Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Have you ever wanted a little glimpse into what the crypto life is all about?
[00:00:05] NFTs, utility tokens, meme coin farming, max yield and trading strategies, a full time job chasing unicorns, winning jackpots, and repeatedly kicking yourself in the balls. You would think that after someone had been in crypto for 12 years playing this game, that maybe they would begin reconsidering the big picture.
[00:00:31] But you'd probably be wrong. We have a wild little thread to cover today to learn all about it. This one's gonna be fun.
[00:00:41] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:58] Foreign what is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we have got a. We're actually getting into a couple of different things today. We are actually going to have a short episode, but holy crap. I read this thread on Twitter and I was just.
[00:01:26] I cannot. Just the loss of perspective and the failure to recognize. I guess it is kind of a recognition of all of the mishaps and the quote unquote learnings. But somebody posted a thread of I've been in crypto for 12 years and these are all the things that I've learned. And all I could think this show is almost, I guess it's just turned seven or eight.
[00:01:53] I don't know. We've been the better part of a decade here on this show. And all I could think is that if he had started listening to this show, I could have saved him potentially millions of dollars.
[00:02:07] And I don't, I don't like to toot my own horn, but the whole point of this show is to try to bring signal from the noise.
[00:02:18] And you know, if people I know and I don't live up to every lesson that I teach and every single thing that I say, don't do a lot of those things I have done or I have even done against my better judgment. And, and there were a couple of situations where I knew I was doing something stupid or I knew I was doing something wrong. And I literally only just kind of had like a moment of, of recognition of just like, what are you doing, you idiot? And then I kind of got out of harm's way with literally the hair on my chin to, to save me before something terrible happened. And this, this is many times I've gotten lucky numerous times in bitcoin history. Granted, I got unlucky a time or two too, but I at least had a strong set of rules to judge my own behavior by and to recognize when I was being stupid and that I learned those lessons for being very, very stupid. And there was no. But there was no question. I wasn't. I was deluding myself during the times in which these things occurred. But looking back on it, it's so obvious which rule I was violating. And I will say that almost all of the overwhelming majority of all of my really stupid decisions and clear I would say one thing or I would attempt to live by one set of rules and then I would just make one little exception and I had my ass handed to me or I almost did and managed to save my myself at the very last moment. Almost all of those occurred before I started the show. So I do have that going for me. But if people actually listened to those rules and did the very, the handful of very, very simple things that I have suggested during this entire show, I will say and I'm really proud of this. This is the only reason I don't mean this like, oh, Guy Swan's the one who knows all the things and he has all the answers. That's not what I'm trying to mean by this, but I am proud of this is that if you did what I advised and listened to my lessons and stories and explanations, nobody who listened to this show got rekt. Not one person. I never suggested they use Luna. I warned every time there was an exchange or anything that started to feel iffy. In fact, the only thing. And this bugs me to no end. And this is why you don't hear Swann as a sponsorship on this show anymore. Because I still love those guys and what they are trying to do. And I still like the company. But they took $60. They took a fee, a big fee. That was from their move away from Prime Trust to their current setup that they are trying to do to fix all of the fires and disasters with Fortress and Prime Trust. I guess it was Fortress. I don't remember which one it even freaking was because they avoided any and all problems despite the multiple fires that they had during those times. But the fact that they pushed that fee to the user and then tried to make up for it in we'll give you back twice the fee will give you back twice that amount in fees if you stay with us.
