Funny commentary on what happens with most "crypto" projects and FOMO

Originating tweet, I’m gonna unroll it here for convenience though:

I’m seeing a lot of people FOMO quit their jobs to join “crypto”, probably out of some over-romanticized view of what goes on in these projects. Let me illuminate you about what actually happens:

:point_down:

  1. You have an earnest team that believes in decentralization as a theory, but realize that it’s impossible to build any project of complexity without extreme centralization for long periods of time, potentially some parts indefinitely.

  2. You aim to build a community, but in reality 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.

  3. You want to decentralize governance, but only a handful wants to participate in governance. Doesn’t change people from getting royally pissed at governance decisions despite not doing a single ounce of work.

  4. You realize that most of the “influencer” network of crypto is actually a cartel of individuals who all know each other and collude in pumping the same bags. They all cost around $20k-30k for a review, btw.

  5. Some VCs are good. Many don’t do an ounce of due diligence on your project and fight tooth and nail for larger token allocations with minimal lockup periods. Most of them are actually beyond useless. Some are deeply unethical and are straight cons.

  6. Crypto never sleeps. And guess what? That also means that you never sleep. Half your audience is in the west, the other half is in the east. Singapore time is almost entirely during sleeping hours in the US. Have fun with that.

  7. Legally, you can’t talk about “token price”, but it’s your ultimate marketing tool. If it’s necessary for the security of your network, you’re screwed. You HAVE to shill the token, and you have to assure people that the price will go up (but that’s also illegal in the US).

  8. Traders/VCs drive the vast majority of your user acquisition early on, since, again, the token is what most people care about - so you really need THEM to be excited, and they by FAR have the largest followings in the space.

  9. The LAW. SO MUCH LAW. SO. MUCH. LAW. Expect to pay well into six figures of legal fees in your first year. Also, most lawyers won’t actually know how to answer any questions cause everything is still a grey-area. This’ll depend on jurisdiction of course.

  10. There’s actually a good chance that there’s not a single person in your entire state or country that knows how to do your taxes.

  11. People will make up rumors of your project on a daily basis. Either hopium or FUD. It is Brandolini’s law on steroids. Hopium is actually worst than FUD by the way, because FUD unites your community around truth, whereas hopium unites them around price.

  12. Information asymmetry is extreme in this industry. There are telegram rooms of just founders and influencers that discuss price-moving news. You are not in those channels most likely.

  13. Bear markets is when you find the real demand for your products, which is likely magnitudes less than your worse fears or on-chain metrics indicate. Low liquidity = desert of demand.

  14. You will be proud of your project at times, but then get nervous when you see people ape’ing into obvious scams and then you question whether anyone actually knows or cares about your project at all, or if it’s just one of a basket of random asymmetric gambling bets.

  15. You will realize that the source of the majority of problems for your blockchain project is that it is built on a blockchain.

  16. And my personal pet peeve is that, by and large, most of crypto actually does want Bitcoin to die. Perhaps not in a “I want Bitcoin to go to zero”, but in a, “Bitcoin doesn’t do anything and so I want its value to be rightly distributed to my project, which has real utility”.

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This is my first foray into anything crypto… but man… whoo boy this is on target for the bits and pieces I’ve seen so far!

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15 is funny.

I remember watching some companies pitch their crypto businesses (ideas) during the last bull run, it was awful being a techy and understanding the mindless drivel they were spouting. I still wonder what happened to all that money they received, because none of them exist now.

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JEFF!! This twitter thread is GOLD soo much great wisdom! Gotta go into any new endeavor with eyes wide open and never let fear or euphoria guide your decisions!!

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Yeah, I never paid attention. But what was up with overstock.com? I’ve seen suppositions they were pumping things somehow back then, I really don’t know, and that one of them is Chia Inc CFO now so it’s somehow bad? Well, Chia Inc seems rather proudly displaying that association. I think for a pump scheme it’s not that well executed either! Three years of development and an electron app, obvious Chinese problem, and community crying for pools.

It is both amusing and in the same breath so very, very sad. A poignant breakdown of all that is wrong in the world of crypto. I’ve been to a lot of networking meetings all along the West Coast over the years and there was always some yahoo pitching the latest blockchain idea they came up with in an over-caffeinated fever dream. “We’re gonna put your pet’s favourite squeaky toy… on the blockchain! I can tell you more about it, but you have to sign this NDA and also be aware we’ve got a provisional patent on that idea.”

#16 is so on the money it isn’t even funny. People don’t want to destroy bitcoin because it is bad, they want to destroy it out of greed. Oh, and they’re pissed they didn’t get any bitcoin when it was under a dollar. Except for that one random stoner that did, and then they’re pitching themselves as a crypto guru who was prescient about BTC’s future value because their nerdy brother-in-law mined some on his laptop who was then willing to trade it for an ounce of Tijuana’s finest but then said stoner promptly forgot the nerdy brother-in-law had created a BTC wallet for them and only recalled the fact 11 years later. But that is oddly specific and a discussion for a different time.

