The Idea That Helped Me Get "Rich"

Hello to my fellow Hivians,

We are all processing and perpetuating information on HIVE. The information we provide on HIVE is theoretically perpetual. We can write things first here. Even if what we write here gets reprinted on another form of social media, it was posted here first and we have the ledger to back up that story. We can tell the truth and we have evidence.

The things we write on HIVE will be perpetuated into eternity, in theory anyways. The information we share, our beliefs, our actions, and the people we associate with will all be remembered. HIVE is a social experiment.

Most people on HIVE today do not realize they will be remembered; based on their on chain actions. What you post on HIVE is the legacy that your children's children can remember you by. If you become famous one day, but HIVE is where you started, people will come here and see your foundation; how did you operate when you had basically nothing? Can you be trusted with more?

I should not be trusted to manage anyone's investments. The trading strategies I refine are built around my personality and how I think at a given point in time. When I am being greedy I acknowledge it, and I try to use my understanding of why I am being greedy to my advantage. If I make a mistake, it is because I am a failure and I want to figure out what I did wrong. I ask myself, "what do I need to adjust, so I am more likely, to be successful next time?"

Most people make mistakes and do not adjust. Admitting you are failure sucks that you later have to pull yourself out of. It is a terrible feeling and requires self reflection that is a skill. It is a skill that must be constantly refined and you will always be challenged. It is a lot like golf. I do not enjoy playing golf, it is annoying and mostly a waste of time for me. But there is a reason golf is so popular with the "successful." If you can train yourself to leverage your mind's impulses, when you hit a golf ball just right, it is perfection. It is one of the best feelings in the world that most people will never be able to experience. The networking and drinking with golf is just a "bonus" 😅.

I am very "religious" but I do not go to church right now. I try to be a Christian. I have Muslim friends in the real world and Muslim acquaintances on HIVE. I cherish my relationship with these people regardless of their faith. I do not care what people say to me about Muslims. I do not care what Muslim countries do. I do not care what people say about Christians. I do not care what "Christian" countries do. I do not believe Christian countries can exist and that premise, to me, is a flawed understanding of what a Christian is. I only care about the individual. I cannot blame you for things you did not do and I will not give you empathy for your father's sins.

I am not going to use HIVE to spread the word of God, based on my interpretation obviously. I am not convinced trying to spread the word of God on HIVE is even moral to do. This idea is still fresh in my mind so I won't be able to articulate it very well. I am not a preacher. I should not try to change people. But if I am being myself on HIVE, it may seem that way sometimes. I believe in "The Church" but not a church. I think the standard we impress on our religious leaders is unreasonable. Any human, even a preacher, will have a hard time not getting consumed with power. This is why sabbaticals are very important to Christian religious leaders in my opinion. They need to get away from people. People do not usually like making their own decisions. People want to be led. People will try to make their leaders gods.

I am only bringing this up because many people on HIVE do not know me well. Some people on HIVE are much smarter than me and I am mostly speaking to these folks that I have not been able to talk to outside of HIVE. If you have talked to me a lot on Discord my faith does come up sometimes. And there is no agenda, it is just a conversation. When I talk on Discord the chat moves on and eventually we forget about most of it. Also, Discord is a business and it will end one day like all businesses do. Most those conversations about my faith will luckily get deleted.

But HIVE is perpetual in theory. So me teasing out my faith and trying to understand other religious people through debates on HIVE can be dangerous. I need to control it and we should not perpetuate religious arguments that could be wrong to all Hivians for eternity. I am human so I think I will make mistakes, but I am not a leader or a pastor and I am no god; I am just a man. This power I am referring to is incredibly dangerous. Not speaking about the chance of people doing what I described makes the existing power to do this more pernicious.

