It's not for everyone. Some people have the appetite for risk and others don't and never will. You can invest or watch and complain while others become wealthy...all the while claiming to be highly technical and that everyone else is an imbecile who happened about their new found wealth by being careless.
Risk often appears careless to those with a weak stomach. Risk is typically very ugly. It's not supposed to be pretty. If it were, all and sundry would be participants.
Risk wouldn't be risk without risk is all I'd leave you with.
But like one of the contributors on the sub points out, ANS/NEO has some govt support (I use support lightly because there have been discussions with govt about NEO but nothing officially announced yet). Therefore, if this turns out to be the case, then undoubtedly, you'll find that NEO will be the crypto that wins in China. I think that this alone would make it very very big in terms of market cap.
Finally, technically, contract writing in ANS/NEO aims to be as easy as possible compared to ETH where unless you learn solidity, you cannot immediately jump in and start writing code for it. ANS/NEO aims to make it easy for any developer anywhere in the world to jump right in.
EDIT:
I think that many crypto-variants will exist simultaneously but that there'll be one or two that win because they implement ease of use quickly and well. Let's consider the internet in the early days; it was only useful to a select few who could withstand the pains of getting up and running with it. Crypto is the same way today. Few are willing to withstand the pain of its use - be it devs or regular users who may or may not double up as speculators.
If a coin can't be stupidly easy to use, then there cannot be mass adoption. ANS/NEO seems to have figured that out - making onboarding devs easy and attempting to reduce the energy required to run the network.
It's my opinion and you're a flagging bully. If you're smart enough to be on HN, you're smart enough to discern and determine where to invest. If I happen to learn about ANS and let others know about it, I don't see the harm in that. They can inspect the truthiness of my recommendations via pagerank.
You missed out on the boat. So did I (a developer as well). So did many others (developers or not). Learn and move on. No need to be bitter (because it is so blatantly obvious you are when you say things like 'they decided to dump their life savings into this stuff knowing nothing about it')
Who cares if you know everything or very little about it? They saw something that you with all of your 'vested interest and expertise' didn't - they saw that this thing would be a great investment.
So what next? You make a good point when you champion the technology itself. I love the tech as well and I'm learning all I can about it.
However, I'm also going to be dumping a significant amount of my networth in the next bitcoin which I believe will be Antshares/NEO.
BUY IT ASAP I tell'ya. Don't miss the wave again. Never again.
Why Antshares/NEO? Its chinese roots for one. The support by groups such as Microsoft and Alibaba. And for me, the reason why I champion it over all others is that as well as the aforementioned properties, NEO could be bigger because, they've created a platform that supports programming languages that all developers already know. Developer take up could be huge, especially in China and then the rest of the world.
Also, if you truly believe in Bitcoin as a technology, why not buy now? I still think that if it indeed delivers on its promise, it will be way bigger.
> It's easy to hold an opinion when it's other people's money.
Is this is the only metric to warrant having an opinion?! Every stakeholder has a right to speak their mind. For the employees, they may not have the money to buy into the business but they do so via sweat equity (effort + time + risk).
Your attempt to trivialize their involvement amounts to nonsense for these reasons.
Risk often appears careless to those with a weak stomach. Risk is typically very ugly. It's not supposed to be pretty. If it were, all and sundry would be participants.
Risk wouldn't be risk without risk is all I'd leave you with.