Totally agree with this. One of the central arguments that Nassim Taleb presented in his book, Fooled by Randomness. His background was in statistics and stock option trading at a hedge fund. This book really helped me to stop saying or thinking "Man I should've done ___" (because hindsight is 20/20). Now when those thoughts come to me, I stop and think back "Could I have known what I know now then?"No, not at all, I think that's stupid also. If you just like beanie babies or baseball cards and just have fun collecting them, then more power to you. But as an investment? Here's the thing--for every silly anecdote about how someone made a fortune collecting something obscure, there are thousands of anecdotes about people who lost money collecting something obscure. Take your philosophy far enough and I'll show you a hoarder: all you need is a little more time, and then this junk will be worth a fortune, you'll show everyone, really. (As you weave your way between towers of urine soaked newspapers just waiting for the day.) The thing is, all the people who lost money were just as sure they knew the secret tricks to making a fortune as the ones who made money, they just weren't zapped by random chance at the right time. The human brain seems to be really good at convincing itself that anything good that happens is due to its own skill, while anything bad that happens is either bad luck or someone else's lack of skill.
Keep selling them shovels!!!The people who more consistently make money on this schlock are the middlemen who can skim off the transactions (and I don't mean by mining). That's why big investment companies getting in don't mean it's a good investment; it just means that they think they can fleece the sheep before it craters and that they think they've found a way to minimize their downside exposure. They're sometimes disastrously wrong about the latter, but the former tends to be all too easy--especially if they can trigger peoples' greed (you'll see this when there are sock puppets running around babbling about how much money there is to be made and how guaranteed the return is).
(There's a hidden lesson here for those who think a functioning society needs a super-secure non-repudiable anonymous public transaction ledger to move money around, but I won't belabor the point.)