The first bitcoin transaction ever was by man who bought two pizzas. That arrangement would be worth over a $100 million today. Regret was baked into Bitcoin from the beginning. Last year, somewhat inexplicably, Bitcoin’s price rose more than 1,000 percent. That number has since dipped, but a single bitcoin is still, as of this writing, worth around $11K.
This boom has turned a small number of people into millionaires, modestly enriched a somewhat less small number of early adopters, and sent millions of others into a paroxysm of envy and regret. If you’d never heard of Bitcoin, you kicked yourself for not paying closer attention; if you’d treated Bitcoin as a joke, you probably still did that. Maybe you recognized right away that it was all unstable and unpredictable and not for you, while also privately daydreaming about how you might’ve spent your Bitcoin millions. Of course, for those investors who tried to jump in on the wave when it hit an all time high in December, regret means losing half of your money because you were too late.
How mad at yourself should you be for missing out on that perfectly timed investment? Is your lack of foresight here worth regretting? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to cryptocurrency specialists, psychologists, an interfaith minister, and others to help us answer those questions, and guide us through these trying times.
Brian Patrick Eha
Journalist and author of How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the Fight for the Future of Finance
You know that Marilyn Monroe quote, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best”? The same could be said of Bitcoin. So one reasonable answer is that you shouldn’t regret it at all—if you weren’t the sort of person to recognize Bitcoin’s value in 2012, when its market price was less than $10, or in 2013, or in 2014 or 2015, there is no sense in kicking yourself now.
A lot of people missed it: Another Bitcoin journalist is on the record as saying he didn’t initially expect digital currency to have any more staying power than the fad for pet rocks. Way, way more people missed the boat than got onboard—and plenty of early passengers bailed out when the going got rough. Even the ship’s crew (to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point), which is to say the early adopters and Bitcoin miners and startup founders and software developers who were advancing and advocating for the technology back then, had no guarantee they wouldn’t run aground. Along the way, there were plenty of reasons to doubt Bitcoin’s success: There were price bubbles and crashes and scams and arrests and epic meltdowns, which is what made it such an engaging story to tell.
While it may be too late to make a pile of money on Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have a lot of room left to run. The speculative frenzy and resulting press has obscured just how remarkable these innovations are, how smart and hardworking many of their creators are, and how varied and significant are the needs and problems—techies call them “use cases”—they are trying to solve. This isn’t investment advice, but anyone with an interest should not only research Bitcoin but look beyond Bitcoin to other projects, such as Ethereum, Dash, Zcash, Golem, Augur, and SALT. Some are trying to be a powerful new medium of exchange, while others are meant to power software applications or provide users with new financial tools. Many are still early, too early to have proven themselves, but the excitement among those in the know is palpable.