[00:05:40] I thought was the, the very, very wrong choice. Like the user people who had bitcoin in that account suddenly had 60, 70. I think even some people like it was like $100 depending on like how many Utxos Fortress had on their ends which was so stupid. Like, and I completely agree that they should have battled this out, but Swann should have covered it. And I know they had another fire, but they should have taken out a loan and they should have covered the fees. And yes, I have told everybody, set up auto withdrawal because I was still using them at the time. And I didn't have that problem because I did set up auto withdrawal. So if you were holding your own keys, that wasn't a problem. And that was one of the things I loved about Swann is like 80% of customers actually held their own keys. And I think that was because of good lessons and good signal in teaching them, getting them to understand the consequences and the risks that are being taken. But that decision to let that small though it was that fee get taken by the user really just that that was, that was a bit too far. I was the closest to anybody who listened, took my advice to them, quote, unquote, getting wrecked. And I 100% wish them all the best and I still think they're a great company overall, but that just really, that was not the right choice in my opinion. But other than that, I never, you know, I told people, keep stacking, keep long term, look at the fundamentals. And I tried to explain all of the things that were happening during bear markets. I tried to put perspective and give proper lessons to the context of a lot of things that were going on. I tried to answer all of the FUD that was coming up again and again and again, three cycles later, four cycles later, as the same bullshit was espoused over, oh, it's a minor death spiral and everybody's worried. And I tried to make sense of it and I tried to pull the signal out of the noise. And if anybody was actually paying attention and following the advice of this show, I see no reason why they should not be sitting exceptionally well today. And I'm proud to say that, like, that makes me happy to feel that I have not made any great mistakes that I have suggested. Like, if I had ever pushed Luna for any amount of time, like, I would want to end my podcast. Like, I would be so pissed at myself for having gotten caught in that. But luckily I had already built up some really strong heuristics that just kept me away from all of that crap. And hopefully I extended that properly to the people who listen to this show. And that brings us to our thread, because for anyone new to the show, I want to explain. I want to have the opportunity to explain why all of these rules matter and to show you exactly what the other side of the fence, the other perspective, the other narrative, what it produced and what the experience was like for those people to present it as a dichotomy against the lessons we try to instill in this show. So before we get into it, I just want to thank the Human Rights foundation and their amazing Financial Freedom Report newsletter for the incredible resource on all of the human rights issues and the specifically the financial and CBDC and Bitcoin tools like how do you get monetary freedom to the world and all of the critical topics and events that are going on toward and against that fight. If you aren't keeping up with it, you are missing out on really important things that are happening in the world. And links and details are right there in the show notes. And you can also find it on nostr. It's the Financial Freedom Report. It's really easy to find if you go looking for it. Then of course if you were looking for an on chain and lightning wallet that just works and has a very intuitive Design, check out BitKit. The BitKit wallet by synonym is such an awesome wallet. I love their little the contacts that they have, the fact that they have a really cool peer to peer system happening in the background that I think a lot of people don't appreciate that will also be involved in Pub Key, the kind of re envisioning of the web that they are doing. And that's, that's actually going to be public very, very soon and I'm excited to share that and we'll have episodes and all sorts of stuff about it. So stay tuned. The details and link to Bitkit is is right there in the show notes. All right, with that let's go ahead and get into today's read which is again short, it's just a thread. And then I just want to kind of talk about the why the why you stay away from these things and why I think the lessons of this show are so important. So let's dive into today's read and it's titled 12 Years in Crypto by pix on Chain.
[00:10:36] I've been in crypto for 12 years. Here is every painful mistake I made so that you don't have to 2013 I'm writing for a finance blog. One day the boss says I'll pay you 50% extra if you take bitcoin. I Google can I sell bitcoin for cash? Looks legit. And I say yes, life happens. I forget about it. A few months later I see the headlines. Bitcoin hits an all time high. I check My wallet, it doubled. I sell immediately and pat myself on the back. Genius move, right? Fast forward four years. Bitcoin is up 10x from where I sold. That was my first taste of crypto pain. And it wouldn't be the last.
