Part of the problem is that people have no patience this days.
NEM is a perfect example of patience paying off. 4million NEM tokens per participant were shared to those who showed interest in January 2014 (airdrop). Now did they all hold their coins? Ofcourse not, but to the 1% that held on, 4 million coins is equivalent to 1.28million dollars as of today. That is a space of 3 years.
Some of you have been working your day jobs for 5 years, and you still haven't saved upto $100,000 cumulatively.
This is just an example where by a community stood its ground and saw a project succeed.
I read through the early thread of NEM and trust me, most of the things happening now have happened in the past. Its human nature.
Patience is truly a virtue as not everyone has it.
I just thought I should say this. Might give someone a better perspective.
My 2 cents.
Let me assume a role of advocatus diaboli here. The fact, that NEM price has risen to current level doesn’t mean that people who sell it early made a wrong decision. I’m not saying they did the right decision (I haven’t been around back then) but the price appreciation alone doesn’t automatically imply they did the wrong one.
If you have ever spent some time on the poker strategy forums, you would notice one interesting thing. If someone asks for a strategy advice, he always (and I mean always) omits the results of that particular hand. This omission is deliberate. Final results are irrelevant when assessing your decision making process as all of your decisions are made before final result is known. This is true for a poker, but it’s also true for investing.
In other words, when one is looking back and trying to review his past decisions he has to ask the following question: did I made a right decision based on all the information that was know to me when I was making that decision? You can’t look back at your decision and evaluate it based on some future information. I mean you can, but this is not a very constructive way to analyze things
I sold my Nems, it was dumb looking back at it. I spent so much time with that coin, then life took over.
Coin was released and I remember feeling that it was hurt by the delays. And then people were dumping, might as well get $300 for it. And even at the time it hurt selling it because of the time spent following it. Sold it and that big part of my life was over. Because I didn't want to feel that I missed out on $300 that I didn't even need.
So if you don't need the money, hold. So what if the price goes to zero, that $300 wasn't going to do anything for you. Keep the memory of the process, don't be greedy.
I also had a NEM stake. 1.125 million tokens I think. I traded them for less than one Bitcoin quite early on because at the time everyone else was dumping the crap out of it.
It was a valuable lesson and I won't make the same mistake again with Deep Onion.
It almost sounds bad, and I hate to say it, but I was pleased to see the coin value come down some. It has given me a chance to buy a bit more at a lower price. Fact is, when it was at $4.90-$5.00, I was kicking myself in a big way for not loading up more. The next time, it goes up, I hopefully wont feel that regret.
The way I see it - this coin has a long road ahead of it. Sure, I'm a moderator, so some might consider me biased, but if nothing else, I see first hand the community behind it. The effort that goes into it. The potential future ahead of it. There are tons of alt coins out there with barely a functioning wallet behind it. DeepOnion - maybe wont be the next Bitcoin, but def has a place up there at the top.
What I was hinting at was the concept of expected value. Let me give you some examples.
Let’s say you are at the casino sitting by the roulette table and you have $5000 you won’t mind loosing. Let’s assume that the roulette has singe zero wheel. For simplicity sake, assume that you have only two possible courses of action
- made a bet on number 7 and walk away with the result of your bet
- walk away and earn or loose nothing
To choose the correct action you have to evaluate both decision in terms of expected value. If you place a bet on number 7 you have 1/37 chance of winning $175000 and 36/37 chance of loosing $5000. Your expected value equals (1/37)*$175000 – (36/37)*$5000 =$4729.729 – $4864.864 = -$135.134. The expected value of the second decision equals 0. As you can see the correct decision here is to walk away.
Now, imagine that you didn’t make a bet, but a ball actually landed on 7 on that particular spin. Did you made the wrong decision? The answer is no. The thing to realize is that if you regularly make bets with negative expected value you will loose money in the long run. You might earn some money thanks to short term fluctuations and luck, but in the long run (and that’s only thing that matters) you will loose money.
Another example. Let’s say you’re at final betting round in poker hand and you’re holding a weak hand that can only beat bluffs. There are $900 dollars already in the pot and your opponent makes $100 bet. Let X be the probability the your opponent is bluffing. Let’s assume X = 9%
You have two possible course of action:
- give up and loose nothing (money already invested in the pot in previous betting rounds doesn’t count)
- call and either loose $100 with 91% probability or win $1000 with 9% probability
Expected value of the first decision is 0. Expected value of the second decision is 0.09*$1000 – 0.91*$100 = $90 – $91 = -$0.1. As you can see the correct decision here is to fold. Let’s assume that you actually did fold and after that your opponent showed a bluff and bragged about it. Did you make mistake? No, you played your cards exactly as you should have.
Of course neither investing nor poker for that matter are that simple. Expected value calculations tend to be much more complex mainly due to the fact you have to guesstimate values of all of those variables. But the underlying principle is the same: your goal is to choose the action with highest expected value.
NOTE: I’m not saying that you did the right thing when you sold NEM and I’m not saying that you should sell DeepOnions. I’m saying that evaluating your past decision based on some future information is not very constructive way to analyze things and will only lead to unnecessary regrets.
