Great points. Ultimately, it seems to boil down to deferring tax to the future instead of the present resulting in higher gains for everybody, and having the freedom to choose on how to give back. Both of which seem like the obvious after further consideration.
I'm really curious about your story. Would you be interested in continuing this discussion over email?
Comparing an educated crypto investment with a negative EV gambling game seems a bit too farfetched. I'm quite considerate and picky investor, and did extensive research beforehand.
I do get what you are saying, but I think this is over-simplifying things. There were a lot of interesting facts and conclusions available to be made early on about the possibilities.
Again, extremely hard to say what the odds of failure still are and were in the past. And hard to say what my stance would be had I lost the initial investment. It's easy to rationalize the investment in hindsight.
This is always a good reminder. Then again, had I not done that investment or cashed out earlier, that 20k€ would be nowhere near 1M€. There simply doesn't exist many ways to achieve 50x ROI in <5 years. Seems like majority of people are happy with lower yield plans, but I personally would have not achieved my goals without some aggressive increase in wealth.
Hard to say what I would be saying had I lost everything though. It's easy for me to rationalise the decision now that it paid off. And yes, we have to remember to look at the graveyard too.
The non-linear utility of money puts an interesting twist on things though. The effort and risk one should take to achieve additional wealth seems to reduce logarithmically after a certain point. I guess that point seems to be further for me than most people, but I feel it's close now.
Wow, this advice is very valuable. I'll definitely investigate. Thank you.
Another interesting discussion is the ethical side of things. I do feel some obligation to pay back to my home country for things it has provided (free education, healthcare, etc.), many of which were financed with tax income.
But paying the whole amount from current and future gains would be tad too much. Also, would it be possible to achieve higher and more direct impact with dodging the taxes and distributing that money via philantrophic means? Just some questions I'm thinking about in the whole picture.
I did some calculations about owning your own apartment vs renting. At least in Finland with the current housing prices and interest rates, the difference in a 25 year period between owning and renting was surprisingly small. Personally, I'm happy to pay rent and have the money in more liquid assets as well as enjoy more freedom and being debt free.
I assume renting out would only be worse with the additional risk of having bad tenants.
Here in Finland, the status quo seems to be that you obviously save for your own apartment as the first thing. From purely financial gains perspective, I couldn't find the rationale.
So easy to say in hindsight, right? I try not to be too hard on myself about past decisions. I bet you did the best decision you were capable of doing with the information you had at the time.
In Finland, the capital gains on cryptos are realised once you sell them for floating currencies (ie. USD or EUR). We pay 34% tax on the profit.
For example, I'd pay (1M€ - 20k€) x 34% = 333k€ of taxes on capital gains. I'm not sure how the taxation works if you try to dodge it by relocating to a more tax friendly zone. I've heard some horror stories about Finnish companies moving to Estonia for tax benefits only to be taxed with fines for the gains that the company made while it located in Finland. Would the same rationale apply for personal capital gains?
You can freely trade between cryptos, for example between BTC and ETH, without triggering the capital gains. The moment you leave cryptoland, I believe they use the first-in-first-out (FIFO) principle to calculate the profits.
I didn't have any magical crystal ball, like no one else did. The key transition point was moving the Bitcoins into the Ethereum. For me, Vitalik's early posts convinced me that Ethereum wasn't just another altcoin and it had great potential.
I didn't have any debt at that point and the traditional model of saving portion of salary and getting 4% annualized growth wasn't going to achieve the wealth I had in mind. So cryptocurrencies seemed like it had the huge upside potential I wanted and the worst-case scenario would have been that I'd lose the initial 20k€. I'm fairly opportunistic and risk-seeking. YMMV.
Hard to say what the probability of failure (ie. Bitcoin collapsing or the value of Ethereum being far less than the pre-sale price) has been.
Ethereum seems to have great potential to multiply its value in the next 12-24 months. I think the probability of ETH going from 1B$ -> 2-5B$ market cap is far greater than BTC going from 10B$ to 20-50B$ due to several factors.
My line of thinking has been that in order for the 4% to be meaningful, you need to start with at least a million. Saving a portion from the salary and getting 4% annualized growth just wouldn't have ever achieved the type of financial wealth I had in mind. YMMV.
But now I feel like the time has come to diversify and start reducing the risks. Going from 20$ to 10$ per ETH definitely hurt.
Just turned 30. Invested most of my savings (20k€) into Bitcoin several years ago, and then converted everything to Ethereum in the pre-sale. Those 20k€ are worth roughly 1M€ pre-tax at the current rates.
Started a fintech startup three years ago and we are close to a liquidation event that would net ~1.5M€ pre-tax.
Right now, though, I have less than 10k€ in my bank account. Would be also really curious to hear how to convert that money into sustainable passive income.
Spending 3k€ per month for the next 30 years would be about 1M€. Seems like having <5M€ is far from the "go bananas" type of wealth, but it can definitely be enough to achieve FI.
Would love to hear your general thoughts on Modafinil. One of the things they say is that it has minor side-effects and that tolerance builds up really slow, if at all, in comparison. What's your take on it, empirically?
The expected value for this bet is $1,000,000,000/4,294,967,296 ~= $0,23.
Say, it takes 10 minutes to make the bet. That would compute to the average gain of 6*$0,23 = $1,38/hour.
This disregarded the $100,000 paid to the top 20 as well as the possible psychological effects from making such bet, such as a positive outlook on life for the duration of the bet, etc.
My girlfriend has Ankylosing spondylitis. The exact cause of the continued inflammation is unknown. It has been hypothesised that the cause is a gut bacteria feeding off of gluten/starch/sugar/etc.
We are super excited about trying out an elimination diet with Soylent, but knowing the real possibility of placebo and other factors, such as stress, we are trying to come up with a systematic way to measure the effect of Soylent diet on the wellbeing.
Do you have any advice on how to go about conducting such a (food) experiment, what and how to track things and anything else to consider? Thanks!
It took some time to get used to, but now I don't even notice it. Totally worth the adjustment period. New people always seem to comment how orange/warm my screen looks.