quite happy with what little money I had. However, back in 2013 a friend of mine met with a road accident which took away his entire family. I was one of the first people called for help, and was involved in the whole hospitalization nightmare. He had no relatives nearby, so the staff asked us to deposit funds to begin the treatment. I had nothing in my account, and another friend paid the charges.

Ironically, during this time I was living the extremely high risk lifestyle of a motorcycle tourer, routinely riding 1000+ kms a day like a jackass. Until that moment, because of the stupidity of youth, I hadn't even considered something like this could happen to me, but then the bulb finally lit.

At that point of course I was way behind my friends in terms of savings, so the natural idea to catch up was simple: High risk investments. Sure my friends already have a corpus of 50 lacs while I don't even know what "corpus" means, but if I invest a couple of lacs in Bitcoin and they multiply 20 times over, Bob's your aunty.

The reason I didn't buy Bitcoin was laziness mostly. I knew that it's nearly impossible to make those sort of gains in real life, the only way to have a slight chance would be to try and understand the market, and keep an eagle eye on things. I didn't have the time or the interest to care about either of those, and once I stopped fantasizing about being a multi-millionaire, I realized that I was being an idiot.

Crypto may or may not be a scam, it may or may not be semi-legal gambling, but it's undeniable that some people have made some money out of it. I just wanted to make some money too, but investing in it without any real knowledge of the market, and then expecting 10000% returns, was being just a bit too dumb, even for me. Fear of poverty combined with jealousy of friends and a pinch of intense greed is not ideal as far as investment motivations go.

The people:

Like any other rational human being I firmly believe that we are ruled by a race of shape-shifting alien reptlie elites who control our thoughts with 5G and chemtrails. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett say that they don't like Bitcoin, I naturally ignore them and tell them "Have Fun Staying Poor". On the other end of the spectrum however, the people who like Bitcoin and tell us to buy it can be slightly shady sometimes too.



This is of course not the recommended way to decide where to invest your money, but over the years I have followed a lot of accounts on Twitter who are into Bitcoin. Being able to observe their behavior from the outside without being part of the community has actually been quite an interesting experience, and what little interest I had in crypto died as soon as all of them started photoshopping laser eyes into their profile pictures.

The argument can be made that I don't have to like other Bitcoin investors if all I really care about are my own profits, but the fact is that it makes a difference, to me. The cringe factor of these people using phrases like HODL and DeFi and WAGMI is too damn high. On top of that the toxic positivity that they operate on is scary.

I remember reading somewhere that the people behind the Nigerian Prince email scam are actually pretty good with English, but the reason they use broken sentences and obviously incorrect words is because they are smart. By making their emails look like obvious scams, they are only contacted by people who are really easy to scam. It's essentially a self-filtering mechanism that reduces the effor they need to put in significantly. That's the sort of vibe I get from these Bitcoin influencers.

Take one look at the Twitter feed of crypto whale Michael Saylor, and you'll know exactly what I mean. In case you'd prefer not to burn a hole through your eyes, here's his pinned tweet:

#Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.

What does that mean? It means absolutely nothing. He channels the spirit of Deepak Chopra on a daily basis to write stuff like this. Saylor is, unfortunately, the most visible face of Bitcoin. Dude's been all over Fox News and CNN the last few days desperately trying to convince everyone that he being some 1.5 Billion dollars in loss is just fine and not a problem at all. Ignoring the giant conflict of interest problems here, the fact is that people like Saylor make it more or less impossible for semi-literate people like me to buy Bitcoin, I do not want to associate myself with anything that man touches.

But like the Nigerian Prince email scam, I believe this is by design. The type of tweets Saylor puts out are designed to appeal to a very specific kind of person, and that's someone who is willing to put money into something on pure faith, motivated by FOMO, a distorted sense of how the world works, and a severe lack of social intelligence.

Now, there of course are some very intelligent people who have gamed the crypto system and made impressive profits, but I'm not concerned with them in this article. I am an average man, and it's the point of view of an average man that I'm trying to explain. The people and culture surrounding crypto is genuinely repulsive to someone like me, to the point that even if I know that being practical and unemotional about it could make me good money, I'm still physically incapable of doing it.

The people who want to influence me to buy crypto want me to focus on what Bitcoin is and how it's better than fiat money or something, but what they don't seem to understand is that I can't even get past their face and the things that come of it. They are selling something, but their personality gives me the creeps.

It seems obvious that what Bitcoin needs is liquidity, which can only happen if a large number of normies like me invest in it. However, the methods employed by crypto influencers seem paradoxical to me. All they really appeal to is greed and fear, everything they say is a call to some primal emotion, which obviously alienates people like me who are looking for at least some semblance of logic in our investment strategies. Their strategy of attracting investments screams SCAM to me, but millions of people have invested because of them, so perhaps they know what they're doing.

If you're someone who's succesfully gambled with crypto, I have big respect for you. "Behti Ganga mein haath dhona" is easy to say, but not so easy to do. For people like me with limited attention spans however, Bitcoin continues to be a trillion dollar red flag.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by RiderZone

If you're someone who's succesfully gambled with crypto, I have big respect for you. "Behti Ganga mein haath dhona" is easy to say, but not so easy to do. For people like me with limited attention spans however, Bitcoin continues to be a trillion dollar red flag.

Great post... After reading it, I looked back at the posts I made in this thread in 2017 after understanding the crypto world for the first time.

Nothing has changed, what I said then still holds true. Just the numbers of greater fools, who are very essential for crypto success have increased.

[GTO]

Thanks for sharing, RiderZone! Moving your post out to a new thread. A new thread means 100X the views & 100X the visibility in search engines, including Google. Will add to homepage later this week .

