“The Average Investor” and my attempt to buy a PlayStation 4 with B...

Half a decade of HODL. I have yet to experience the fruits of my patience since getting into crypto in summer of 2017. Yesterday I thought that was about to change. I found someone selling a Playstation 4, and he was accepting bitcoin as payment.

I messaged him, we exchanged a few messages. I was a little nervous because he was incredibly brief in all his replies, like he was doing it all as a kind of lazy chore. Was this even for real? Was he going to invite me up to his apartment and harvest my organs?

I arrived at his building and felt relieved. This guy was way too rich to want to harvest my organs...unless he made all his money harvesting organs from other innocent people trying to buy Playstations.

He made me wait outside for 10 minutes, but I didn't mind. I was excited about the fact that I was about to buy a playstation with 0.004 bitcoin that was worth $25 when I bought it. I am not looking to cash out but I thought I deserved a little prize for waiting out this long.

Well, you could say it didn't go as planned, although my organs are all where they were yesterday, give or take.

"So this bitcoin thing, how does it work?"

Oh no.

"How do I receive it?"

He doesn't even have a wallet? OK maybe I can teach him....

It turned out he had an exchange account which he had signed up for a few months ago to buy some bitcoin with. He had never sent or received it before...

Well ok, I can work with that. I gave him a little lesson on how bitcoin works and the difference between holding it yourself and having it on an exchange.

It could take up for a day for the money to show up on this particular exchange, and that made him very uncomfortable so I suggested downloading an Exodus wallet.

"No I don't want to download anything."

Ok, so we did a test run, just to see if the transaction would go through quickly, after all, the website is probably just warning people of the worst case scenario and bitcoin transactions happen much faster than they used to.

10 minutes...

We chat and he asks me about myself.

"So you are one of those guys who got in early and is just living off your fortunes now?"

Not exactly. I told him my story and how I am basically in crypto because I think that's the way the world is heading in, and his assumption about me was about a third true. I got in early but not THAT early, and also it wasn't nearly enough to be able to live off entirely, at least not long term.

"I don't like this. I open my account and it's all red. It's got a different value every day. I feel like I made a mistake."

I explained to him how 4 year cycles worked. He asked how to use his exchange wallet and didn't mind showing me that he held 2 bitcoin. Not surprising given the apartment he was living in. But from his tone, it seems like he invested way more than he was willing to lose. It's hard to imagine another persons financial situations from bits and pieces. He also said he had kids (more than 1). For all I know he could have taken out a massive loan on his house or maybe he’s taking care of his parents too.

Or maybe he’s just an upper middle class guy without huge financial struggles but who doesn’t like the idea of 1 year of his salary in this “crazy internet money”. I think it’s most likely that he’s just rather risk averse.

In any case, I realized, he is the average investor.

The average investor doesn’t understand what they are investing in. They hear something people are talking about and they buy when it’s high and sell when it’s low. The average investor wants someone to take care of everything for themselves. They don’t want to be their own bank.

Crypto adoption may be nigh but it’s not like it won’t still be a long long journey. Lots of influencers are talking about how retail isn’t even in yet, that it’s all the institutions. But what if this cycle is only really about the institutions. What if it takes another 4 years for any new retail to get in, other than the slow trickle of nations states, like El Salvador, which invite their citizens to use bitcoin?

I’m not saying we won’t still see upside. If MasterCard and PayPal and Apple and Facebook are all buying, the price will surely go up, but these companies are not likely to FOMO, for all we know some of them have already gotten in in a big way this year and are just looking to top off their reserves. They don’t move the markets.

What if retail investors merely account for a tiny percentage of bitcoins gains as institutions play games with shorts and corrections to try and trick them all out of their money as bitcoin slowly but surely rises for the next few years without much of a bear market. What if retail focuses on meme coins instead of bitcoin because 100000x gains on doggydog are more attractive than a 5x gain on bitcoin? What if there is new FOMO that scares them out as the institutions slowly buy up all the bitcoin that they’ve been scared out of hodling? What if they try to squeeze every last drop and it takes 2-3 years before anyone other than us long term investors and crypto educated start using these new crypto services.

It may take a long to me before we see many people using their crypto as currencies. It may take a long time til people actually accept this kind of thing as money. I think for the average investor, it’ll take, not only high levels of inflation, but high levels of inflation for an extra year or two to get the late-comers into crypto. It’ll take a new generation earning online and keeping their money in crypto. It’ll take more than just crypto tips on Twitter or even something as revolutionary and decentralized as Hive for us to see much more adoption than where we are at.

The fact is, we’ve already seen a massive spike in adoption this cycle. NFTs and defi grew massively in the past two years and now countries and companies are integrating bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I am starting to think that while we still have upwards movement coming, the current wave of adoption may start to plateau.

I’ve always felt that at some point bitcoins price chart would start to look more and more like Amazon. The 4 year cycle was a great tool for predicting the price as far as there was still a ton of bitcoin being mined relative to the demand. Now the demand is much bigger than supply, but the price is much higher and harder for regular people to move, even with their life savings.

I wonder if it’s finally time that we see a more “stable” bitcoin price, that rises, but much more slowly and steadily, at least compared to how it’s been in the past.

I don’t think anyone should come away from these feeling bearish. It just means that the market might change, if this theory ends up playing out. There will still be lots of opportunities.

So I’m the end, the transaction was still pending. He told me if I wanted to pay in cash I could and he would try to send me back the bitcoin tomorrow. I felt exhausted and I’ve already hyped myself up about buying the PS4 after a year of talking about it, so I went to the ATM and I paid him cash.

It may be another 4 years of inflation and developments in the industry before I can easily buy a PlayStation with bitcoin from a stranger on the internet and not rely on some 3rd party service.

Either way, I’m not a financial adviser and this is not financial advice, but I think we are still going up.

🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