they've redefined it as "first amendment". Also they've convinced themselves that hypernationalistic fascism was somehow a project of the leftists the fascists rounded up and slaughtered.
It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for.
It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality.
Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.
You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse.
Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton...
There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless"
or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world"
If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts.
These are all absurd things that happened.
You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.
> There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
True, but you can readily point to the things they were actually dumb about. Most people, I'd argue, had the simpler reason of "I'm willing to bet this will grow in value over the long term, given that it's finite and it has some advantages over normal money" - and those people ended up being very, very right.
Likewise, even in those "absurd" examples you bring up, there would have been entirely rational reasons to believe them, like
- "Fossil fuels are unsustainable so the automotive market will start to shift toward electric cars; I should invest in electric car companies, even early-stage ones", or
- "I think Unix is the operating system of the future, and Apple taking Unix mainstream by rebranding NeXT will give Microsoft a run for their money", or
- "These CRTs are obsolete, but so are vinyl records and some crazy audiophiles still pay big bucks for those decades later, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to toss these out"
Even without the benefit of hindsight, those seemingly-crazy bets could have been - and probably were - predicted via entirely rational and intelligent thought processes. Those rational people likely didn't put all their eggs in any one of those baskets, but they didn't do so for Bitcoin, either, and still ended up rich.
> Crypto currency wasn't a new thing. There has been digital currencies going back decades. They had all failed and become worthless.
That didn't make them unreasonable bets. Lots of smart ideas fail to gain traction in spite of being smart ideas, for a variety of reasons. The electric car market (for example) had its share of false starts, too, in the late 19th Century and throughout the entirety of the 20th Century - and yet the people betting on EVs weren't irrational in doing so before the 21st Century, and still weren't irrational to do so afterward. It ain't like the problems with fossil fuels were completely unknown before 2000, after all.
There's been electric car companies and projects since the 1800s - literally hundreds of companies. They all failed at a rate of 100% for over a century.
If you're saying you saw Tesla as a success way before they put out there first car because of some rational eventuality, I don't believe you.
A surprising (?) number of medium-term Bitcoin HODL'ers held because they lost access to their holding during an exchange collapse (Mt Gox etc) and then regained access because of government action. The irony is poetic.
It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for.
It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality.
Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.