Actually, "understanding" something can hinder your success (at least short-term) significantly.
I for example missed out almost completely on the recent Ethereum craze, even though I learned about this new project shortly after their initial crowdsale. Back then, I tried to learn how this thing ought to function and what it tries to do, in an attempt to gauge whether it is feasible from a technical standpoint. I came to the conclusion that this is a visionary, but technically deeply flawed project, because it wouldn't scale on so many levels:
- block validation requires everything to be executed on every node again and again -> essentially your thousands of nodes all compute the same stuff, which is hardly the "supercomputer" as which it is marketed
- parallelization would be hard to achieve, as every contract can possibly call every other contract by design -> again, no "supercomputer" works this way, and transactions per second of this network would be severely limited to an amount that's so low that it would not be useful for any real business case
- smart contracts would be unable to get any data from outside except for stuff delivered to them via transactions, and all that stuff must be pushed onto the blockchain and archived forever -> blockchain would either explode in size or contracts would be extremely limited in their possibilities, despite turing-completeness
- every transaction costs gas, which is bought by ether, which costs money, which means that providing "free" services to users is pretty much impossible besides by impersonating them and doing requests on their behalf, which totally destroys the idea of letting the user sign everything by himself. Free services are an important way of getting user traction however for businesses today and probably also in the future.
But despite all these problems and surprisingly (at least for me), Ethereum found a real killer application in the ICO craze: pie-in-the-sky-kind of "companies" created some fancy marketing material called "white paper", a fancy website with fancy team members, laid out a business model that usually conforms to the pattern "we do this already successful use case X, but only decentralized and on the blockchain" and necessarily incorporates a new "token" that they intend to mint and sell to "investors". The tokens are practically useless most of the time (except for their producer, which uses them as a vehicle to get "investor" money), but the fact that almost all of these tokens, as soon as they landed on crypto exchanges (which happens quickly now thanks to the ERC20 standard), netted their initial purchasers an immediate 2-5x profit or more when selling resulted in more and more people buying ether and trying to get in those token sales for a quick buck, effectively driving the ether price into the sky.
For this "use case", all the scaling limitations described above - which still exist, and there are still at most unproven, concept-stage solutions in existence for them - don't really matter, since the ICOs only sell dreams of future applications on the Ethereum blockchain, not actually working ones, and dreams aren't limited by scaling issues (except for the fact that some of these ICOs by themselves drive the current Ethereum network into dysfunctionality already, as recently demonstrated during the Status ICO which effectively clogged the network for almost 48 hours).
I wish I had realized this earlier and had taken part in the 30x gains in the price of ether within two months. But my knowledge about the scaling limitations of the network that ought to be the foundation of all these lofty dreams kept me back...
What you are feeling now is hindsight bias or survivorship bias. Would you have felt this bad if ETH didn't rise to these levels? Nope.
Or would you have dumped the ICO for 2x-5x profit once the "price target" was achieved? Or would you have ridden the hype wave up to the current 30x?? The answer is you don't know.
Limitations of the project are real. If your idea of becoming rich is buying something you don't believe in and hoping it goes up big time, then you should try the next big ICO, maybe you will get lucky.
I for example missed out almost completely on the recent Ethereum craze, even though I learned about this new project shortly after their initial crowdsale. Back then, I tried to learn how this thing ought to function and what it tries to do, in an attempt to gauge whether it is feasible from a technical standpoint. I came to the conclusion that this is a visionary, but technically deeply flawed project, because it wouldn't scale on so many levels:
- block validation requires everything to be executed on every node again and again -> essentially your thousands of nodes all compute the same stuff, which is hardly the "supercomputer" as which it is marketed
- parallelization would be hard to achieve, as every contract can possibly call every other contract by design -> again, no "supercomputer" works this way, and transactions per second of this network would be severely limited to an amount that's so low that it would not be useful for any real business case
- smart contracts would be unable to get any data from outside except for stuff delivered to them via transactions, and all that stuff must be pushed onto the blockchain and archived forever -> blockchain would either explode in size or contracts would be extremely limited in their possibilities, despite turing-completeness
- every transaction costs gas, which is bought by ether, which costs money, which means that providing "free" services to users is pretty much impossible besides by impersonating them and doing requests on their behalf, which totally destroys the idea of letting the user sign everything by himself. Free services are an important way of getting user traction however for businesses today and probably also in the future.
But despite all these problems and surprisingly (at least for me), Ethereum found a real killer application in the ICO craze: pie-in-the-sky-kind of "companies" created some fancy marketing material called "white paper", a fancy website with fancy team members, laid out a business model that usually conforms to the pattern "we do this already successful use case X, but only decentralized and on the blockchain" and necessarily incorporates a new "token" that they intend to mint and sell to "investors". The tokens are practically useless most of the time (except for their producer, which uses them as a vehicle to get "investor" money), but the fact that almost all of these tokens, as soon as they landed on crypto exchanges (which happens quickly now thanks to the ERC20 standard), netted their initial purchasers an immediate 2-5x profit or more when selling resulted in more and more people buying ether and trying to get in those token sales for a quick buck, effectively driving the ether price into the sky.
For this "use case", all the scaling limitations described above - which still exist, and there are still at most unproven, concept-stage solutions in existence for them - don't really matter, since the ICOs only sell dreams of future applications on the Ethereum blockchain, not actually working ones, and dreams aren't limited by scaling issues (except for the fact that some of these ICOs by themselves drive the current Ethereum network into dysfunctionality already, as recently demonstrated during the Status ICO which effectively clogged the network for almost 48 hours).
I wish I had realized this earlier and had taken part in the 30x gains in the price of ether within two months. But my knowledge about the scaling limitations of the network that ought to be the foundation of all these lofty dreams kept me back...