@JJG
I was a lot worse in 2014 as we were slicing downwards like a knife through hot butter. I invested £xx,000 of my hard earned fiat & I thought for a long time that I’d seriously fucked up (obviously I’ve been buying ever since but my maximum fear came in 2014).
Obviously that all turned out well & I’m sitting on huge profits atm, more than I could ever achieve in life anywhere else probably.
Anyhow, I felt that I had been making decent investments all of my life, but I tended to invest in index funds and things like that and also I tended not to venture out too much, but even before I had gotten into bitcoin in late 2013, some of my investments had gone up 30% or more in some years, and did not perform as well in other years, but still overall I was ONLY getting a return of an average of about 6% per year, and I have not completely gotten rid of those traditional investments (many of them index funds that are tied into 401ks), but they still are only returning in about an 6% per year average.
So, I figured that even if bitcoin returned a bit less than 6%, at least it seems to have a decent sized asymmetric bet component that also allows a hedge against my dollar investment and nothing else had even come close, even though I used to consider that gold could be in the hedge category, but not necessarily in the asymmetric category.
So, anyhow, it seems to me (and you seem to recognize it too) that largely, historically regular pleebs did not tend to have access to these kinds of investments.
I have a very similar story-a good IRA+regular account, was not satisfied with the fact that we have very limited investment opportunities there (no private companies, etc.)
I fully realized it when FB went public at 100-120bil valuation (BTW, AMZN only at $1 bil, but in a better time for regular investors).
There were literally dozens of funds which "feasted" on FB from a few mil to 120 bil.
I thought that it is a good time to start looking at asymmetrical deals and bitcoin was the first and the largest by far. I dabbled in others, to a limited degree (call it a hedge).
That said, I feel quite holistic about it. By selling a small part, I might be widening the circle, hopefully.
TL;DR bitcoin investment is like a private equity deal on a very promising venture. You can never get these (in bulk), unless you are Bono, lol.