• Abstract

• Context

• Why Use A Futarchy For Governance?

• Participants In A Futarchy

• Types Of Proposals In A Futarchy

• The Potential Of Meta-DAO’s Futarchy

• Conclusion

Abstract:

Institutions, and how they are governed, create different incentive structures for citizens of nations. Comparing countries such as North/South Korea reveal how the right institutions create vastly different outcomes for similar populations, and this is no different in crypto. When institutions such as FTX/Alameda did not have a structure of transparency and honesty, we ended up with customer funds being used, huge amounts of fraud and theft from users.

While the majority of crypto participants use the asset class for speculation and investment due to its lucrative financial upside, ultimately, code (and the blockchain) will be adopted by human societies in various forms, due to how it allows one to check the legitimacy of ownership, provenance, proof of funds, and more.

And with Meta-DAO’s execution of an onchain futarchy, governance in crypto might have taken a giant leap forward with code being used to create a new incentive structure for market participants, allowing the forces of predictive markets and an open price to trade to help the DAO develop from a simple idea, into a benevolent organisation that can empower the sovereign individual of the 21st century.

This essay will explain in-depth how a futarchy functions, how Meta-DAO has enabled it for crypto participants with smart contract technology, and how one can begin participating in Meta-DAO’s futarchy, as well as $META’s speculative upside.

Context:

In order to understand human behaviour, it’s crucial to understand how institutions and incentive guide societies. If one lives in a low-trust, high-violence society where bribery, corruption and theft are the best means to acquiring wealth - the smartest individuals will trend towards that behaviour. If one lives in a high-trust, low-violence society where capitalism and innovation are rewarded, and building valuable businesses/assets are the best means to wealth - that too will influence that society to behave in that manner.

In the context of the blockchain, the incentive structures/institutional issues within it can be seen in a multitude of examples, such as:

• A new layer-one chain deploys, and with new market participants bridging to it to buy any new tokens on it (memes, protocols, pool2-farms), anonymous developers can easily deploy tokens where they control large amounts of the supply, and sell those tokens on the open market with the exit liquidity of eager buyers

• A DAO has its decisions governed by token stakers, and the token supply is accumulated by several entities who wish to redeem the DAO’s treasury, or give themselves huge financial bonuses without delivering promises to token holders. Due to the institutional structure of that DAO being controlled by who owns the most supply, decisions that enrich top holders, as opposed to the project/protocol long-term, are much more likely than not.

• A new token/protocol launches with low float, with venture capitalists (VCs) and private investors owning much of the supply at a much lower valuation than current market price. As the VC/private investor tokens unlock, the monetary incentive leads to these parties to cash out their returns against public buyers, who end up bagholding at a loss.

However, Meta-DAO’s creation of a futarchy alongside the usage of smart contracts creates an entirely new governance structure that circumvents the issues seen in the examples above, and instead, is a groundbreaking step towards humans beginning to trust code for governance, as per GCR’s prediction:

What Is A Futarchy, & Why Use It For Governance?

A futarchy is an governance structure where prediction markets are used to determine decisions on policy, and where members of that structure vote on values, and bet on beliefs. First popularized by Vitalik in 2014, Meta-DAO is the first DAO to properly implement this structure on the blockchain on Solana’s Virtual Machine.

Let’s look at how Meta-DAO’s futarchy functions:

Participants in a futarchy can raise proposals for market participants to vote upon through the usage of prediction markets. Instead of decisions made via token or stakers, decisions are directly influenced by participants betting on the impact a proposal has on the $META token, and whether it will have a positive/negative impact.

Here’s what a basic futarchy proposal/decision might look like:

(Source: https://medium.com/coinmonks/a-deep-dive-into-futarchy-what-national-governments-and-private-organisations-can-learn-from-a-9408aa2fb887)

And in the case of Meta-DAO, the endgame of its futarchy would be it going from helping develop projects under the Meta-DAO banner, to eventually institutions, even nations working together with the DAO as it continues to grow in participants and value provided through its governance structure.

Considering that the 5 FAANG companies are known for their innovations in institutional structures, and that they have provided over 7 trillion USD worth of shareholder value, while Meta-DAO is still an early stage project, it helps frame the potential of using a futarchy for governance, and how its new structure could lay the groundwork for a more prosperous society.

Meta’s futarchy functions through the usage of the “autocrat”, a smart contract that allows proposals to be submitted to the DAO, and it creates 2 separate pass/fail token markets, which then allow market participants to speculate on the proposal, and to predict the effects it will have on Meta’s token price, $META.

The autocrat program regulates and checks the price of the pass/fail market tokens, and then either executes/disregards the proposal based on the market’s decision. The market that wins the pass/fail decision is finalized, while the losing market is reverted.

The autocrat reverts markets via the conditional_vault program, which allows users to deposit underlying tokens (either $META or $USDC currently) into a pass/fail vault (the token market), and redeem the tokens after the proposal has been decided upon. This ensures the vault will never have more liabilities than assets, and that users will always be able to redeem what they’ve placed into the proposal.