[00:11:23] 2017 rolls around. New cycle, new me. Time to redeem myself. ICO season is raging. Every altcoin is 100xing influencers launching paid groups. And I join a few. I'm an idiot. I started talking to one of the guys in the chat. He sends me a few good plays. We become friends. A month later, he social engineers me and steals 10k. Despite all of that, I hit six figures. For the first time, I feel unstoppable. So I do what any reasonable person would do. Take profits into xrp. You guessed it. I buy the top and hold all the way down. Down 90% in slow motion, six figures turn to dust. So I rage, quit, Covid hits markets, nuke. I'm forced to sell my company for pennies on the dollar. I sit there with stables and no direction. So I check CoinGecko Bitcoin at $10,000. Ethereum 300. I buy both, go work in a startup to make ends meet. Then the US money printer turns on. Portfolio doubles. I find NBA top shot. I'm back in the rabbit hole. This time fully. I quit my job, go full time web three, start flipping NFTs and for a while it works. I'm making more money than ever. Every week there's a new mint, new meta, new 5x. It was a wild market tweet from Yieldasaurus. If you're rocking a pfp under $100,000, please don't me or share your opinion on my wall. I don't care what you have to say. Reality is you need to work harder. Move out of your mom's basement, stack Ethereum and Solana, buy a few real PFP and then share your opinion. I wanted to be smart this time. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? So I diversified. Ethereum, Solana, Avax. Gaming, coins, governance tokens, JPEGs, a dozen different narratives.
[00:13:28] You already know where this is going. Yep. It all went down 90% when the bear market hit. Diversifying within one industry never works. Then came another mistake. Olympus Dao. The cult of DeFi 2.0. I joined the 33 movement. Didn't fully understand where the yield came from. Turns out it came from me. Yeah, I was that dumb. By 2022, the lessons were stacking up. I finally started taking profits. Moved most to stables Then someone said, park them in anchor on Luna. 20% APY on UST. Everyone's doing it. With 16 billion TVL one of the biggest protocols in crypto should be safe, right? So I park my stables there. Months later, I finally dig in, start researching the yield mechanics. See red flags everywhere. I pull everything out. A week later, UST and Luna collapse. $40 billion gone. I didn't win. I just didn't lose. Spooked, I moved my funds to FTX safe. Sounded nice. Then the SBF versus CZ drama kicks off. I test to withdrawal. Takes four hours. Panic, I pull everything out. Takes 14 hours. Next day, withdrawals shut down forever.
[00:14:54] Now I'm feeling cursed, but also lucky. I split funds. Part on ledger, part in a Solana wallet. Then at 3am quote, Bro, Solana wallets are getting drained. I check mine. Gone. Slope wallet exploit. Another black swan. Market was pretty slow. Middle of bear. So I start writing. Building my personal brand was the smartest thing I've ever done. It gave me leverage. It opened doors. It built trust. But when the bull returned, I wasn't just tweeting, I was ready. While Connecticut was chasing meme coins, I thought I was being clever. I started LP farming meme coins. 2 to 3% returns daily. 54 profitable days in a row. I thought I found the strategy. Then the market slowed down. Volatility dried up. My invincible strategy starts leaking. But I don't adapt. A few weeks later, half my profits are gone. It was time to pivot. Then comes the AI agent boom. I'm early. Catch the narrative. Before most people buy a few tokens, crypto twitter starts catching on. I assume the top is in. So I sell. Then the sector. 10X's without me. This cycle taught me something new. Even when you do everything right, even when you're early, strategic, consistent, you can still mess it up if you don't adapt. Now. I don't try to be right all the time. I focus on staying in the game too long. Didn't read 12 years of tuition fees paid. Being early is not everything. Taking profit is greater than feeling clever. Diversifying doesn't matter if it's all in one sector. Don't farm the same edge after the market shifts. If it feels off, it is surviving. Black swans often comes down to acting fast. Building in public pays off longer than trades do. Emotion is your biggest risk. There is no final form, just better mistakes. I hope you found this thread helpful. Follow, don't follow. Don't follow this person.