I am an options trader (zero sum) and an investor (mutually beneficial). I will always do things to increase my ability to pivot; unless I believe it will dam my soul. Using HIVE in a religious way with the intent of converting people may dam my soul and I am not going to do it. This is a promise from me to HIVE. I will try to be a Christian through my actions and I will probably fail. But I am not Jesus and if you expect me to act like Jesus you will be disappointed. I am not a shepherd, you should talk to me so we can share knowledge, but do not follow me and do not do what I say because I am the one saying it. You can listen to me but then you should look at the facts. Don't trust, verify. I will not lead you to heaven and I am attracted to dark places. Being around me and talking to me constantly is hard, not everyone can do it. I disagree with myself all the time and that makes it very hard for people to understand where I am coming from. I type people short novels because my mind is constantly racing. It seems crazy. Maybe it is crazy? But it works for me and what works for you should be different. We are all individuals.

I used to have a negative net worth. It is more common than not in the West. We get cheap debt and lots of opportunities. People can take out a $100k+ loans to pay for higher education and usually they don't even need collateral. This is crazy. It is not crazy to get opportunities that pay this much money though. What is crazy, the idea that we need people in higher education so we can gain the knowledge to be successful. "You need to go to college or you are a failure" is a commonly perpetuated scam in the West.

I do not think we should talk about our beliefs on HIVE with the intent to convert people to our beliefs. We have a hard enough time holding religious leaders accountable in the real world. I do not think having religious leaders on HIVE is a good idea. Followers is fine, but not a leader that can use social engineering tactics to get people to operate outside of the boundaries of the protocol. A religious leader would not get the opportunity to take a sabbatical if they operate on HIVE. I am only bringing this up because sometimes my beliefs will come out if I am being transparent about where I come from. I am not Jesus and you SHOULD NOT follow me. I am a sinner.

There is a way to share your beliefs on HIVE and it still be a good post that is not about telling people what to do. I am thinking about 1 person in particular that does this at an "advanced" level. This person is not a Christian and they do have my respect. I will show them deference.

Moving on, I would like to talk about this book and why it is important to me.

The below book is very important to me in an almost spiritual way. No it is not the Christian Bible.

This book is hard to get an original hard copy of. This copy is a collection item. I like to collect things that are valuable to me even if they are not valuable in the real world.

This book is important to me not because of the words but the underlying idea of the book. Finance is an art and a science.

If you only treat finance like an art, you will eventually be smacked with reality and no one can save you. This happens in Private Equity all the time. This is why Private Equity has a bad reputation globally. Because Private Equity sometimes (not usually) is a perversion of the formula for a successful business. The formula for a successful business is to make money and be morally good to your stakeholders. Toys R Us went out of business because of the greed that naturally lives within Private Equity and Finance more generally. Sometimes even the best of the best cannot control their own human desires. Even the smartest get consumed by greed and become failures and no one comes to save them; if anything humans laugh at their pretentiousness. Toys R Us went out of business. The only thing that was left of Toy R Us was the brand; a shell and a perversion of what Toys R Us was built to be.

Finance is also a science. There is logic and math that goes into a firm's valuation. When the art outweighs the science this can be very powerful. The CEO of a business makes a huge difference and in a lot of ways these people are the "preachers" of the business world. "Follow me and you will get rich" they often imply. It only has to work once for some folks to believe them forever.

Michael Saylor is my favorite example of this. I am not picking on Michael Saylor; I have a lot of respect for him. There are lots of examples but people in crypto world do tend to envy the guy. He is a legend in crypto. I have been trading Covered Calls on $MSTR for a "long time" and have been able to hedge his delusions. His philosophy is all you have to do is buy Bitcoin, HODL, and get rich. That could be true....? But why do I need $MSTR to do it? I don't need $MSTR, $MSTR needs investors. I have been trading CCs on $MSTR for a while and I have been waiting for the moment that recently happened. $MSTR valuation collapsed to reality. Sometimes reality smacks you in the face. Michael Saylor got smacked pretty hard recently and $MSTR mNAV is close to 1. https://www.strategy.com/

I don't think Michael Saylor can get out of the situation he put himself in; he cannot even get $STRC to trade at par. But Michael Saylor has an uncanny ability to do the "impossible." Michael Saylor is a smart person when it comes to numbers and he is very charismatic in a weird way. His only weakness seems to be his desire to be remembered. He famously says his gift to humanity will be not selling his bitcoin and letting it be lost when he dies. As soon as a man or women starts to position themselves as a savior, they have lost me.