@ BHPians, if you should spot any good post in an existing thread that deserves its own new thread, please report the post and we'll move it out for greater visibility.

Thank you!

[ajayc123]

With no real assets to back the bitcoin or equivalent, to me it appears to be a scam riding on the human weakness ‘Greed’ and the ‘Greater Fool Theory’. I am staying away.

[Axe77]

Hilarious. Check.
Instructive. Check.

I just loved this post RiderZone - everything from your writing style, to your analysis and even the approach to the analysis.

Personally haven’t been too enamoured by the crypto mania for largely similar concerns albeit based more on gut feel than any active process of inquiry. Your post reaffirms some of my underlying cynicism on the subject.

[jkrishnakj]

You know what RiderZone, I’m also one among those millions who wanted to get into Bitcoin and never did, during the 2016-17 times. I’ve heard enough stories from some of my friends who claim to have made a ‘killing’ but I haven’t ‘really’ witnessed anything that alluded to their so called ‘killing’.

What I loved about what you wrote was the perspective comparing the Nigerian prince emails and I must say, it looks like a very compelling argument.

Now, have I learnt enough about it - NO
Have I invested - Yes and lost 40% (10k was what I tried with a few coins)
Will I ever see that as a channel of investment ever for the future times - NO


I’m happy with the post office savings and fixed deposits and a few mutual funds. I’m happy and secure. I don’t ever want to claim that I’ve made a ‘killing’. Easy money has never come my way.

[bhairavp]

I had mined about 28 bitcoins in 2013, on my personal computer at home.
Exchanged them for about 1200USD worth Amazon vouchers, got a brand new camera.

If I had held on till 2020, would have been able to buy a new house in South Mumbai with the proceeds. Oh well.

[SoumenD]

I just invested a few thousands due to FOMO only earlier this year via Vauld. It has a way to invest those coins as FD as well. But now when crypto market crashed and I wanted to average out by putting in more, they don’t even allow investing through INR anymore. Weird!!! So now my investment is at -50% and I have no way to average out.

My cousin (18 year old) is very bullish on crypto and I see folks like him being way more interested in crypto than 30/40+ generation. They keep talking about air-drop and all where they can earn some fractional coins for free. They spend quite sometime trading (small amount) on Binance, CoinDCX pro etc. I feel am too lazy to even try and understand. Yeah am around late 30s & MFs is as far as I get

[neeraj0272]

No government will ever give up it's sovereign right to control currency.
That's all one need to keep in mind to know whether private mediums of currency like bitcoin or crypto will succeed.
At best governments may introduce their own new mediums of currency including bitcoins/crypto etc.

[Livnletcarsliv]

A great reminiscent post indeed! An excellent story style and command of language.

I was in the same boat years back (even now). Everything and everyone related to Crypto looked alien to me. And of course, I was damn lazy to let myself into this world of techno-geeks vs techno-fools (I am the later).

One fine day, finally in 2021, I wanted to test the waters with bare minimum investments (few thousands in single digit). Invested in Crypto - Bitcoin. I don't know who and what is the reason - our government was not happy with me trying to make some money. Some telepathy or some thing that the finance minister announced the restructuring and reforming the Crypto market in India that made to sell the Crypto immediately with a loss of few hundreds.

Crypto investment is still a rocket science to 99% of the people around the world. Unfortunately, we (common man) fall in this 99% and this 1% are the one who created this and of course made/making money as well. The 99% of us are techno-fools and and money minting 1% are techno-geeks.

[apachelongbow]

Let me ask a basic, fundamental, may be even a stupid question. If crypto currency is so good, why peg it to an actual currency? Why all cryptos are valued in us dollars? The moment you peg your currency to the dollar, you are assimilating all the features of that currency.
What is the basis for Bitcoin to be at usd 20,000 today? What are the assets backing it? How much legitimate business transaction is actually taking place in crypto?

[warrioraks]

Great post RiderZone and a very unique perspective. Especially the corollary between the self filtering mechanism employed by Nigerian royal family and Crypto influencers

Governments all over use monopolistic fiat currencies to exercise control over citizens. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where they will allow de-centralised unregulated coins to flourish. It is a direct threat to the sovereign’s authority.

This basic point is enough to keep me away from the fancy world of crypto. Bitcoins and similar in its current avatar are probably the biggest pyramid schemes we have seen in the history of human kind.

[am1m]

I was too scared/didn't understand enough to invest in crypto either earlier. So these sentiments resonate with me. But I also can't help feeling that perhaps we're just being a bit too smug because of our age. I mean if you asked my grandfather, he's say pretty much the same thing about the stock market or mutual funds and he'd swear by FDs or real estate. Plus I personally know someone who's not a speculator or high-risk investor, a normal salaried employee who bought some bitcoin way back when he was in the US as an experiment because he was intrigued with blockchain, not expecting it to go anywhere. He can retire anytime he wants now, even with the crash. So yeah I get the drift- there are certainly a lot of people who have been scammed and are trying to scam others into pouring money. But is it really a ponzi scheme? Or did we all just miss the early boat and are now being smug/making a virtue out of our not having invested for whatever other reasons, in hindsight?

(Just playing devil's advocate here, I still wouldn't invest in something I don't understand and I still don't understand crypto- but that could apply to any asset class! And there are certainly several who understand those.)

[gnome]

With bitcoin, it is best to treat it as a "lottery" not an investment. I put in only enough money that I am comfortable losing. The hard part is deciding on timing of when to buy or sell.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by am1m

Or did we all just miss the early boat and are now being smug/making a virtue out of our not having invested for whatever other reasons, in hindsight?

No, this is just a case of calling emperor has no clothes. Let me share what Economics Nobel winner said about crypto.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/tr...n-6920831.html