[00:17:05] Holy crap. Holy crap. What I find interesting is that through all of the lessons that were supposedly learned here, I think we're still a very, very far cry from the real lessons. And there's also something else to point out is that Every single oh it 10x and oh I'm 90% down is actually way, way, way worse than that because that's in bitcoin terms. And this has been going on this start, this little story started in 2013. Now it looked like the email that was in question during this time was at a hundred dollars roughly per bitcoin. I think one of the things said it was $106. So it was probably well past the $13 range which is where it, you could have gotten bitcoin in like the $10 to $20 range in 2013. But after it went up to 106, I think it only ever, it like peaked. There was, there was like a little bubble that went to 230, 250 somewhere around there and then I think it came all the way back down to like 72 in at a bottom. But these are the prices that we're talking about and all of those profits and or losses that this person is talking about is in dollars. He's talking about lost 90% in dollars, not 90% against the Bitcoin he could have had. And this is where I, I talk about this is there's such a deep misunderstanding as to what's going on in this industry and what the actual innovation and breakthrough is because there is a technological breakthrough, but it's got nothing to do with tokens, meme coins and NFTs. As soon as it's got a token on it 99.99 in fact, I'm just going to say all of it, every bit of it, if it's using a token is bullshit. The only thing that's actually a technological change that is meaningful is stablecoins. It is still a fiat extension, but it is the bitcoin technology. It's a cash like protocol system for push payments which would never have happened without bitcoin. And not just because of the bitcoin system, but because, but I mean bitcoin popularized and made it okay or interesting to build the infrastructure and the technology out to use keys such that something like tether could actually exist. Even if you quote unquote invented tether. Today it's so different from legacy technology that it would not catch on or work at all. It needs the base of people getting into bitcoin finding out about a bunch of crypto tokens and then Just exploring. They have to, they have to have a hardware wallet or have some reason to be in this first before they understand stablecoins and before that. Technology is something that actually could reach critical mass. But there is a technological shift happening, but it's got nothing to do with utility tokens. It's got nothing to do with Ethereum or Solana or NFTs. And the only use case that has any real application is as a push payment custodial system, basically quote unquote digital banknotes that are backed by a trusted institution in a currency that already has adoption. That's the technological shift. The other is a monetary shift. And this is why all of the utility tokens and NFTs and crypto and different narratives for this token and that token have all fundamentally missed the point. And it's not. And it's not because they missed the point because they didn't understand. It's because they missed the point because they were chasing a hundred X every single time they went looking for something they weren't looking for understanding. They were looking for something that sounded good that was going to paint really, really big green candles. Like this guy never actually did research. He was, he was literally playing in the shallows the whole time. Because the entirety of crypto is about how do we attach. Let me get this, this interesting sounding software idea and this idea for a network and then let's print a brand new token out of thin air to sell this network on. And it kind of seems like this is equity. It kind of seems like people are purchasing the rights or the ownership of, of part of this network. And to get an idea of what I mean by this, because I do understand, it's really hard to see when you just see that these things are crypto. So understand what Bitcoin invented was a new type of transaction system. It was, it was a set of like database tools. When you look at hash chains and signatures and key based messaging and all of this stuff. So like none of that was like a super breakthrough, but it was at least new in the context of how it was used. And nobody had really, even though that technology was old, hash chains were really, really old. Hash tables and merkle trees are very old and have been used for a long time. BitTorrent was using, uses Merkle roots and hash tables for all of the files so that you can packet size them out into or separate them all out into like 16 kilobyte packets. But you can still authenticate know that you have a legitimate piece of the original file. Like there's lots of different ways in which you can use those things. Proof of work was used in a really old email system or attempted to during, during the early days of the cypherpunks and the cryptography mailing list. So just when you look at Bitcoin the network, it looks fascinating. And it is a new type of network and system of technologies to make payments and to keep track of payments and to be able to do so in a very open and accessible way. That technological breakthrough is important, except that it never would have been implemented. Back to my stablecoin thing, it would not have been implemented had it not been for the fact that Bitcoin, the money, the token, the item, the thing that is Bitcoin that this system allowed to secure. You don't need a lot of the pieces of this system if you aren't securing an independent monetary unit. A lot