And as the structure of proposals in this futarchy allows participants to predict the proposal’s impact on $META price, this brings in the power of predictive markets and speculation to provide better governance decisions than other traditional structures. Predictive markets have been shown to predict political elections better than traditional bookmakers, forecast weather and movements in the prices of commodities, and a futarchy taps into this speculative power that would not be used in a democratic or autocratic structure.

Participants in a Futarchy:

There are 3 main roles inside a futarchy, although participants can be a composite of multiple ones:

1. Analysts/traders

These are market participants who speculate on token prices and market trends, contributing their speculation and predictive agency to various proposals, and to help govern a futarchy from detrimental decisions.

2. Entrepreneurs

These are individuals inside the futarchy that wish to build and develop projects in the interest of the futarchy. Be it someone in Meta-DAO who wishes to create a creative studio and is requesting a grant in order to hire artists and coders, or someone requesting a business development role for the DAO, entrepreneurs are crucial for helping drive innovation and creation on the base layer for a futarchy.

3. Cyber-agents

These are the coders and developers that help the futarchy enact proposals, and build out assets for its benefit. While the entrepreneurs guide the vision of the futarchy, and the analysts/traders help predict the outcomes of various proposals, cyber-agents are the integral engineers that keep the futarchy running, and help it function on the blockchain.

The Types of Proposals in a Futarchy:

While anyone can submit proposals to Meta-DAO, it’s recommended by Meta-DAO leader Proph3t to use one of the four formats below:

• Business project

• Business direct action

• Operations project

• Operations direct action

And anyone can view the templates for these proposals at the link here: https://blog.themetadao.org/a-futards-guide-to-the-meta-dao-7a6b8d66443a

These proposal templates help consolidate the desires of the proposer to the DAO, and ensure that the proposals are explained in enough detail for the DAO to make a balanced decision on them.

And that’s the bare bones of what a futarchy is, and how it functions!

Hopefully through this breakdown of the futarchy, the roles within it and how proposals function alongside the autocrat’s smart contracts, you can start to see the potential of this new governance model.

Now, how does the futarchy work in real life?

The Case Study of Proposal #3

After the Meta-DAO treasury grew from $10,000 to $30,000 several months after launching in November 2023, Rar3 created a proposal for Meta_DAO to raise an additional $75,000, $35,000 of those funds to be used to provide META/USDC liquidity on an AMM. The proposal passed with a pass price of $24.2, and a fail price of $18.9 - proposal link here: https://app.themetadao.org/proposal?id=3

However, Proph3t, creator of Meta-DAO, wanted the proposal to fail, and analyzed the various ways he could cause the proposal to fail, and how the futarchy’s structure prevented him from doing so as a possible bad actor.

When the proposal was live, the pass META (pMETA) was valued at $24.5, while the fail META (fMETA) was valued at $11. He considered this a huge mispricing from the market, and thus started buying the fMETA market, and selling the pMETA market. In the middle of the proposal deadline, Proph3t was sitting on 191 fMETA, and 82 pMETA, and wanted the proposal to fail so he could redeem the fMETA for normal META.

How could he possibly manipulate the markets to his favour? Well, he could actively buy the fail market, and sell the pass market, but if he was unable to change the trends in the markets, he would be stuck buying META above fair value in the fail market, and selling it in the below fair value in the pass market. On top of that, other traders might spot the price dislocation, and push it back to where prices were at the beginning.

When the Hunt brothers attempted to corner the silver market in 1979, despite the short-term spike in its price, people responded by smelting down their silver to profit from the manipulated price, bringing the market back to equilibrium. And plenty of arbitrage firms exist in traditional markets, preventing the manipulation of asset prices in more mature markets.

Or Proph3t could do a smear campaign on the proposal, but while the proposal might fail, it would damage his reputation to the futarchy in the long term, and have real financial consequences to him as someone working for the DAO.

Finally, he could do a hostage-style negotiation with the DAO, but it wouldn’t be in the interests of Meta-DAO long term to allow the passing/failing of proposals solely because of such tactics.

From this example, you can see how the futarchy works IRL, and not just on paper:

• Price incentives in the pass/fail META markets for traders to speculate and predict the impact of a proposal

• The financial impact of lying about the proposal’s impact on futarchy participants help prevent selfish actions

• A group of individuals unified by shared values and goals under the futarchy, thus incentivising participants to act best for the DAO’s long-term future

• And the immutability of the autocrat smart contracts to help determine the passing/failure of a proposal

Can you begin to grasp the revolution of this form of governance?

You get the power of prediction markets helping to correct and direct decisions, the direct incentive structure preventing bad actors, and code becoming a vital part of governance to further remove the chances of human error/manipulation in decision making.

The Potential of Meta-DAO’s Futarchy

The price of $META has gone from $25 to $1,000 over the past few months, with a circulating market cap of around 13-14 million as of February 28th 2024, showcasing the market beginning to realize the potential of the project, and what it represents - an evolution of governance structure inside the crypto space that can be used to incentivise a flywheel of positive behaviour for futarchy participants and $META holders.

