I think everyone who has dabbled with crypto currencies for a few years has at least one painful story like that. I sold all my ETH at 16 or 17 dollar a piece after the developers did the hard fork to steal back money from the DAO hacker, I really thought ETH would die because of that. Well, turns out it didn't die. While I could have made thousands of dollars selling my ETH now compared to the few hundred dollars I got back then, I still think it was the right choice at the time (and I made good use of the money).
I think that is the best way to think about it. I didn't make that choice in a vacuum, there was a reason I sold, I thought long about it. I also once owned 35 Bitcoin and sold them for about $100 (Spent would be the better word here than sold, I actually used Bitcoin to buy stuff, I didn't use it as an investment). Quite painful to realize how much money I'd have now if I I had held on to them. But again, at the time, the decision to spend the Bitcoin made sense, so it was kind of bad luck and not a mistake that I could have prevented, it only looks that way in hindsight, so it's nothing to keep fretting about forever.
Berating yourself only makes sense if you actually had access to information that would have changed your decision and didn't make use of that information. Otherwise, you made the best possible choice with the data you had on hand and that's not a mistake, even when it turns out you were wrong.
I've got one story like that too though, one that truly was a really stupid mistake. I sold 100 LTC for $1. In total, not per LTC. Selling for $1 is just stupid. I obviously didn't need $1 so badly that I had to sell, I could have just held on to them, there is no excuse for that particular bit of stupidity :)
Thanks for sharing your stories. It's nearly impossible to avoid all FOMO in this volatile crypto investing environment, right?
I think the best a person can do is to define their own principles (i.e. risk tolerance, goals, etc), and then act in a reasonably conservative manner. For me, that means paying off debt before making major crypto investments, which is PAINFUL man. but hopefully it pays off in the long run.
Couldn't agree more :) Risk tolerance is really important. Too many people invest more money than they can afford to loose because there is always this idea of "I'll get rich!". And yes, that can happen. But you might not want to bet your life savings on that. Personally, I only ever spent small amounts on crypto currencies. I bought 34 Ethereum for $10 for example in the Ethereum pre-sale. Then sold them for $500 (and could have made $8000 if I had sold them right now). Did the same with Storj, MaidSafe and a few others and by only spending $10 on each, I made thousands without any real risk.
So you really don't need to invest huge sums if you're an early bird. And new crypto coins are created all the time so you can always still be an early bird. I go for coins that actually add something new and useful to the table, like Ethereum, like Steem. Things that aren't just a cryptocurrency, but make use of the blockchain for something that adds value behind the coin so to speak.
Time to invest in steeme now that its cheap and DO NOT SELL IT!