of the tools are specifically there for the monetary assurances and to give monetary integrity, to give scarcity and finality to something that can be digitally altered by anyone in the world. How do you do that? That is the reason you have proof of work. That's the reason you have that as a consensus mechanism to begin with. If that is not your goal, if your goal is the utility of some JPEGs or smart contracts or world computers, you almost invariably do not need that. You just need to be able to tether those things to monetary transactions. So the analogy that I want to give for trying to understand why crypto is such like, the entire purpose of crypto and the reason that the brain on default runs in that direction is because they see Bitcoin was once a penny and now it's $1,000? I want to do that too. So how can I do something that's like Bitcoin but lets me start over and I'll use it for a different purpose. But that's the thing. The network itself, the network technology can be used for many, many different purposes. But money is, is going to be singular. We are going to move toward the most, the highest integrity and the most trusted money. That's the reason why we have one dominant money right now. And we are looking at a shift in the monetary balances and power in the world. And the idea of utility tokens makes no sense. No one would use something with the friction of having to own some random, free floating, no volume utility token whose value shifts wildly back and forth in order to utilize a simple piece of software or a network. That is an extraordinary friction. And the only reason people would use it is because they were hoping that the value of the token went up. But the second they create a token, now it's playing a game of money. It's trying to be a monetary unit and it thus has to compete with the integrity of value. Not the technology, not the, not the oh my transactions are better, but the monetary assurance of Bitcoin. So my analogy is if this had been the case or you could have attached tokens to things at the very beginning of the Internet. We have tons of different protocols on the Internet. We have tor, we have SSL, we have HTTP and you know, HTTPs with SSL. We have email or SMTP. We have BitTorrent. We have UDP for file transfer, we have, we have FTP for file transfer, we have IMAP, we have which is, which is just the IMAP and like POP3, that's for retrieving email from servers as like a logged in account. So it's remote email. We have DNS which is for domain names. And Google we have DHCP which is how you assign IPs on you know, various networks. We have SSH so that you can SSH into your computer, which is kind of like Telnet. But SSH is kind of a replacement. Like Telnet's old, it's not really in use anymore. I mean there's. So we've got WebRTC RSS. WebRTC is a chat. It's an open like streaming, real time chat for, you know, Bitcoin used to do lots of, and There still is RTC chat for Bitcoin development and RSS's podcast. You're listening to this on a protocol that puts out subscribed like, like feeds from certain locations and certain users newsletters are RSS or a lot of them are RSS as well. We have all of these different protocols. We have all of this stuff built on top of the Internet.
[00:27:22] Now imagine that you could have printed tokens out of thin air and attached it to these and then sold them. And then people thought that they bought an SMTP token and that if more people used email the token would be more valuable. And then they'd come up with some weird thing where you can all get together and vote on the next thing that happens in smtp. And now it's democracy. Now it's a governance token. Why would you want a governance token for smtp? You wouldn't. Unless you really, really wanted to make a new token and you were trying to find an excuse for it to ex. And you definitely couldn't say it was equity because That's a legal, that's a really big legal problem. And now you're committing a lot of crimes. But people will probably treat it like equity because it kind of seems like equity. Or we could do a different system where you have to pay SMTP tokens in order to send an email. And then we can kind of come up with a great excuse that, you know, this is for, you know, this is to protect people in the. And to monetize the network so that we have a lot of relays that are up and you know, sending and receiving SMTP mail, because otherwise people won't use email if you don't have infrastructure for it. And so this is, this is a means to pay for the infrastructure because we wouldn't want to use money. What we want to use is our token that we're going to print half of the supply of today and hand out to our developers, and then we're going to sell the rest to you by announcing it on a really big exchange. And maybe we'll give you an airdrop so you can get a couple of free tokens. And there's a lot of buzz around this. And this is super important for the development and the future of the project because they want to sell tokens they get to print into a database for free. And imagine all of them have this token. There's a HTTP token, there's a TOR token, it's called onion. There's a UDP token called data coin. And the, the data coin is attached to the value. When its value goes up, it's actually attached to the amount of storage that you get access, the percentage that you get access to in the data network. Because that makes sense and it sounds cool. Here's our token.
[00:29:37] All that sounds great, right? Don't we want to fund all of these wonderful protocols? Don't we need to make sure that these utility systems have utility tokens to help make sure that they're sustainable?