Here’s a simple breakdown of this potential flywheel:

• $META price is driven upward by speculators who believe in the potential upside of the token

• $META price increases the monetary value of submitting quality proposals to the DAO, and building value for the futarchy

• Proposals created by entrepreneurs, analysts, and futarchy participants lead to increased adoption and speculation on the $META token, with the price prediction mechanism allowing the market to participate in Meta-DAO’s governance

• $META price is driven upwards by the speculation, and the reflexive cycle repeats itself

Conclusion: How much is an entirely new structure of governance and innovation worth in this asset class?

Considering the speculation we’ve seen so far this cycle on new token standards such as $ORDI and $PANDORA, as well as the growth of new protocols such as $PEAS, I have little doubt that the innovation and possibilities that $META presents as both a token and DAO have yet to be fully seen. Especially as majors continue to trend towards new all time highs, bringing new institutional as well as retail participants into crypto.

There will be a multitude of billion-dollar DAOs and protocols that will be created this cycle - and Meta-DAO has the potential to be a standout performer this cycle.

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into what a futarchy is, what Meta-DAO’s futarchy is, how it functions, and its potential to be a groundbreaking shift forward in crypto governance. I’m personally very bullish for what $META represents, and what it can accomplish this bull market in our asset class.

Nothing will stop the expansion of fiat currency.

Which means our internet coins have only ONE direction to go on a long enough timescale…

UP.

I was back in Singapore last weekend, spending time with the family. I went for a walk in Ion Orchard, one of our most popular shopping malls, where people are meant to enjoy themselves and have fun times with friends/family.

(like that’s possible in Disneyland with the Death Penalty lmao)

I was greeted by the dark, deadened serotonin-overloaded stare of young men lost in quiet desperation, their psyches and physiques trapped in a state of shock and nervous overexcitement, their souls lost in a cultural purgatory of a never-ending societal crab bucket to climb out of.

I have zero doubt that stems from the pressure cooker culture of the country, as well as the fact that you have a younger generation walking around seeing the opulence and wealth of the boomers, knowing they will NEVER reach the same level of wealth in their lifetimes due to how the fiat system is setup and how the housing ponzi has been pumped in most Western/developed nations.

Remember:

You have an entire GLOBAL population of such youths, waging from paycheck to paycheck, watching the clown world of celebrities print millions from OnlyFans, Tiktok, influencing, etc etc and they are desperately wishing for a way out.

Quiet desperation isn’t just the English way.

It’s the way of the Zoomers and those born after the boomers who understand the Ponzi was stacked against them from the day they sprang forth from the cosmos, with Boomer Cantillionaires mocking their poverty and wagedom from their ever-pumping assets that they acquired at much better income/asset ratios when they were in their youth.

There are only a few ways out of this scheme as a 1st worldooor:

1. Becoming a digital nomad and moving to a poorer 2nd/3rd world country.

But anyone with common sense knows that unless they are able to create a sustainable income stream that can grow, moving to Vietnam, Thailand, LatAm doesn’t mean you’ll have a great life forever - it means you’ll have a decent standard of living in a place you have no connections in (usually) for as long as you can sustain an online income stream before your business/job/industry eventually gets replaced by technology or becomes too saturated.

Ask the dropshippers who made it off fidget spinners how they’re doing these days if they didn’t upgrade their skills and ran out of their early windfalls.

Or the 2000s affiliate marketers that printed 6 figs easily from Clickbank offers before the space became more saturated. Or the internet copywriters that thought they could print millions off ripping Dan Kennedy sales letter templates forever. It’s not looking good for any of them. Quiet desperation awaits.

2. Embrace clown world with wh0ring/clown world antics

If you’re a cute Asian female, you can always punch in your Yoko Ono card, go to the gym for a couple of months, learn to put freckles on your cheeks and cash it in with OnlyFans.

Do a couple of twerking TikToks, start printing a few thousand each month with a decent sales funnel. Maybe sell your used undies and bathwater to desperate men online. You will print from this. Call it yield farming with extra steps.

Or maybe you become a gay twink online or femboy if you’re desperate enough. Most don’t have that level of guts/desperation to do this option, or the appearance/desirability to do so.

Again, quiet desperation awaits.

3. As someone with little to no other options, hypergamble your way to as much moolah as you can through the speculative markets of crypto, stocks, options, you name it.

Many in the developed world are smart enough to know the game is rigged against them, which will drive them towards moonshot investments and punts that would freak out a value-driven boomer investor and/or give them a heart attack.

This cycle will be marked by what I believe to be a level of utter desperation and escapism, that will blow away the boomer ideas of efficient markets, P/E ratios, value, and other antiquated values. Imagine telling your boomer parents you got a 100x off $JOE because yellow boi meme is good lmao

No, it is not different this time. Similar ridiculous behavioral patterns have occurred in periods of hyperinflation, such as Weimar Germany.

