> early adopters were heavily subsidised for the risk they were taking
This is amusing. I mined eight bitcoins in the very, very early days using my standard off-the-shelf windows PC with no GPU. It was agonizingly slow, but it worked just fine. There was zero risk. It was a fun thing to do, silly even, which is why I didn't even bother backing up the disk those BTC were on, so I'm in the keys-are-lost category.
But risk? Each BTC was worth pennies, where was the risk?
It doesn't even have to die out in order to ruin you. As you mentioned, you can go bankrupt from insolvency. You don't even have to directly use leveraged trading to purchase the Bitcoin to get bit by this. It just has to become a too-large proportion of your assets on your balance sheet, and the space it occupies feeling comfortable enough that you can take out as many loans as you want for other things you need.
"Because no way am I killing my golden goose, but I might as well enjoy life"
(PSA: Pay off your loans when you can, it may occasionally look like this bull run can never end. It will always end!)
This is amusing. I mined eight bitcoins in the very, very early days using my standard off-the-shelf windows PC with no GPU. It was agonizingly slow, but it worked just fine. There was zero risk. It was a fun thing to do, silly even, which is why I didn't even bother backing up the disk those BTC were on, so I'm in the keys-are-lost category.
But risk? Each BTC was worth pennies, where was the risk?