[00:29:49] But what if, what if by making the token, they were no longer compatible with TCP ip? For those who don't know, IP addresses are how all devices are designated and found and paths are taken. Or with TCP ip, it's the transfer and the identification protocol for the Internet for computers to send arbitrary packets of data back and forth to each other and find devices reliably on an unreliable network of devices getting on and off all the time. TCPIP is the Internet. Imagine SMTP launched a token that made it so you couldn't use it on the Internet. That is what every crypto token and utility coin is doing. They found what seemed like a great way to make a lot of money really, really quickly, but didn't realize that they were actually fighting the monetary invention itself in order to try to do this, and committing suicide for their projects before they even started because they had no idea they were trying to play a game of better technology in a monetary game, like bringing a knife to a gunfight. They brought fancy software tech to a revolution about global monetary trust, and this guy still does not understand that. One of the most important lessons of this space, in my opinion, is learn Bitcoin first before you even begin to think about any of the other stuff. And granted, this Twitter thread is anything but a full picture of a story of what happened over 12 years, but it seemed like he never even thought thought about Bitcoin or even like that Bitcoin was never even something that he tried to learn. You know, usually you get your ass handed to you in crypto or you trade a bunch of shitcoins for a little while and then you realize what a joke it is. And then you, you reframe and you look at the original again like, okay, what? Why did any of this ever work? Why? What have I misunderstood? You basically reframe and you say, okay, something is wrong. Why do things keep going wrong? Why do I keep losing all of my money? Why do all of these projects that I am consistently convinced are either safe or the best thing or the coolest new tech and the biggest, most reliable thing? Why do they all keep just like, exploding in my face?
[00:32:42] I mean, this guy, he took profits, quote unquote in xrp.
[00:32:53] How. How does.
[00:32:56] Oh my God, how does the mental framework of I'm going to take profits and then putting it in the literal cream of the crap. And in the thread, he shows the chart and this is the most psychotic thing he bought on a green candle that was straight up. Like, straight up, nothing but illiquid psycho, no volume move. I could not fathom looking at this, knowing nothing about what I am about to buy, and then thinking, yeah, this is where it's safe to take my profits because of one of Ripple's 200 different fake bank partnerships that they make a big stink about. And, oh, they're testing out our system and they're going to use XRP for international trade. And then they kind of install the software and they do something and then nothing ever comes of it. And then they do it again with another bank. And then of course it comes out in the SEC filing that they have literally Paid the banks money to fake, to pretend that they're going to work with them and they're going to use their systems. And then they don't want to because why the hell would you have an illiquid bullshit fluctuating token for interbank payments? Of course they wouldn't use that. And of course they weren't ever even considering it. They got paid to pretend because then Ripple gets to sell that they have a partnership with a bank. And they get to say, look, see, they're installing the software and they're playing around with it. Something's big right around the corner. And then they sell a bunch of hype and the price shoots up for a short period because there's no volume and a whole bunch of new morons like, unfortunately this mister Picks on chain run in and they buy as much of it as they can. And then Ripple, the foundation, sells all of their issued tokens that they issued to themselves into that market. And here's how you know they do not care. They do not think that this is their. This is their exit strategy. They've never bought xrp.
[00:35:14] The foundation never buys. Brad Garlinghouse has never bought any xrp. He has done nothing but sell it since the beginning. They printed themselves all of the coins and then they sell them to people whenever the price goes up. And they do a bunch of fake partnerships to make the price goes up, make the price go up so that they can sell them. And this dude took his profits in XRP.
[00:35:41] Oh, then he quit his job to go into Web3. I hate that branding. And it apparently means nothing. It apparently is just referring to the casino where you just print tokens. I mean, as he said, he's flipping NFTs.
[00:36:00] Flipping NFTs. You flip a house by fixing it up, by actually making it something. You take a house that's not that great or that could be really good, or have a market that was worth entertaining and you fix it up. You. You fix the kitchen. You tear out that one wall that is going to really open up the space, give it a new coat of paint, fix some really rough things around the edges to kind of add. You know, you put $10,000 into it, $15,000 into it, so you can get 22 out of it. You flip a house by doing something with it. You don't flip NFTs. It's just somebody who doesn't know anything about any of this. Buying something that other people are buying and then selling it to someone else who knows even less about what any of this is. And even said it, quote, every week there's a new mint, new Meta, a new 5X.
