Yes I keep trying to place myself on both sides of the coin.

Andy,That is a lotta coin!!

[How is it that I can buy a stock or a gold coin one day and sell it the next and it's a capital gain but buying and selling a house isn't?]

Have you done a cost/benefit analysis of coin operated laundry?  

As someone who studies macro economics extensively, I can tell you that no one can predict anything beyond a flip of a coin.  

Like you, I come from IT and I'm moving to RE, so obviously I'm thinking first about how the RE world can benefit from crypto and vice versa.

Apparently someone had made a deposit of several rolled coins a few days prior and they were all silver quarters, half dollars, and dimes.

If you do the appropriate research, and have a good understanding of what factors may likely lead to continued appreciation, that gamble seems like less of a true coin toss.

@Jesse HouserFor me - it was simply a matter of Control.I can live and also more importantly learn from my mistakes and directly benefit from making the right decisions.I do invest in stocks and bonds, and even in silver coins (as hedge).

That 25% pay bump from moving to the Bay Area might get them to the $1.125m price point (it's not really linear like that, but good enough for our purposes), but it's a coin toss if they will accept $1.125m as their buying power, or rent a really nice house from a landlord that doesn't calculate DTI ("gross income > 3x rent" gets you a LOT farther than DTI would get you, if you have a zillion dollars in student loan debt).That's a broad brush and there are a lot of doctors NOT described by that, to be certain.