I think that it's interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.
Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn't make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn't pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn't or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.
Four from me:
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My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of
lynxon a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn't convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then. -
In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn't think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.
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When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it's safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.
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After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering
youtube-dlmuch less useful, theyt-dlpproject came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn't tolerate this
it seems to me to have all the drawbacks of youtube-dl from their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn't be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven't throttled or blocked it.
Anyone else have some of their own that they'd like to share?
Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that's stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.
I just thought it wouldn't go anywhere. Financially I made the right choice by never investing. No matter how much money you could have made in retrospect, the correct choice is to make the decision based on sound financial strategies. All the value remains speculation
So, if you are born with an unfortunate citizenship and location, you do need these things exactly. Bitcoin is one tech-bro thing I worship. It fulfills a purpose. The world would be worse without it.
That's because you live in a first world country and think, apparently, that everyone does or that those who don't have only themselves to blame.