Michael Saylor inspired a lot of similar investments https://bitcointreasuries.net/. I have made money on some of these copycats and lost money on others. That's just the way it goes but I do keep track of my losses and am honest with myself and the people who care about me when I make bad bets. I cannot hide losses forever and it makes trading for me even harder than it already is when I have skeletons in my closet. It is impossible for me to think clearly when I have skeletons in my closet and my end goal is to bury these skeletons in secret. Some people seem to be able to do this. I cannot.

I do not think Michael Saylor is evil or that he will go out of business. I think he will make a lot of money from this trade. I am guessing eventually he will try to take $MSTR private because doing what he is doing with a public company might actually be impossible over the long-term. Bitcoin Treasury Companies are too easy to stop in public markets with zero sum traders doing their thing (I am mostly thinking of short sellers).

What is interesting is I am not even predicting the future. Jim Chanos is a famous short seller when it comes to calling out fraud or scams. He appears to be the main driver that brought MSTR mNAV back down to about 1. Jim Chanos has walked away from the trade but $MSTR mNAV is currently stuck. Retail traders are waiting for Michael Saylor "the savior" to save them. But in the end, Michael Saylor will need the help of investors; Jim Chanos reminded him of a valuable lesson.

I do not "like" Jim Chanos for the same reason I do not "like" Michael Saylor. They tend to fall in love with their trades and stop doing it for the right reasons; they want to be remembered. If you want to be remembered it will happen because of what you do; you cannot force it like a script forever and you will be exposed. Both Michael Saylor and Jim Chanos have been bankrupted before.

I am going to start talking about real investing (mutually beneficial trades) on HIVE (not options or futures). Zero sum trades is how to extract from others; it is just a wealth transfer and I am actually better at this than "real" investing. Mutually beneficial trades is a coordinated way to create value (not "create" money) and this is how you make crazy money because it is a lot of work. I am going to create a community with a purpose that no one has ever done before on HIVE. I want to make a mutually beneficial community that teaches Hivians how to become better investors, in a generalist way, as a HIVE with non crypto investments. I want us to make more money in the fiat world together by sharing knowledge. I will sell you nothing and we will exchange knowledge in way that benefits both of us. I will leverage my increasing HIVE stake to make this a reality. I will have to do this the right way which makes this complicated and it will be time consuming to get it done correctly.

This community has not been created yet. The community will eventually be very strict and it will have a lot of rules. The rules will change too. There are not a lot of finance communities on HIVE. Most finance communities on HIVE are geared towards L2 products. I hope that some of the people in these other communities will want to come and learn vs try to make money only. If you are going to post in my community for the HIVE rewards, you are on HIVE for the wrong reasons in my opinion.

If you post "bad content" in my community I will most likely downvote you. I do not want to be a "jerk;" but, if you are a real person and you believe I can use my stake as I wish, I am not being a jerk. I will never tell everyone why I downvote them but I am giving you a heads up in this instance. Usually there are multiple reasons with me when I downvote people and I do not like explaining it because usually people use my own words against me and take my words out of context.

I am looking forward to this community. If you are interested in the idea but not sure if you can provide value that is a good signal you will be a valuable participant. I learn more from the people that have not been trained how to think.

I am only in one Discord community right now and I will not make a Discord community for this HIVE community I am working on.

I will never ask you to invest in anything. If I ask you to do anything it is a scam. I say that because a scammer may try to impersonate me one day to take advantage of you and you need to be careful. People need to constantly develop defense mechanisms against scams in crypto and the real world or they will be scammed. Even I get scammed sometimes, and I think I am pretty smart 😊

Happy Saturday!

Cheers!

❤️

Hurt - The Potato Dragon on HIVE