Welcome to Crypto where the vision of a global distributed economy lives in the eyes of futurists, hobbyists and dreamers everywhere. Oh, it’s also the home of the greedy, the stupid, and the immoral. But hey, it’s better than having them in government.
You got in for a variety of reasons:
Damn! That’s cool! I can send money faster than any bank, to anyone without any bank imposed limitations, without user accounts, without verification procedures. Awesome!
Damn! That’s cool! An immutable ledger with information on it, supported by thousands of people who get paid to maintain its integrity? Awesome! What can we put in there? Identity docs? Credit Scores? Land deeds? And I can control my proprietary information myself? Woohoo!
Damn that’s cool! I don’t know what this bitcoin thing is, but my friend Joe got rich and drives a new truck now. I wanna do that! If I get in now and Bitcoin goes to 500,000 dollars, I’ll be a millionaire!
There are of course other reasons. In 2016 and the first half of 2017, I think most of the people from reason #1 and #2 were really, genuinely interested in what blockchain could do. Then the bubble started and the greedy folks from reason #3 entered.
Here is the thing, lots of us were into Bitcoin when people were making fun of us, writing us off as lunatics. We got in when Bitcoin was $1, or $10, or $250 or even $1000. All that time we were told that the idea was preposterous. But we spent the time understanding how it works. We also spent time popping bubbles. Most of us didn’t care that much about the bubble, because there was always another one down the road.
However, this last time the Bitcoin bubble had 3000 other coins on it like fleas. These other projects gained in value upon their ICO, 2x, 5x or 100x it was free money falling from the sky for whoever was involved. But now people are somehow shocked that they fall in value faster than Bitcoin.
So here we are in August 2018. Bitcoin saw highs almost hitting $20,000. It’s now at its lowest for the year. As an aside, Bitcoin was still a great investment relative to last year, it being up 60%. Compare that to Apple which recently made news becoming a trillion dollar company is “only” up 37% from last year.
But your coin tanked. You looked at it month after month and thought to yourself, “It’ll go up next month”, or, “when they present at that next conference it will recover”. And month after month it just sinks deeper, as you watch your hard earned money dissipate into thin air like water on a hot skillet.
So you know they fucked up, right? Your coin was going to solve identity theft, or credit scores, or digital copyrights or you bought freaking CancerCoin and were going to freaking put an end to cancer. So it can’t be the project, the people running the project must have screwed the pooch. So you get on their Telegram and you ask some questions. Now you are one of two people:
You go on Telegram and ask about marketing, and exchanges, and “When Binance?”, and “When Mainnet?”
You go on Telegram and ask honest questions, hard questions about the specific way in which they intend to imbue value into your coin. You ask about the tokenomics, and why people will choose the coin over Fiat or Bitcoin or Dash. You ask what value the main net is providing when they could have just stayed on the ethereum blockchain. You ask why they chose to place their token on some unused blockchain or freaking JP Morgan’s Quorum blockchain for cripes sake!
Telegram: your source for FUD and unanswered questions
If you are the first question asker you get some droll, canned response. And maybe you are happy with that and you go away. But not after complaining that they arent getting to main net fast enough, or that their marketing sucks or whatever. But you know full well you have no idea what it takes to pull off a new crypto asset or even a new product as you have never done anything like that in your life. So you back off pretty quickly.
But if you are of the second variety, you spend hours repeating, rephrasing and making your question into various analogies just to try to get a straight answer. You are verbally abused, berated, called a troll, told to “Read the white paper” which you already have two times and are asking questions not answered there. You are asked to have private conversations knowing that they are trying to take your perceived attack out of the public square. Sometimes you are blocked despite still being a major coinholder and now you can’t keep up with important dates. But what doesn’t happen is — your question being answered. Why? The only reason that is possible is that there are no answers, they don’t know, or they know you won’t like the answer. They got their ETH, the project sucks, it wasn’t planned out well enough.
The entire situation, makes you mad. Because deep down, you know whose fault the loss of your funds belongs to.
It’s your fault.
You know you should have fully understood the tokenomics of the system you were buying into and you should have asked your smart questions back then. You didn’t because everything was going well for everyone, including you.
You knew you were in a big bubble. Every single person on the planet watching this was telling you. But you thought it wouldn’t be so bad. You were told Bitcoin is going to $500,000 so everything will eventually be fine. But you knew that there are many canyons and mountains to cross between here and there.
You know that virtually every single alt is down 60–98%, but you still want to believe that someone on the staff of your project can somehow fix the value of that specific coin. They can’t, and won’t. They are using the funds raised to get past this pain and work on the fundamentals of the project. They are not going to market something that isn’t at all ready.
You are basing your perceived loss on the value of the coin at an exchange. But deep down you know something is wrong about this assumption. If you want to cash out, the value is actually a lot lower. If you want to buy in, then the cost is actually a lot higher. A single person can move the price of your alt by 100% in a single trade. This is because volume on the exchange your coin is on is extremely low. It makes the number you are using to measure your wealth not a useful one.
It’s your fault because you didn’t do any due diligence before you bought the coin. It’s your fault because “Hey John MacAffe likes the project, it’s gotta be good” was enough for you. It’s your fault because you are expecting some tiny group of people to fix the value of their coin against the entire descending crypto market. It’s your fault because you didn’t sell when you should have.
We are all in the same boat here. 8 months ago we felt rich. Now we don’t feel so confident. I’m going to tell you a not-so-secret:
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions are not going away. While your specific coin may be total trash and finally disappear, the same is not true for all of blockchain. Make sure you learned a lesson from this. Now wait. Once Bitcoin starts to shine again then major alts like Ethereum, EOS, DASH, and Monero will follow closely. Then and only then, can you start to evaluate whether the exchange price for your coin actually means anything…if it’s still around.
Don’t repeat your mistakes.