I’ve been mining different crypto for a few years and my strategy has always been “You can cash it out when you retire, don’t bother paying attention to any crypto news except to make sure you don’t need to move those coins to a new version of the respective blockchain.” RVN, XMR, BTC but always with an eye of “do it for the lulz” rather than what is usually “what coin should I mine that is most profitable?” That “mine the most profitable” is seriously short-term thinking.

About three months prior to the launch of Chia I accidentally read something about it on reddit (I know! I know! Stay the **** away from the career destroyer known as reddit! Waves @DEK_AI which is no doubt only one of their accounts on that platform). Took me about a month of research of the project before I was willing to commit to anything at which point I drew up a short two-page business plan, including a couple of “it ain’t happening, keep what you got but terminate any further expenditure” check points. I also set a limit in that same plan of what I was willing to put in to it figuring “The wife won’t notice $50K of hard drives on the AMEX if I spread it out over a few months” like I was some kind of addicted housewife trying to hide Farmville purchases from their concerned husband. Again, oddly specific, but a discussion for another time. I originally put a limit of 2PiB net space but revised that up to 5PiB about two weeks before trades opened.

XCH and NFTs and DOGE in the past two months has brought out all the crazies with an NDA again and I have wasted more hours listening to drivel about blockchains and tokens on Discord and Clubhouse than I possibly care to mention. NFTs of late have become seriously low-effort memes with cryptopunks, cryptokitties, meebits, bored apes (that’s a thing, look it up), fractals (yes, people are selling fractals as NFTs, seriously, just **** off already) and I am already watching the ponzi juggernaut of lemmings running with open arms towards the Chia project. “i cAN bARely USe a mOuSE bUT i JuSt bOuGHt aN $8,0o0 pc tO FArM cHIa! iN tEH cLOUd! aNYbODy tHOugHT Of uSINg A rAmDIsK?!? hAi! hOW I mINe 4 fISh?”

image

Self-reported: I am in this picture and I don’t like it.

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Are you alright, @JustinLloyd? :sweat_smile:

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All true, but let’s not forget that there are nonetheless crypto projects achieving moderate-to-great success. Of course, there’s plenty more that don’t, but that’s just Sturgeon’s law.

I do question the purchasing of brand new hardware, there is no shortage of refurbished hard drives out there that offer significantly less cost per TB. No doubt it is a lot more effort, especially if you go the SAS route, but I have seen people paying 7x what I have per TB, they have a lot more skin in the game and potentially a lot less space - it is a tough position they have placed themselves in.

I wonder what happens 6 months from now when these people discover that they may never recoup the costs of the rigs they have purchased?

My plotter is my main workstation, and the only new component I added to that was a RAID card, which I kind of secretly wanted but couldn’t justify anyway. Everything else is taken off the “I forgot I had this…” shelf in the closet or is refurbished enterprise gear from various equipment liquidators. Cables I purchase new, but only because it would cost more in gas to drive to the warehouse than it would cost me to buy them. And I would never be quite sure they’d have what I want. Or if they’d work.

Plotter - personal workstation but I added a new RAID card because the second-hand prices were higher than new. The workstation is a sunk cost.

Farmer - A CPU, motherboard & RAM from 2011 I had on the shelf. An old 1660 GPU in the junk drawer.
A few refurbished SuperMicro 45-bay JBOD cases
Refurbished SuperMicro 24-bay server chassis
Refurbished 16TB SAS drives bought in packs of 20 for stupidly low prices.
1TB Samsung 840 Evo out of the junk drawer (no longer using this)
Refurbished 4TB Intel DC SATA drive
Refurbished HBA (host bus adapter) cards to handle the drives
Refurbished case fans
An old AIO CPU cooler

I committed a chunk of capital expenditure to the project, that doesn’t mean I need to buy new when I am okay with thrifting stuff, or routing through junk boxes at the equipment liquidation warehouses in my city, or spending hours on eBay scouring for just the right case, at just the right price.

This has permitted me really stretch the budget. I don’t have as much as some, but I have more than most.

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Sounds good, slow and steady wins the race! :blush:

got my monies back and more. I made $7k

What’s the current price? What’s an “official” place to look at for Chia coin pricing? I have no idea.

OKEx has the highest volume as far as I know (~25,000 XCH in 24 hours). Price is $583 at time of writing.

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This site has all the exchanges listed with pricing details:

Friend of mine who does a bunch of different investments is going kinda nuts over this… I had been keeping him posted on my farming investment and he was sorta ignoring it for a while and focusing on commodities. Now he’s planning to buy a ton of XCH, thinks it’s a great investment.

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Comforting that the price listed there is about equal to the one on CoinMarketCap:

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Coin stats is useful they have an mobile app show all the Xch markets on one screen and you can add your port folio.

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OKEx is now 1300, what the hell I am amazed, still gald I sold at 706 because the money was more important that the risk but if chia makes £2500 next week I’ll be miffed.