Off the top of my head, here are several factors that will fuel this cycle:

1. A new form of technology, allowing a new form of speculation/growth

The blockchain can still be considered new if you market it well enough. Add in some words on scalability, immutable ownership etc, and it becomes interesting enough for people to allocate into this asset class.

We’ve got Ordinals on BTC, with clear adoption and usage by speculators, paving the way for funds and institutions to begin speculating on them further. We’ve got socialfi tech on BASE and other EVMs, letting us punt on our favorite influencers and egirls.

We’ve got Blur making NFTs more efficient, and tools like Maestro, Bananabot, Unibot, Newslybot all making our lives easier as degens.

Now, one must not fade the shitcoining speculator.

For he is at the forefront of technology, aping with the skin of his teeth into contracts, chains, satoshis, all for the promise of filthy lucre.

2. A run from fiat into more and more speculative assets further down the risk-curve.

It’s unlikely we don’t see more money printing if/when enough negative economic indicators emerge from the West.

If you think not, you underestimate the greed of politicians and elites to pump their bags, and to use the printer to kick the can down the road.

We will most certainly hit new all time highs denominated in USD and other fiat currencies for this reason alone. Dumb take, I know, but if money supply goes up, there’s no way $BTC and by proxy $ETH don't go up in price.

Just duh, keep it simple.

3. A wave of institutional adoption through ETFs, Blackrock, and other big tradfi names starting to pump our bags.

Unironically, this will lead tokens with decentralized narratives to pump for fear of elites seizing the asset class for themselves. I’m looking at $TAO, $ATOR, and other such tokens to take lead with that narrative and grow even further from how well they’ve performed this year.

This will also push our altcoins and ETH to run hard, due to the next wave of new retail participants being biased from BTC’s high unit price, and looking at cheaper alternatives and memecoins for better returns.

When it comes to memecoins, the winners for this current wave of expansion are very clear - $PEPE, $JOE, $BITCOIN, $SPX, etc - all of those with strong cults and communities have many a way to go.

Most have forgotten what a raging bull market is like.

It is a fiendish time of pumps that do not end, of feverishly chasing the next big thing, desperately aping into whatever you think may be the next 5, 10, 20x gem. As of now, you can still allocate into the right coins and be considered "early". I believe once we hit range highs on $BTC on this move (be it $45-52k range), that is when alts run even harder, before eventually the liquidity is pulled by the participants who were in the ponzi scheme earlier, and the money transfer from the hands of the many, into the hands of the few once again.

We are still in a zero-sum game, and will continue to be so until we see clear signs of new blood entering the space, and an increase of liquidity.

However, we are nearly at the brink of the PVP shifting to PVE, and for the market to truly charge forward as a bull once more.

You didn’t stick around this bear to lose, you stuck around to win. The signs of what will be this cycle’s winners are already here, you only need listen. I will end this tirade with two words:

Bet More.

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Academic writing these days that's required for you to get a degree, PhD, etc...

Is the art of regurgitating big words without understanding the meaning behind them, while quoting sources you scurried together off Google Scholar on a last-minute writing binge, to form a thesis that doesn't even make any sense.

Academia has become a cabal of midwits stroking themselves off to the repeated, dying, dogmatic thoughts of 19th-century psyops, with little to no ability to even see what life could be outside the schemas of their thought patterns.

In all honesty, academic writing was probably better (and more interesting) when we allowed dreams to be the sources of our insight. Good example of such intelligence? Read @thoughtfultrade's Twitter account. Kozyrev's mirror. Neutrino sea. Healer hands on enzyme rates.

Midwits will flagellate and flail themselves to the altar of certificates and societal statements of value, while those on the other sides of the bell curve will be denominated as lazy, dimwitted, and a waste of resource - when often the greatest ideas and innovations emerge from such individuals.

Sad!

You also see this a lot in commercial music today.

Every sad song has a Minor 4th, as if it's some amazing musical discovery to denote to the audience that NOW you must cry and feel sadness. Tear up and kowtow to my musical genius, they proclaim.

Olivia Rodrigo's Vampire is a great example of this. Vulgarity for the sake of it, with little prose or artistry beyond the prostration of a musical cliche that has been overused for centuries.

There is no drawing of emotion through smart chord choice, OR it has become midwits flexing over Jacob Collier's quintuplet over septuplet extended major 11th with a flat 15th.

Both of which are reprehensible and an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Where is the art?

It isn't art, it isn't music, because it isn't human.

It's a pastiche of humanity, a pale imitation of what we used to be in a world that was not besmirched and destroyed by monetary inflation, cultural degradation, toxification of the food supply and many other forces.

What a dreary state of affairs.

Anyway, back to the cave, where aspirin, coffee, milk and orange juice await my growling stomach.

Regarding crypto:

Bet more, we're going higher bitches.

50k BTC is on the cards, ride up this Ponzi and get your bag so you can find yourself homeless on a beach somewhere, with a caiparinha and glass of fresh orange juice in hand. Simple as.

Play the betas, long the winners, ride the trend.

Don’t oversize so you get chopped up, but don’t try and call the top too early. Ride the bull, and be willing to get thrown around by it to make your way into the citadel.

