It would be easy to read about his success and think “ he’s so lucky” or “ why does nothing like that ever happen to me” or “ it’s not fair!”. In this case, Finumus made a million quid and I did not. Choices that compounded until they made it possible for him to place that fortuitous bitcoin buy order.
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Whatever the source of his wealth, Finumus had made a series of choices throughout his life. Perhaps he was an entrepreneur, high-income earner, inheritance beneficiary, married into money, successful investor, or a trust fund baby. Which suggests that before the point he decided to invest, Finumus had already done pretty well for himself. Which (likely) means that he breathes the rarified air of the top 1%. Which (probably) means that £100,000 was not a material portion of his net worth. Which (hopefully) means he had a £100,000 that he could afford to lose.
Which means he had a spare £100,000 available to invest, nearly 4x average annual earnings. That means he consciously decided to invest £100,000 of his hard-earned money into bitcoin. His bitcoin investment generated a 10x return, not a million-to-one lottery win. Yet let’s take a moment to reflect on how Finumus was able to make that million. True, Finumus lucked in again when he cashed out of his position, shortly before the herd became bored with bitcoin and rushed off to join the WallStreetBets driven Gamestop pump and dump scam. True, Finumus got lucky when the herd briefly attached their desires to the latest shiny object, a token of digital imaginings without any intrinsic value of its own, shortly after he had bought his stake. Many would write off the windfall as a fluke. The blogger Finumus recently made £1,000,000 in just four short months, by taking a punt on bitcoin. All leading to the point at which you find yourself today. Their effect and impact compounding over time. Doing nothing is also a choice, though not always a conscious one.Įvery significant financial event in your life can be traced back to just a small handful of choices. ChoicesĮverything we do involves choices. Yet if we fail to critically access their effectiveness, we simply emulate those errant evolutionary algorithms that resulted in the camel, Brexit, and generations of amateur investors who believe those expensive actively managed investments their broker recommends will outperform the market. The algorithm determined that few engineers had captained a women’s sporting team nor attended an all-female school, so it proceeded to screen out those candidates who had.Ī cancer detection algorithm decided the most efficient way to identify cancerous spots from photos was to look for the presence of a ruler, after all the training images supplied by oncologists contained one.įaith, hope, trust, and blind repetition underpin many of our beliefs and actions. It quickly evolved into a sarcastic feminist hating nazi.Īmazon built an AI to shortlist job applicants, using a blended picture of the perfect hire created by ingesting the CVs of thousands of successful tech bros. Microsoft once force-fed an AI chatbot millions of social media messages so it could become more adept at speaking like a millennial. Sometimes the same problem that the data “ scientist” was attempting to solve! Then, iteratively evolving a solution to a problem. The theory goes that if we feed a computer enough answers to a problem, eventually artificial intelligence will be able to tell us the best way to solve it.įirst, ingesting vast quantities of training data. Machine Learning is an interesting process. The Natural History Museum, law courts, and unemployment office keeps score of what did not. Who was sufficiently fast? Lucky? Smart? Or ruthless? Reddit trolls.Īctions without consequence. The theory goes that over time the optimal outcome will emerge.īillions of years after Georges Lemaître’s “ big bang” kick-started evolution, the species occupying the Earth today represent the current pinnacle of that evolutionary process.ĭonald Trump.