[00:37:02] What could possibly be valuable enough about NFTs that you could just every single week just mint them like crazy? Like, isn't that the whole idea is that A, they're scarce and B, how big is the market for collectibles really? And multiple times in this short thread, he's just chasing some yield and he has no idea what it is.
[00:37:31] And he admits to that, at least. He's like, I've. There was some yield. And so I didn't know where it came from, but there was yield. I actually got in an argument with a guy, I almost wish I could remember which token, like crypto coin it was, but maybe it's actually funnier and better that I don't remember what it was.
[00:37:54] But there was something that was paying out, like a ridiculous yield. It was like 10% or 15%. It's like a week or something, I don't know. And I was asking them, I was like, where do you think that's coming from, man? Like, the only way that that is coming from anywhere is it's either new people buying in or they are just printing the tokens.
[00:38:17] Like, nah, man, people are using it, man. It's like it was like a storage coin or it wasn't. It wasn't like storage coin. Like, there is actually one called that. Yes, I'm not joking, but it was something like that where there was supposedly some utility that you got from the network and you got the token so that you could stake something to get it out of the network. I. I don't remember. It doesn't fucking matter. It was something I dug into and almost did a shitcoin Insider episode on because I was just fascinated by how, like, just so bad some of these projects were. But I was arguing with this guy and I kept asking him, like, like, show me, like, where is somebody paying a fee for something? Like where they're actually using this thing and, and thus the people who are offering up the other half, that there's a service provider and there is a service.
[00:39:19] Who is the buyer and what is the service and how much is it? And he kept, he kept dodging. And I mean, we ran around and I just was like trying to focus, like, focus. My man. Look, look at, look at it, look at it. Where is the service? Who is buying what, aside from staking and yield and all of this crap? And then finally he went and found some statistic for like, how much of this, like, actual utility like the wattage or something on their electricity coin or whatever it was. And it was something like $12,000. And this guy alone, alone was saying he's making like hundreds of thousands of dollars and the entirety of the network, like the whole thing from start to offering utility to upgrades to, to yielding and staking to 100 million total value locked. I mean, the numbers he gave were ridiculous. Just like this much and this as much is traded and this much is locked and these are all the stakers. And I'm like, okay, what are they buying? And it was nothing, like literally nothing. 1% of 1% of 1%. Of all the bullshit that was going on with somebody being like, all right, maybe here, host some jpegs for me. There was another one, actually there was much more recent. So he's talking about like it was like a real estate coin or something. And it's like it facilitated $5 million in transactions. And I was like, so like six houses or something? Every time you dig into it every time. Especially the utility tokens, because there's some really fun stats that you can get into, like what the actual utility is, aside from all the staking and printing and, and governance, whatever. It's like, okay, but what does it does? What, what it. What does it does? What is the utility? It's almost invariably something that nobody is using and nobody cares about. Not even anybody in it is caring about it. I guess the only thing in this thread with this guy that I'm. I guess I have to say I applaud him for is at least he looked for the yield after putting all of his value into Terra, USD and Luna and then by some crazy chance withdrew it just before it completely collapsed and then moved his funds to ftx.
[00:42:02] I can't, man. I just can't.
[00:42:09] Maybe, maybe this is all bullshit. Maybe this whole thread is made up, I don't know. But then he puts it in the Solana wallet and gets hit with the. I think the Solana thing was a multi sig exploit that they were just like emptying that whole system on ch. And he says, another black swan. It's like, dude, at this point it is not a black swan.
[00:42:34] Understand? A black swan is an unexpected.
[00:42:39] Couldn't predict it once in a blue moon type event. The black swan in crypto is that something survives and is actually useful for something that is the black swan. Your situation with Solana was just normal crypto.
[00:42:59] And then this guy found the Strategy. He was LP Farming Meme Coins, 2 to 3% returns daily.
[00:43:10] How do you think 2 to 3% returns every day is going to be sustainable in something called Meme Coins.
[00:43:23] You don't even have to do your own research. You already did all the research you needed to do. Read the name of it. It's called Meme Coin. That shit's not gonna work for very long. I don't have to know anything else about it. But I can tell you if you're getting 2 to 3% returns per day, it ain't gonna last for very long. And you're probably gonna be the one holding the bag when it's losing 2 to 3% per minute. But this is the story of crypto.
