If I could see into the past -a boring story about money

I try not to play the what-if game.

But then I start to, and I can't seem to help it.

So I make rules for myself. I try to only say what-if I made choices that I might actually have made.

Like, we can all say to ourselves "what if I had purchased X coin when it was X"

Duh, that's no fun. We didn't do it for whatever reason.

Of course, there are also less clearcut what-ifs. Like, what if I had moved to L.A. right out of High School? That one seems a little possible. Like, a different universe, but still me. Who knows what would have happened. I'm happily married, and it's less likely that I would have met @stinawog if I had done that. But our meeting was very coincidental in the first place, and things happen all the time to throw two people together, so who knows. The big reason for this question is that I suspect I was further to the right of the bell curve where the x axis is acting ability and the y axis is number of people/role available for the same casting type as you. Like, I don't think I've become a worse actor, but I think, as I've gotten older, the number of people who can do my job as well as I can has grown. I was in the top 1% of professional teen actors in the world, and now I'm merely in the top 10%... or something. I'm making this up without humility. Anyways, who knows.

But then there are the what-if game that we play with financial decisions. The first one is, of course, what if I had bought into BTC when I heard about it. The thing I did instead (because I hate risk) was try to figure out how to mine it... but that was a non-starter. Even at the lower difficulty of 6 years ago, my laptop was just not good enough, and while I'm technologically savvy enough to do anything an average user can do, I'm not dedicated enough to figure it out. I didn't have any friends doing it to guide me. Of course OF COURSE, I should have persevered, and figured out how to buy a little... but maybe not. This was before Mt. Gox, so maybe I would have lost it all. Regardless, that's not the fun game to play.

The fun and frustrating games to play are, when I entered the litecoin market, should I have just bought as much as my credit cards could hold? Yes, maybe. I even considered it. It seemed not super risky. I could have sold them off when my cc bill came due, and I would have still come out 33% up. Magic money. But who knew?

And the second one is, once I learned of Robinhood, I put a bunch of money in stocks because I was excited about dividends. They seemed safe. I shoulda bought BTC at its low of 1800 instead of stocks, and then I'd have more than doubled it all since then. To be fair, I probably would have sold at 3400, and not made as much as it is now, but... And that whole BCH thing got me. I thought the split was priced in, and that I shouldn't buy until a crash right after the split. Which, of course, didn't happen.

Fool that I am.