## LESSWRONGLW

It is a little bit unfair to say that buying 10 bicoins was everything you needed to do. I owned 10 bitcoins, and then sold them at a meager price. Nothing changed as a result of me merely understanding that buying bitcoins was a good idea.

What you really needed was to sit down and think up a strict selling schedule, and also commit to following it. E.g. spend $100 on bitcoin now, and later sell exactly 10% of your bitcoins every time that 10% becomes worth at least$10,000 (I didn't run the numbers to check if these exact values make sense, but you get the idea).

Upstream of not taking effective action was unwillingness to spend a few hours thinking hard about what would actually be smart to do if the hypothetical proved true.

Showing 3 of 5 replies (Click to show all)
7[deleted]2yI strongly agree. Despite appearances, I wouldn't say someone with 10 bitcoin today has "won" at all. Winning means getting more of what you ultimately care about, like goods and services. You only win if you convert your bitcoin into goods or dollars at the right time. I am reminded of "buy low, sell high": an empty phrase that can sound deceptively like good investment advice.
10lexande2yI agree that this is the appropriate strategy to use when adding an investment to your portfolio, but note that if applied to Bitcoin it did not yield the sort enormous gains that motivated this post. So if you think the Bitcoin example should lead us to update away from outside-view-motivated beliefs about our ability to spot market inefficiencies/investment opportunities, you should probably also endorse updating away from outside-view-motivated portfolio strategies like picking an allocation and rebalancing. I just ran some numbers on this. Suppose you had $100k in savings, read the 2011 LessWrong post and were convinced to adopt a 95% cash 5% bitcoin allocation at the end of Q1 2011, and thereafter rebalanced on the last Monday of every quarter. (Assume for simplicity that your non-Bitcoin holdings earn zero interest, that you don't add or remove any money from your total savings during the period, and that you successfully avoided having your BTC stolen in MtGox etc.) If you ignore taxes, then at the end of 2017 you'd be left with$414k, which is decent but not life-changing. Further, since you're rebalancing every quarter you're paying a lot of taxes if you're in the US; assuming a federal+state short term capital gains rate of 30% you'd end up with $284k. (By only rebalancing yearly you can decrease your tax liability but you miss out on some of the big rallies; assuming a 15% long-term capital gains rate you end up with$258k.) By contrast just buying the same $5k of BTC in Q1 2011 and hodling until the end of 2017 would leave you with around$75M (perhaps $60M after tax), which is more like the sort of "winning" Scott seems to be thinking about here. But how would you know to do that rather than, say, selling in mid-2011 for$100k?

A plausible strategy would be to buy say 100 bitcoins for $1 each, then sell 10 at$10, 10 at $100, and so on. With this strategy you would have made$111,000 and hold 60 bitcoins.

# 291

Wei Dai, one of the first people Satoshi Nakamoto contacted about Bitcoin, was a frequent Less Wrong contributor. So was Hal Finney, the first person besides Satoshi to make a Bitcoin transaction.

