As BTC reached new heights this week, hitting a record $5,000 recently, I'm sure all the "if onlys" and "what ifs" are running through our heads again, as they so often do each time it hits a new milestone. I'll be honest: they certainly run through mine. I was aware of Bitcoin right in its infancy. The first transaction for pizza, equivalent to well over $40,000,000 at the time of writing, still blows my mind. If only I had put in a couple of hundred pounds/bucks/euros. If only I had got my hands on as many as I could.
Number of bitcoin transactions per month. Image by Zhitelew (Own work), Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons
It's fun to daydream about the financial freedom that very early involvement in cryptocurrencies would have brought. A way to travel the world. A way to spend much more time with our families. Paying off debts – not just our own but those of loved ones too.
I reckon that many of us here on Steemit in its current era are the “maybe millionaires” – the group of people who came to certain cryptocurrencies way before they have truly matured, but who missed out on their thousand-fold percentage increases.
But you know what? I’m not bitter about it, and nor should you be. This is for two reasons:
Hindsight is 20/20
So you think you would’ve stashed away a couple of grand’s worth of BTC in 2010, and then just sat tight until now? How do you know that? The bottom line is: you don’t. You may have sold them off at a fraction of today’s prices. You may have doubled your money; perhaps you even may have made enough to pay off the car or a good chunk of the mortgage. But just because you got in at a good time is no guarantee that you would have stayed until a better time. It’s easy to make the right decisions when you know precisely what outcomes they will deliver.
There is nothing you can do to change it
Seriously. However it makes you feel, this is the truth, and more specifically, there is no point whatsoever investing your mental energy into things you cannot change. Ultimately, you can’t turn back time. (And if you could, you probably wouldn't need to care about cryptos because you would have a freakin’ time machine, which would be, er, pretty lucrative to say the least).
There is a Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
You cannot get anywhere in life if you are trying to live in the past. Move forward, and Steem on dear friends.