Personally, I’ve largely refrained from posting that much about $mybags or writing articles on this substack as I find most of the crypto content space to be already widely covered by people who work much harder than me to list protocols, and provide information.

However, I received a message the other day from someone who said my articles are among his favorite pieces of crypto content, so perhaps it’s time to start typing away like a maniac once more.

For one, it seems to be entertaining and somewhat useful to the small audience I have, while also very therapeutic on my end.

Hoping you are all well,

Tyrogue

• Why being a crypto degenerate does destroy your health over time

• The most common forms of crypto-related physical, and mental stress

• And how to reverse all that damage with several easy fixes - Ray Peat style

The psychological and physiological damage of trying to make it in crypto is largely understated, underestimated, and underreported.

Let’s fix that in this article today, and identify all the ways crypto speculation creates mental and physical stress, and how to reverse that damage, and unlock a deeper, more meaningful level of life.

Disclaimer: don’t follow the health stuff w/o obviously doing your own DD. But it’s worked for me so ymmv, nfa etc.

TL;DR:

• Risk on trading/degening puts your body in fight/flight mode constantly, increasing cortisol and stress levels - this is why you always hear people say “It feels like 5 years passed this year” in this space

• That affects your sleep and rest, destroying your ability to recover and make good decisions (both IRL and in cryptoland)

• Big losses/wins then destroy your dopamine receptors and reward mechanisms, destroying personal motivation among others

• Heavy desk/screen time also damages your spine, mobility, and eyes over time without the right corresponding therapies

• Bad diet alongside crypto degening = weight gain, bad posture, constant high stress on the mind = and u wonder why you’re more stressed than ever since you discovered this ponzi asset class

• Easiest fixes? Good health routine, good food routine, good water supply + reduction of heavy metals/toxins in your diet

  • In any major city? Congrats, your water is filled with birth control pills, trace heavy metals, trace antipsychotics, trace hormones - all of this compound the damage and stress of crypto

  • You better get a good water filter, deworm yourself, and fix that microbiome fr

• Best supplements? Vit D, NAC, piracetam, magnesium, pregnenolone/progesterone drops, red light therapy, bright lights in winter - in fact, bright lights all the time will reduce the depression of 6-8 hour days of screen time easily and the related eye damage from it

• Best exercises? Kettlebell swings, hindu squats, hindu pushups, yoga classes, starting strength, gymnastic strength training - note they are all focused on bang for buck, mobility + strength movements

  • Combat Conditioning is a great PDF available online if you know where to look (Library Genesis)

  • Pavel Tsatsouline has plenty of tutorials online

  • There are 30 minute free yoga routines on the internet by hot girls and you’re selling $ETH to buy OF videos ser? Really? (No, I’m not linking that, search it yourself to improve your sleuthing skills)

• Easiest Ray Peat fixes are:

  • Daily carrot salad on an empty stomach to restore thyroid function

  • Daily tropical oil consumption - coconut oil in your coffee/tea is an easy way to accomplish this while checking the charts + reduces chances of obesity

  • Daily asparin for increased blood flow to brain - 200-300mg is my personal dosage, some go higher

  • High quality orange juice to replace starch consumption, also anti-estrogenic

  • Broscience explained: if your gut is inflamed, so is your brain and you expect to be able to trade and speculate well with a broken brain? NGMI

  • Remove all unsaturated seed oils and fish oils from diet, replace with ruminant fats and copious dairy

• Personal recommendation: pick up a movement based sport/art to distract yourself with when the market is crabbing/doing jack shit - your adrenals and dopamine receptors will thank you. Boxing, MMA, BJJ, Muay Thai, Judo, Fencing, etc

• In order to heal from crypto degen stress, one must acknowledge it exists, identify how it wreaks havoc, and how to resolve it - all of it covered in this short article (short = 2,900 words he says)

The Damage Of Crypto Degeneracy - Broscientifically Speaking

When you’re trading and speculating in a 24/7, 365 days a year market - you are rapidly ageing yourself, like it or not.

This is why so many tradooors and degens burn out, and why THIS image is so popular in our space:

When your net worth is hanging on the edge of a thread, or you’re knee deep in Dexscreener or Coingecko looking for the next 100x, or you’re staring at a dodgy mint site trying to figure out if its the next Goblins.wtf or BAYC - your body is pumping out cortisol, in a constant fight/flight mode as you try to ascertain what to do with your Ponzi tokens.

This isn’t normal.

We were not meant to worry about the floor price of an NFT collection every waking hour, having nightmares about liquidation emails from Bybit/Binance, and going from bed to immediate blue light glare from our smartphone screen to check if we still can pay rent with our coins in the morning.

Every time you lose a trade, or take on too much risk, or even win an absurd amount of money in this casino, your body perceives it as stress - and when you keep these stress responses constantly elevated, that’s when problems happen.

If you’ve ever won hard on a leveraged trade (10-20x at least) - you know the adrenaline rush it brings. It’s like a hit of pure cocaine watching the number go up on the screen, the green uPnL flashing and growing as your mind starts thinking about all the things you’ll do with the money you’ve just made.

