• Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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    5 days ago

    The opportunity to go from poor sod to multi-millionaire or even more, virtually overnight is very compelling.

    Add in that of you didn’t get insanely rich you could also become kind of rich.

    Then there’s the rest - people who saw an opportunity to sell a shovel for the equivalent of $2000 today, because inflation was rampant in these mining towns.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social
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      5 days ago

      Add in that of you didn’t get insanely rich you could also become kind of rich.

      All true, but from my sense, it was also common for such folks to lose their relative wealth in any number of ways, starting with gambling, whoring-boozing, and outright theft by various opportune colleagues.

      people who saw an opportunity to sell a shovel for the equivalent of $2000 today

      Yeah, if I was going to try to make money in those crazy situations, and I possessed the requisite moral compass, it would be by similar exploitation.

      Even so the two rushes mentioned only lasted 3yrs each, so unpredictability was everywhere, which is again why I’d want to angle one of the more stable profit-making schemes. And then you’d be directly participating in situations which regularly produced some very sore losers…

      Still, all notes from afar!

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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        3 days ago

        Oh, for sure.

        Just pointing out what drove people - the opportunity to become an equivalent of a billionaire today in a very short period was really compelling.