> I'm disappointed at the lack of millions I could have made (maybe, if I were a serious "hodlr")
He might say (and even believe) that he's looking at this purely from a dev standpoint, but it's just another investor angry over sour grapes.
We are all "investors" whether you/he likes it or not. Even if you choose to keep all your funds in cash stuffed in your mattress - that's just investing in fiat currency :)
The technology hasn't fallen back. It's evolved, even. (With the new fork we'll potentially even see competing alternate realities soon :D) Several devs I know are still happily tinkering away and following the progress of various cryptos - if you're "sick" over the sphere as it currently is, don't blame it on external forces.
Having been bitten by this aswell (had ~100 Bitcoins in 2011) the issue is less with being angry about sour grapes and more about being I'll prepared for the situation.
When I made the decision to sell my BTC, I was completely uneducated regarding the economics of investments and didn't have any family members with any sort of investment at all, so there was nothing pushing me in the right frame of mind to consider BTC anything other than another tech-toy I created.
So the anger that I heard from many in a similar boat mostly stems from this sentiment "hey I was there, I was a programmer, I understood this, but still the wrong people won out, as always." because one wasnt educated to be a evil capitalist/banker/investor. (The evil connotation stemming from group think especially in Europe where rich = villain)
We will see more of this kind of behavior the next time a big tech crunch happens and the VC dries out for years. "Why did nobody teach me how to raise capital when it was still plentiful?"...
And what's stopping him? There is nothing he could do yesterday that he cannot today, other than invest at yesterday's prices.
Hell, it's probably significantly easier to develop with today's landscape - services and libraries being much more numerous than before - so you're going to have to enumerate specifics if you want to argue otherwise.
IMO it seems weird to be interested in a technology which enables digital scarcity and therefore value, but not be interested in the value created by a practical implementation of the technology.
It's a strange enough position to me that it makes me question whether people who say this actually understand the technology.
Plus, who cares about other peoples' "greed"? There's lots of greed in traditional finance but that doesn't stop most of us from investing in stocks and that kind of thing. If I think GOOG is a sane, rational long-term investment while others are going bonkers over it, I don't see why that would change my mind.
You missed the part where he wrote that he was into this "as a developer, not as a speculator."