The first mention of Bitcoin on Less Wrong, a post called Making Money With Bitcoin, was in early 2011 - when it was worth 91 cents. Gwern predicted that it could someday be worth "upwards of $10,000 a bitcoin". He also quoted Moldbug, who advised that: If Bitcoin becomes the new global monetary system, one bitcoin purchased today (for 90 cents, last time I checked) will make you a very wealthy individual...Even if the probability of Bitcoin succeeding is epsilon, a million to one, it's still worthwhile for anyone to buy at least a few bitcoins now...I would not put it at a million to one, though, so I recommend that you go out and buy a few bitcoins if you have the technical chops. My financial advice is to not buy more than ten, which should be F-U money if Bitcoin wins. A few people brought up some other points, like that if it ever became popular people might create a bunch of other cryptocurrencies, or that if there was too much controversy the Bitcoin economy might have to fork. The thread got a hundred or so comments before dying down. But Bitcoin kept getting mentioned on Less Wrong over the next few years. It's hard to select highlights, but one of them is surely Ander's Why You Should Consider Buying Bitcoin Right Now If You Have High Risk Tolerance from January 2015. Again, people made basically the correct points and the correct predictions, and the thread got about a hundred comments before dying down. I mention all this because of an idea, with a long history in this movement, that "rationalists should win". They should be able to use their training in critical thinking to recognize more opportunities, make better choices, and end up with more of whatever they want. So far it's been controversial to what degree we've lived up to that hope, or to what degree it's even realistic. Well, suppose God had decided, out of some sympathy for our project, to make winning as easy as possible for rationalists. He might have created the biggest investment opportunity of the century, and made it visible only to libertarian programmers willing to dabble in crazy ideas. And then He might have made sure that all of the earliest adapters were Less Wrong regulars, just to make things extra obvious. This was the easiest test case of our "make good choices" ability that we could possibly have gotten, the one where a multiply-your-money-by-a-thousand-times opportunity basically fell out of the sky and hit our community on its collective head. So how did we do? I would say we did mediocre. According to the recent SSC survey, 9% of SSC readers made$1000+ from crypto as of 12/2017. Among people who were referred to SSC from Less Wrong - my stand-in for long-time LW regulars - 15% made over $1000 on crypto, nearly twice as many. A full 3% of LWers made over$100K. That's pretty good.

On the other hand, 97% of us - including me - didn't make over $100K. All we would have needed to do was invest$10 (or a few CPU cycles) back when people on LW started recommending it. But we didn't. How bad should we feel, and what should we learn?

Here are the lessons I'm taking from this.

1: Our epistemic rationality has probably gotten way ahead of our instrumental rationality

When I first saw the posts saying that cryptocurrency investments were a good idea, I agreed with them. I even Googled "how to get Bitcoin" and got a bunch of technical stuff that seemed like a lot of work. So I didn't do it.

Back in 2016, my father asked me what this whole "cryptocurrency" thing was, and I told him he should invest in Ethereum. He did, and centupled his money. I never got around to it, and didn't.

On the broader scale, I saw what looked like widespread consensus on a lot of the relevant Less Wrong posts that investing in cryptocurrency was a good idea. The problem wasn't that we failed at the epistemic task of identifying it as an opportunity. The problem was that not too many people converted that into action.

2: You can only predict the future in broad strokes, but sometimes broad strokes are enough

Gwern's argument for why Bitcoin might be worth $10,000 doesn't match what actually happened. He thought it would only reach that level if it became the world currency; instead it's there for...unclear reasons. I don't count this as a complete failed prediction because it seems like he was making sort of the right mental motion - calculate the size of the best-case scenario, calculate the chance of that scenario, and realize there's no way Bitcoin wasn't undervalued under a broad range of assumptions. 3: Arguments-from-extreme-upside sometimes do work I think Moldbug's comment aged the best of all the ones on the original thread. He said he had no idea what was going to happen, but recommended buying ten bitcoins. If Bitcoin flopped, you were out$10. If it succeeded, you might end up with some crazy stratospheric amount (right now, ten bitcoins = \$116,000). Sure, this depends on an assumption that Bitcoin had more than a 1/10,000 chance of succeeding at this level, but most people seemed to agree that was true.

This reminds me of eg the argument for cryonics. Most LWers believe there's a less than 10% chance of cryonics working. But if it does work, you're immortal. Based on the extraordinary nature of the benefits, the gamble can be worth it even if the chances of success are very low.

We seem to be unusually fond of these arguments - a lot of people cite the astronomical scale of the far future as their reason for caring about superintelligent AI despite the difficulty of anything we do affecting it. These arguments are weird-sounding, easy to dislike, and guaranteed to leave you worse off almost all the time.

But you only need one of them to be right before the people who take them end up better off than the people who don't. This decade, that one was Bitcoin.

Overall, if this was a test for us, I give the community a C and me personally an F. God arranged for the perfect opportunity to fall into our lap. We vaguely converged onto the right answer in an epistemic sense. And 3 - 15% of us, not including me, actually took advantage of it and got somewhat rich. Good work to everyone who succeeded. And for those of us who failed - well, the world is getting way too weird to expect there won't be similarly interesting challenges ahead in the future.