Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future of money was evidently wrong, they just happened to get the timing right. Getting lucky for the wrong reasons is not a good investment strategy.

Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on.

But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.

When you see people making money from something you did not get involved in, just remember: Someone will always be luckier than you, wealthier than you, etc. It doesn't matter. Measure yourself by your own life satisfaction, not by how others are doing.

That is why I agree with the sentiment as well. I use AI a little. Not too much. And I'm as swamped with work as ever because my focus is on legacy stacks, where AI is really not strong.

Others are pointing out that many also lost money, but I think we can say something even stronger, which is that the people that got rich only did so by taking the money of the people who lost money on it. If it's the future of money, you'll be able to buy in at a stable valuation, neither winning nor losing in the transition -- that's kind of a key property of money.

> Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's.

I know a few people who got wealthy by being early to crypto. None of them had the correct reasoning at the time: They thought BTC was going to become a common way to pay for things or that “the flippening” was going to see worldwide currency replaced with BTC. They thought they’d be kings in a new economy but instead they’re just moderately wealthy with a large tax bill they’re determined to dodge.

I know far more people who lost money on crypto, though. Some were even briefly crypto-rich but failed to sell before the crash or did things like double down on the altcoin bubble.

The second group had gone quiet about their crypto while the few people in the first group gloat and evangelize (because continued evangelization is necessary to keep their portfolios pumped). This creates an intense survivorship bias where it appears like all the crypto kiddies are wealthy, but a quiet mass of people who played with crypto are most definitely not.