What should someone who has made millions from BTC do?

That is the problem with shares as well.
I think that's a very good point. One of the stand out items with crypto is that it has been a retail phenomenon. Some folks seem to be appalled at a lack of investor savvy from retail-based market participants. Why is this such a surprise? Retail, whether in stocks or digital assets are not going to have the same approach as professional investors or institutional investors. Many (myself included) didn't have any direct involvement with equities prior to getting involved with crypto. If one is to look at it positively, its an opportunity to bring folks further towards a saving and investing mindset - and to learn the basics along the way. And I'll just add that market participants include the complete spectrum. That may include the entirely reckless - but it's neither reasonable nor accurate to assume they all sit at this extreme end of that spectrum.
 
Not just digital assets and equities either. Since property is the investment of choice for the Irish 'retail' investor you've a whole slew of people who have no idea what they're doing, and are doing it with leverage too. In my experience they have no idea how much they're actually paying for their property since they've no idea of what the total interest over the mortgage lifetime will be and don't even know how to calculate their profit since they don't know the difference between cash flow and profit.
 
That is the problem with shares as well.

I have sold shares when they increased, not because I was making a call on their value, but because I had become overweight in them.

Rationally, I know it's the right thing to do. But then the shares continue climbing and I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I regret having sold them but on the other, I am glad that they are still rising as I still have a substantial holding.

Brendan

I agree, but I do think that there’s a generational thing whereby younger people have high conviction that “this time it’s different” whereas more seasoned investors think about things like sizing and stop-losses.

With large gains on Bitcoin, or anything, it’s about risk/reward. To answer the question posed by the thread, maybe look at becoming non-resident or sell a portion of the holding to de-risk?

The problem is that most BTC investors think these concepts are archaic.
 
They only see upside. Classic naive investor behaviour.

Let’s say they have €3m and sell €2.7m and keep €300k.

The mania around this rubbish is such that they see the perceived loss of a bigger gain if it goes 10x rather than the downside protection.
Good forbid they sell, live the life of a millionaire but lose out on the chance to have paper wealth of €27m while still being a PAYE wage monkey.
 
What I'd say to this guy. Is the Dunning-Kruger effect is one of the most important aspects of investing and I would point any person who's experienced a windfall type return in a speculative investment where on foot of that windfall they feel some level of expertise has been achieved...maybe it has or maybe it hasn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

The difference between a professional investor and a amateur one - is not how much money one can make when they are right (or lucky) but rather how much they lose when they are wrong (or unlucky). The math of losing money is a brutal - you experience a 50% permanent loss of capital you now require an alternative investment to double in value just to get back to break even. Finding doubles where you are not exposing yourself to large amounts of risk are very hard to find. Perhaps an index fund might, might return 10% p/a...but good luck....your now waiting 7yrs to get back to zero.

The world is full of investors, crypto and otherwise, who were lucky three times or even four times in a row and got killed on their fifth outing. Zero by way of a hundred is very common outcome for a retail investor who thinks they know what they're doing for a while precisely because they don't know, what they don't know.

Investing in the very short run is a mixture of luck and skill over the long pull it tilts aggressively to skill. Some are smart, realize their good fortune and have a Dunning-Kruger epiphany and do the hard work of acquiring the skill of investing, risk management, knowing where you have an edge or where you do not...others, more rarely, cash in their windfall and leave happy realizing their good fortune relative to their skill level and knowing that they have no interest in truly becoming expert...others, more commonly, reveal themselves to be what they always were......congenital gamblers who were unknowingly on a roll but mistook it for expertise/insight they didn't actually have.

The truly skilled investor risk manages his positions and is unforgiving around managing the downside and cutting off the tails and most importantly only playing in games where he/she has an edge. If you've made three million in crypto and are still 100% in crypto despite all the evidence of counterparty risk, volatility, market structure problems, collapses, rug pulls, lack of disclosures, insider trading, acutal liquidity vs. perceived liquidity, market manipulation you've failed a very important test of risk management at the first inning. Perhaps you'll get away with but my bet is you won't.

Put more simply ZERO by way of three million awaits every man who stays at a poker table where they have no edge or in the casino where the croupier is pocketing his carry on each spin of the wheels.

Crypto most resembles a casino to me - so little economic value is being created in consumable goods and service that people are paying for (16yrs in now....not a single product or service I use or my company uses directly or tangentially is underpinned by blockchains or tokenomics).......the product being provided here is digital speculation pure and simple......for which various brokers/exchanges/token & white paper promoters will take first all the initial investment and then two or perhaps even 3% transaction fee on an on-going basis until all the money is gone....in zero sum games where no overriding economic value is being created....the only winner, over the long pull, is the croupier. This crypto three millionaire needs to realize that.
 
Having been in a somewhat similar situation to the guy mentioned here (but a much smaller amount of crypto) I fully understand why he doesn't want to sell it. I got into crypto purely out of curiosity when I first read about it and spent hundreds buying bitcoin at the time. Over the years I have cashed some amounts out for major life events (wedding, car, house deposit etc) but never for diversifying into other investments. I'm genuinely interested in the technology behind crypto and know next to nothing about conventional markets, it has been hugely successful for me over ~10 years, I'm my mind diversifying into something I know nothing about seems a much bigger risk than just holding the crypto (and earning 10% Apr on decentralised lending protocols). Everyone has their own story and any time someone asks me if they should invest in crypto my answer is always a hard no or nothing more than you don't care about losing.

For more background for a large time I definitely had more net worth in crypto but the scales are probably tipped the other way now with mortgage cleared and savings starting to build (from my day job).
 
@lukas888 - you do understand that the odds of a horse can change, right? The Duke made his comment 10 days ago. I'd imagine the Duke understands the dynamics of betting better than most.
As a bookmaker in a former life i dont need you to educate me on betting odds. The odds on City Of Troy 10 days ago and in fact all winter
was 4/6 a long way from evens.Who knows what will happen on Saturday in Newmarket maybe end up evens or more likely his odds will shorten.
 
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