Your heart begins racing, your eyes dilate, and you feel like you’re going to conquer the world: that’s the reptilian side of your brain kicking in.

There’s a big problem with this though.

Trigger this adrenal response constantly, and you will rapidly age and burn your body out.

The stress of jumping from token to token, flipping another shitcoin for another shitcoin, checking the state of your bags, even the stress of winning big - unironically, is a level of mental stress (and indirectly, physical) that most human beings should not be constantly subjected to.

On top of that, there are several clear side effects of relentless screen time spent watching the markets:

• You don’t get enough sunlight to help your hormone regulation and body recover from the stress its experiencing

• You probably don’t eat well enough, compounding the stress on your body and mind

• You probably don’t end up exercising enough, further disrupting your body’s ability to recover from stress.

So if you are going to partake in the art of being a degenerate crypto gambler/speculator - it then makes undue sense for you to understand the damage your chosen profession does on your body, and how to recover and reduce it.

Crypto Damage Is Not Normal - So Repairing It Should NOT Be Normal

It used to be a lot easier to be a human being, even in the 60s.

Just work your corporate job, pay off your mortgage, keep your wife happy and you’d have a couple of kids and a decent existence.

Idk, it was a different time.

Now? You’re gambling on the world’s decentralized casino if you want your bloodline to have a chance at not eating the bugs, and escaping the pod world of the mid-21st century.

God pray if you can find a woman that wants a family as well.

On top of that, if you are in crypto and truly gambling your every paycheck to try and escape wagedom - chances are, you’re in a toxic big city that is doing undue amounts of damage on your body through:

• Poor air quality - London, Beijing, NYC, it doesn’t matter - city air is bad for you

• Poor water quality - the amount of birth control pills being peed into the water by your cisgendered females of the species left unfiltered by most sewage plants, combined with the antipsychotics handed out like M&Ms and Skittles on Halloween, as well as the pesticides, other trace toxins and God knows what else in the water supply? That also disrupts your body’s healing processes

• Poor life quality - Living in a shithole room or flat, with sirens going off in the distance to yet another urban disturbance, and you expect that to NOT have any effect on your body and mind? That’s also another fight/flight threat in your subconscious

• Poor light quality - if you are in a country with seasons, and don’t get enough sunlight exposure during the Summer months to heal the cell mitochondria fatigue and damage of the Autumn/Winter darkness - that’s also another stressor on your body and mind that needs fixing.

(Is it any wonder why cramped big cities tend to have such high levels of mental illness and depression, or is it simply a symptom of the damage they do on the human organism? Questions for another time)

Damn, this list is doomer as hell.

I assure you though that I am an optimist IRL and refuse to succumb to the globohomo.

And that’s why I’m writing this article - such a dulled, damaged existence is not worthy of my fellow gripto speculators and gamblooors.

Reversing The Damage of Gripto & Restoring The Wholeness of Life

It is actually much easier to fix the damage of the 21st century and modernity than people realize.

It simply requires a change in thinking, and a hefty amount of application - but I assure you, the results will be worth it (NFA NFA).

You don’t have to do everything on this list, but I assure you nearly everything on this list should help you if you’re not doing it already.

Note - I’m not a biohacker trying to clock my sleep on a watch to brag about online - all I care about is in being in great mental and physical shape so I can then make money from this Ponzi market while it’s still here and have a killer brain so I can make leave this space and pursue a different career.

Disclaimer aside, let’s get into it:

First: have a mobility routine for your spine/back/hips. Regularly exercise.

You probably aren’t stretching enough. 10 minutes in the morning is enough, you don’t have to go ham. But if you’re spending 6-8 hours on a chair watching the markets, there are pockets of 10-20minutes where you can easily exercise.

You don’t have to be a gym bro or even go to the gym - you just need to have some mobility as part of your daily life.

Put it in perspective - there are 30 minute yoga videos on YT and some of y’all are selling ETH to pay for OF girl videos - fix those priorities anon. At least do the yoga video, you’ll feel better too.

Then, fix your water supply. It is quite literally, turning the frogs gay, and you’re not purifying your drinking water?

Get a Berkey water filter. It’s expensive but you will feel the difference if your water supply is polluted (it most likely is unless you’re in Scandinavia). Add shilajit or some form of humic extract to your daily routine as well to make sure the distilled water doesn’t draw minerals out of your body.

No affiliate link here, I’m too lazy to get it for you (ironic) - google it, it’s not hard.

If you have the cash, get a standing desk with a treadmill. If not, just start having a 60-90min timer to make sure you’re getting up and moving ever so often. Makes a big difference especially if you’re doing 10-14 hours a day on the screens.

You want to be doing moderate exercise at least 3-4 times a week at minimum. That should help your body stay strong. Kettlebells, barbells, machines, idgaf - strength training will always forge a strong mind. You’ll also then have enough testosterone to not get mogged in a club when you finally make it and go on a date.

