Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. “They’re the future of money!” they said. I replied saying that I’d rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.
“You don’t want to get left behind, do you?” They countered.
That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what’s the point of “getting in early”? It’ll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.
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100%. If I “get in early” on something, it’s because that thing interests me, not because I’m betting on its future. With a hundred new ideas a day and only one of them “making it”, it’s a fools’ game to try to jump on board every bandwagon that comes along.
With cryptocurrencies, though, I’m fortunate enough to have an even better comeback at the cryptobros that try to shill me whatever made-up currency they’re “investing” in today: I’ve already done better than they ever will, at them.
When Bitcoin first appeared, I took a technical interest in it. I genuinely never anticipated it’d take off (I made the same incorrect guess with MP3s, too!), but I thought it was a fun concept to play about with. The only Bitcoins I ever paid for must’ve been worth an average of 50p each, or so.
I sold my entire wallet of Bitcoins when they hit around £750 each. I know a tulip economy when I see one, I thought. Plus: I was no longer interested in blockchains now I was seeing how they were actually being used: my interest had been entirely in the technology and its applications, not in the actual idea of a currency!
Sure, I kick myself ocassionally, given that I later saw the value rise to tens of thousands of pounds each. But hey, I was never in it for the money anyway.
So yeah, I tell cryptobros; I already made a 1500% ROI on cryptocurrency. And no, I’m not buying any cryptocurrencies any more. Whatever they think “getting in early” was, they’re wrong, because I was there years ahead of them and I wasn’t even doing it to “get in early”; I did it because it was interesting. And honestly, isn’t that a better story to be able to tell?
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Yup, that’s the attitude I’m taking.
I play with new AI technologies, sometimes. I don’t do it because I’m afraid of being left behind because – as you say – if a technology is transformative, we’ll all get to catch up eventually.
Do you think that people who had smartphones first are benefitting today because they “got in early” on something that later became mainstream?
Of course they’re not. Their experience is eventually exactly the same as everybody else’s, just like it was for everybody who “got in early” on hype trains whose final station came early, like Compuserve GO-words, WAP, Beenz.com, WebTV, the CueCat, m-Commerce, HD-DVD, the JooJoo, or Google+.
I got in early on the Commodore 64. Fat lot if good it’s doing me now.
Really enjoyed this post.