2024-02-11
The last days is read Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux.
It's about how crypto came to rise, the story of Tether, other scams, FTX, NFTs, Chinese scamming centers aswell as the fall. I probably forgot a lot of stuff. In this post, I will talk about some interesting things I noticed when reading the book.
This is one of the truest tweets I have ever seen, and it's especially true in crypto. People are often fueled by seeing other people make money. It's seeing your friend, neighbor, or most of the time, people on the internet making money— a lot of money— that gets you into taking more risks. People started to take out loans to fuel their crypto investments, thinking they will all get rich. There were too many people on one side of the boat, and when everybody thinks one thing is going to happen, the complete opposite will happen. The same thing happened at the height of crypto and will happen again in the future. People called you crazy even if you just doubted crypto a little bit because why should you doubt crypto when it had never went down and the number has just been going up.
The environment was perfect for a bubble. People were understimulated mentally and overstimulated monetarily, so they started tapping the buy button. People got their stimulus checks and were at home due to corona, being bored out of their minds. It is crucial to identify the environment you are in.
It's hard to notice the bubble when you are in the bubble; you need to be as rational as possible. When looking at what happened, there were clear signs of how crazy all of this was. There were people raising millions through an ICO for a dental coin, which should be a cryptocurrency for dentists. Someone on Twitter once said this about crypto mining: 'Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.' This perfectly describes the mess. But even when you spot the bubble, you need to be cautious; it can take longer for it to pop than you think, and you can as well make a lot of money on the way up.
'This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes. You can make a whole lot of money on the way up, and we plan on it.' - Mike Novogratz
Programmer Alberto Brandolini wrote in 2013 about the bullshit asymmetry principle, which describes debunking falsehoods in the internet age: 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
To notice the bubble, you needed to take on a contrarian approach, not listening to the crypto bros as well as questioning the status quo. This is hard because at the time of the crypto run, there was no profit in being skeptical. People did not realize it and were driven by greed. Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil once said, 'They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.' It's never that easy to get to money as was being described by the crypto bubble. There had to be something foul, and people who did not recognize this paid the price for being ignorant and following the herd.
“People do funny things for money”
When reading the book, it was crazy to me what kind of people were making these sums of money; they just seemed so dumb and unable to see the facts in front of them. But this also hints at something— these people were at the right time at the right place, having the guts to start something without second-guessing themselves and still being unreasonable successful.
'Self-doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.' - Suzy Kassem
'The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.' - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan"
Michael Saylor, the former CEO and founder of an $11 billion company, posting Bitcoin AI pictures daily on his Instagram.
“I sensed the possibility of going further, that this could not be all there was to it,” he wrote. “We can spend our whole existence doing the same things, living the same day a thousand, ten thousand times, without realizing that life is slipping away from us. Then one day everything changes.” - Giancarlo Devasini
Thanks,
Finn