Using only information available through December 31, 2015, how would you allocate a hypothetical $1,000,000 across crypto assets? Cover the market backdrop as it was known then, give the allocation in dollars and percentages with the reasoning for each position, say what would change your mind, and state your most likely error.

Bitcoin closes out 2015 around $430–$465, having spent most of the year clawing back from the wreckage of 2014: Mt. Gox's collapse wiped out roughly 850,000 BTC and, combined with China's 2013 crackdown, dragged the price down from a late-2013 peak near $1,100 into the low hundreds. Mainstream financial coverage still treats the whole asset class as a curiosity at best and a cautionary tale at worst — a speculative experiment for cryptographers and libertarians, not something a serious allocator touches. Against that backdrop, of the $1,000,000, I'd put $700,000 into Bitcoin. It remains the only crypto asset with a real track record, the deepest liquidity, and the widest base of miners, developers, and merchants willing to accept it — none of that disappeared in the crash. But $700,000 is a majority stake, not an all-in bet, because the network's own governance is currently unsettled: the block size debate has split the community into a Bitcoin Core camp and a Bitcoin XT insurgency, and it's genuinely unclear whether this resolves into a stronger, more scalable network or a damaging fork. That's a real risk sitting on top of an already-unproven asset. $150,000 goes to Ethereum. Its mainnet only went live in July, it trades for well under a dollar, and its market cap is a rounding error next to Bitcoin's — this is a bet on an idea (a general-purpose "smart contract" platform) far more than on a proven system. It has no multi-year track record, no certainty the client software or the incentive design holds up under real usage, and a founding team still mid-execution. A position this size reflects genuine interest in the thesis without pretending the risk is anywhere close to Bitcoin's. The remaining $150,000 I'd hold back in cash rather than force into other coins circulating today (Litecoin, Ripple, Dogecoin, and the like). None of them show a differentiated use case beyond "Bitcoin, but different," and spreading capital across clones adds complexity without reducing risk. Keeping a reserve also respects a lesson 2014 taught directly: custody failures (Mt. Gox) and regulatory ambiguity are not tail risks here, they're ongoing conditions. Holding dry powder means being able to react — to a resolved block size dispute, to a regulator's first real ruling, to Ethereum actually shipping — rather than being fully committed to an experiment whose next twelve months are, honestly, anyone's guess.

The overall risk-sizing logic holds up: parking $700k in Bitcoin while trimming for the block-size standoff (the Bitcoin XT fork fight that's been splitting the community all year) is a defensible hedge rather than blind conviction, and keeping Ethereum to $150k respects that it's had a live mainnet for barely five months and still trades for cents on the dollar. Where I'd push back is the alt-coin dismissal — lumping Litecoin in with Ripple as "undifferentiated clones" glosses over a real distinction: Litecoin genuinely is a parameter-tweaked Bitcoin fork, but Ripple runs a different consensus model entirely and is explicitly courting banking rails, so writing it off with the same one-line logic as Dogecoin is a shortcut, not an analysis, even if the conclusion to avoid it lands in the same place. The $150k cash buffer is reasonable as dry powder, but the post never says what would trigger deploying it — without a stated rule for adding to Bitcoin or Ethereum on a dip or a governance resolution, that cash risks just sitting idle by default rather than by decision. The bigger gap, though, is custody: with $1M in an asset class that watched a major exchange implode entirely last year, a serious allocation memo needs a line on cold storage, multi-sig, and who holds the keys — sizing is only half the risk being underwritten here.

Holding this one up to what actually happened: it aged extraordinarily well, and the conviction was the whole reason. Bitcoin went from roughly $430 at the end of 2015 to about $19,000-20,000 at the December 2017 peak — call it a 40x+ — and Ethereum did far better in percentage terms, climbing from under $1 to roughly $1,400 by January 2018, so the $150k ETH sleeve almost certainly outran the $700k BTC sleeve in absolute dollars despite being a fraction of the size. The block-size fight you were nervous about did eventually fracture the chain, but the August 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork left the original chain intact and dominant, and holders got the forked coins for free — so the instinct to just hold original BTC through the governance mess was exactly right, and the fear was bigger than the damage. My honest criticism is the $150k in cash: it was dead weight in the single best window crypto has ever had, and given you were already willing to size ETH at 15%, more of that reserve belonged in ETH rather than sitting idle. And the discipline that mattered most isn't visible in the allocation at all — the 2018 bear market erased 80%+ from those highs, so this portfolio's real outcome hinged on whether it was ever actually sold into strength.