You sir, are a smart, smart man. Allow me a little leeway and meandering a bit to explain exactly why.

Sadly, many (almost all) friends and acquaintances of mine have not heeded my pleas for them to "get some skin in the game." But I can understand why. Our national impulses are towards stasis. We literally hate losses WAY more than equivalent gains. Losing hurts way more than similar winning. I was a shitty hedge fund trader because I get too emotional about my investments. Most people do, which is why probabilistically structured zero-sum games like day-trading and poker are profitable in the long-term for only 5% of people.

I was tutored by a luminary in the poker game back in the day on how to apply the Nash Equilibrium to single table tournament poker (and with a little finesse, multi-table tourneys). That's great. But lots of people (relatively speaking) can understand that stuff. That didn't make a player special, or especially profitable.

Here's why, by way of example: I was the chipleader going into the final table of a 22,000 person tournament with life-changing top three money, and had just outplayed and eliminated the #1 ranked online player in the world a few moments back to amass a lot of chips. I was locked in and playing some of the best cards of my life. And then I outplayed players in 2 different hands right after the final table started, to get them to commit all their chips to the middle when 80-90% underdogs. I got horribly horribly unlucky in both spots and crashed out in 9th for ok money. That's poker. There is a certain class of people who are rare, who can literally play their next hand with completely optimal rationality. Me? I went on tilt and played like a tool at large stake cash games and lost the lion's share of my profit.

The point? I am not slating my friends for not being fast followers of my altcoin strategies. But I wish more would. Because they would, right now, be able to pay off their mortgages with altcoin gains if they listened to me. But they didn't. And most won't until all of this is mainstream.

So coming back around to my first statement: good on you for taking the leap. And I deeply, existentially mean that.

I'm big into philosophy. I actually named by firstborn son, Soren, after my hero Kierkegaard. He once wrote in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript:“What if, rather than speaking or dreaming of an absolute beginning, we speak of a leap?”

At some point in the human experience, all the reason in the world doesn't matter. Because we aren't reasonable beings. In fact the entire field of economics is based off of creating this idealized version of man, the "homo economicus" who makes totally rational decisions all of the time. (side note: this harvard white paper is one of the best things I've ever read about the upcoming AI revolution. AI literally perfects extant economic theory: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/25622971/_aiEcon.pdf

We use reason as a fundamental tool, and far, far better than any other species, to be sure. But as Einstein said “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

And so, given all of modernity weighing itself upon you: to truly, intuitively take on board a given point of view back before it had much rational merit in terms of popularity.....you deserve an absurd amount of credit.

Hey felixir!

Great to have you visit our forum. It has indeed been a long time since I saw you and got you to sign up to our "CRISP for Students program". The funny thing about the program, is that the 500 DNotes you received were probably worth some 2-3 dollars max at the time. Now those same 500 are worth more than one 100 US dollars. Not bad for just signing up an email account online huh! Back at that time, it wasn't common at all for people to hold Bitcoin, and I was surprised to hear you had some.

Do continue to drop us a line time to time!