Bonus tip: if you’re feeling chronically depressed, try a dewormer.

Febendazole and flucanozole are incredibly cheap online, and doing a 14 day course of each can help with depression bigly. Anecdotally, I know of a good amount of men whose city-related depressions were erased within a few days of these courses, I myself included. Minocyclidine is a great antibiotic, and can also help with dandruff, skin irritations, as well as general mood and mind clarity due to its antiparasitical nature. Just fill up the prescription forms for it online like you’re doing an LBP and you should be able to order some quite easily.

Supplements? Quick list:

• NAC will help heal the damage of bad air quality while improving brain function

• Magnesium is depleted in our soils and you need it for good sleep and brain function

• Vitamin D always helps you’re probably deficient - easy depression fix here too

• Red Light / SAD Light - the usual Winter depressions I would have have completely disappeared since using these religiously each day

• Vitamin E can help reduce the damage of seed oils and unsaturated fats accumulated in your body

• Asparin + Minocyclidine + Coffee I’ve found to be an excellent stack for focus and mental clarity during peak work periods

2 Godly, Taoist Immortality Tier Supplements left undiscovered due to big pharma psyops of the 20th century:

• Progesterone. Read this Peat article for more, but take a few drops orally daily to restore the healing powers of your body. If you’re chronically stressed by crypto - you will likely feel a massive mental difference when you take a dose of it. It’s extracted from wild yams, a Traditional Chinese Medicine ingredient found in most herbal mixes - and for good reason, it works

  • Progesterone helps the body heal, reduces stress, reduces the influence of estrogen on your body, and can even restore morning wood in impotent men

  • Test the dosage out on yourself, but a few drops daily can have a hugely positive effect on body and min

    

• Pregnenolone. The mother hormone that helps everything else. Take it daily, there are little to no side effects, and it helps everything, from skin quality to brain function to core body temperature. Higher core body temperature = lower chance of Alzheimer’s and brain degenerative disorders - need I say more?

Above: Ray Peat goes from doomer wojak to GM sunrise wojak in 10 weeks with pregnenolone. Pics from Generative Energy by Ray Peat.

Both should be taken orally, and not as capsules. Preferably in oil-based suspensions.

The Crux of This - Ray Peat 101

If you’re a Peater you’ll recognize lot of what’s in this article.

But in summary, Peat was an alternative health dude with several controversial takes, such as:

• Unsaturated fats and fish oils lead to inflammation over time

• Sugar is not the cause of diabetes, rather, damage to the body’s metabolic processes is - also, sugar is therapeutic and needed for cell function

• Dairy is great for the body, and easily digestible once adjusted to

• But underlying all of his theories was the core fundamental that the body has the propensity to heal and repair itself, if kept in a youthful state, and if ageing is fought of with various mechanisms.

You don’t have to read all of his stuff, it’s pretty complex. But I’ve put together a basic list of what you can do to incorporate his theories, and done right - you should feel a fundamental difference in your body in a few weeks after following them.

• Easiest Peat fixes are:

  • Remove inflammatory oils (seed oils, fish oils) and replace with ruminant fats and copious dairy

  • Daily carrot salad on an empty stomach to restore thyroid function - recipe here

  • Daily tropical oil consumption - coconut oil in your coffee/tea is an easy way to accomplish this while checking the charts

  • Daily asparin for increased blood flow to brain - 200-300mg is my personal dosage, some go higher

  • High quality orange juice/fruit sugars to replace starch consumption - dates are also a good alternative

  • Remove inflammatory fibres from the gut from whole grains, and replace it with stuff like raw carrots and white button mushrooms - this reduces endotoxins in the body, while healing your gut biome

  • Broscience explanation: if your gut is inflamed, so is your brain and you expect to be able to trade and speculate well with a broken brain? NGMI.

  • Consume gelatinous cuts of meat and broth, such as shanks, tendons, bones, bone marrow, etc

  • Consume liver/shellfish on a weekly basis - helps with mineral levels in the body

The tools of modernity can and should be used to “biohack” and repair the damage crypto can cause to our bodies and minds

You don’t have to do this in the weird transhumanist way of green gloop and 20 different supplements.

Rather:

• Your life/routine should be reducing chronic stress, and reducing stressors that trigger ageing

• Your diet should be maintaining your metabolic health, and keeping your core body temperature high

• Your work should not be triggering cortisol release endlessly - rather, stimulating and enriching to the mind.

You have literal billionaires trying everything to hack aging, when Ray Peat was speaking with the energy and brain of a 45 year old a year before he passed away - to a brainlet like me, the choice is clear.

I’d take dying at 85 with no brain degeneration over being 100 in a wheelchair as a dying husk of a hominid any day of the week.

Conclusions & Wrapping Up:

I use nearly everything I’ve described in this article on myself, and I assure you - the psychological damage I once felt from being in crypto while running a business through this recession and juggling full-time university degrees altogether feels like a lifetime ago.

Heck, it probably was a lifetime ago considering how fast time passes in this space.