[00:43:52] He just. It's all trading.
[00:43:55] It is the end game of Fiat Finance. Bitcoin is the end of Fiat. Bitcoin is the attempt to fix the fundamental problem of Fiat and replace it with something better. Crypto is just the end game of Fiat. At its worst. It is finance for the sake of finance. Completely detached from anything in the real world that has no equity, no company, no manufacturing, no production, nothing that anybody needs or wants. Just vapid points that constantly scream up and down and sideways in value so that people can trade it. The whole point of a financial system is to find a market price and exchange real value in the real world equity of actual businesses that produce products, commodities that are actually used to build those products and used by these machines and refined and sent to these companies and moved overseas. It is the granularization and trade and exchange of the contracts that denote what happens and who owns the outcome or the output of all of the things that are happening in the real world with real resources and real people and real businesses. Crypto is all of the points, all the derivatives, all the exchanges and all the financialization without any of the real world where it means absolutely nothing for no reason.
[00:45:32] If he had bothered to learn something about bitcoin right when he got his first, he could have 1000x and most importantly, he would not have wasted 12 years of his life trading nonsense and flipping NFTs, going full time into web 3 and jumping from mint to mint every single week. And he could have learned something useful. He could have built something in the real world and then traded it and stacked Bitcoin because Bitcoin was actually a reliable, trustworthy money. Half of all of this wouldn't have happened if he had just known to hold his own keys. Had he stayed humble and stacked sats, not only would his returns have been astronomical, his strategy wouldn't have had to been a strategy. It's Not a trading system where he has to work day and night to get it, to get it right and to figure out which volume and which yield he's got to tackle today. And where's the new mint? I gotta keep up with the forums. I gotta go full time on my web three trading activities. His strategy would have been simple. Save in good money. And not only would he have had insane returns, but most importantly of all, he would still have it all.
[00:46:49] And he did the worst, the worst of all, which he priced his profit and all of these things against dollars instead of bitcoin. He'd have known what all of this was actually costing him if he had realized that bitcoin is the foundation of all of it. And when they are losing money, they are losing money against when everything, when bitcoin falls, everything in crypto falls harder. And when on any medium or long term timeframe, those other crypto are stable in dollar prices or only they only fell a little bit, or they only went up a little bit, if you measure them against bitcoin, they're getting clobbered because bitcoin just keeps working. It just keeps being the best money and it just keeps growing. And after 12 years of tuition paid, the University of Crypto still hasn't taught him anything useful.
[00:47:49] You don't want that crap.
[00:47:53] So just learn bitcoin first. Learn and implement the simple, obvious rules first. If you do not even know how to put your bitcoin in your wallet and back up your keys yet and you are buying a bunch of crypto garbage or flipping NFTs, you deserve to lose everything. And you will. Because that's how the world works. You can't pray that you have wings and jump off a cliff.
[00:48:26] But anyway, anyway, that's my two sides for the day. I just read this thread and I just was laughing and astonished and just it's such a great example of like, this is the life. These people do this, this is what they do. And they spend this person spent 12 years doing all of this garbage and I just can't. It's. It's wild, it's crazy to me. But you know, whatever, he thinks he learned some lessons. I think he'll just keep learning more lessons until he figures out what the hell bitcoin is. Well, good luck to him, I guess. I hope nobody who listens to this show thinks that that's a good way to spend your time or your money. And if you do, well, can't say God didn't tell you so. All right, we'll wrap it up. Link in the show notes to all the cool stuff. A huge thank you to our sponsors, the Human Rights foundation and their amazing newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report. Check it out. Details in the show notes and of course big hit on chain and lightning. Non custodial. Hold your keys bitch. Easy to use and really well designed wallet. Check it out if you haven't. And with that, I am out of here. Guys. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. And until next time, that's my two sats.
[00:50:05] The IQ and life expectancy of the average American recently past each other in opposite directions.
[00:50:13] George Carlin.