If you are depressed, scarred from the bear market, and feel like the doomer wojak - you need only shift a few things in your life, to restore its wholeness in your existence. A few drops of progesterone, a big glass of good quality OJ, some asparin and pregnenolone may remind you of what a normally functioning mind feels like.

And if you want to make it in the next market cycle - you’ll definitely need your brain to be on best form to do so, and have your body and mind in the capacity to go full speed when the markets demand it.

I hope you enjoyed the article as much as I did writing it!

A personal note:

I have been extremely busy IRL hence the radio silence from this substack in general.

However, it blows me away to see my thoughts/articles referenced to months after they’ve been published, and to see the ripples they make in our ponzi asset class.

I will be returning this Spring/Summer with many more writings, none of them shilling $mybags (if so, with class), and look forward to publishing them for the 3 degens reading them in the basement.

Done correctly, one can escape the inevitable digital serfdom of the 21st century.

However, being able to do this requires synthesis of several skills to create an “edge” - a way of perceiving the markets and information all participants are given, in a way that allows you to speculate and profit off the mass movement of participants.

Otherwise, your obliteration is but guaranteed.

Let’s get into it…

TL;DR - Cult Identifying 101

• Understand the “Mass Desire” and quiet desperation of the market they are dealing with

• Search for the confluence of psychological biases and triggers that can entice a mass of men to invest into a project (Fundamentals + psychological conditions + monetary conditions)

  • Women aren’t the main investors in the space (yet), and the psychological triggers for women are different to men. Understand male behaviour, and you start to understand this market on a deeper scale

• Spot the ideal cult leader, and belief system and goal that can convince the market to transfer their life savings into a dodgy token. This is the way.

• Ride up the ponzi, add fuel and fire to the cult, and spot the key flipping moment the ponzi cannot sustain itself any longer (Bitconnect, Strongnodes, OHM, TIME, Layer-1 Ghostchains, Move2Earn, Play2Earn, riding the Euthanasia Coaster, as GCR states)

• Become a Profit Maxi at all costs. The market is never wrong, it is your decision making that has led you to eat a -85% or -99% loss. You bought the token after all, r-r-r-r-right?

How cults form:

Whether we emerged from caves, aquatic ape forms, descended from Saharan trees or came from space…

Cults exist due to how human beings are coded genetically, and our tendencies to follow leaders and movements in certain traits.

First, understand the bell-curve:

The bell curve is part of the hardwired reason why 99% of market participants lose all the money the market gives them - few are dumb enough to cash out at the top, and few are smart enough to do the same.

The masses of men will always believe the price can go higher or lower, based on whether it is a bull or bear market.

Now here’s the the dark triad of personality traits that our algorithms and social media platforms are incentivized to promote:

Algorithms are specifically designed for engagement, outrage, and continual emotional addiction.

For one reason or another, psychopathic human beings are often the best at manipulating these algorithms to gain fame on YouTube, TikTok, social media, Twitter, or even various elite social circles (See: Theranos, SBF, Anna Sorokin)

For most of history, human beings have not lived under democracies, or the illusion of human rights.

History is littered with endless amounts of destruction, war, genocide, slavery, serfdom, with the ones who survived these transitions being the midwits that latched onto whatever leader was in charge, and didn’t step too far out of line.

The soil of the Earth is littered with the blood of past homo sapiens following the bidding of their leaders. But you’re in the 21st century, so just harness their bags instead.

Point being - you need to understand your competition in this market.

In order for a speculative bubble to form, it requires a mass of people to buy a certain stock or token in hopes of the price increasing beyond their entry point.

A ponzi, but a profitable ponzi nonetheless.

And for the bubble to form, there must be fundamentals of technology on some scale, or an innovation that can justify the formation of a bubble.

From there, crowd psychology, psychopathic leaders and reflexivity then push the bubble to heights unimagined.

The right combination of self-grandiosity, manipulation and psychopathy is what the midcurve is naturally drawn to.

To consistently make money in this asset class, embrace the psychopathic founder who says your size is not size.

Spot these personalities and projects before others do, and set your sells for when the masses will mortgage their houses in desperation to not miss out on “generational wealth”.

P.S. Remember the guy who was leveraging his houses on UST for dat sweet 20% yield? I wonder how that ended.

Let’s get into this with a real example:

Based on “Fundamentals”, Polkadot was considered to be one of the best tokens to accumulate before the peak 2021 bull run, running from a $4-6 range up till $55 at its peak.

But Gavin Wood, despite his British accent and good looks, did not have the charisma or grift of someone like Richard Heart or Andre Cronje.

Meanwhile, Luna faced a possible death spiral at the proper bull market end of May 2021, but was kept alive on life support and continued pumping before it finally succumbed to a Soros-style attack in 2022.

With the leveraged fuelled second fake wave of the “bull” market, it ran up to a near 300x from $0.50 for early holders, to $120 at all time highs. Arguably, what helped drive Luna’s price upward was a psychopathic founder dead focused on conquering the space, and building a cult of “Lunatics” that would destroy any sort of FUD or negative press covfefe.

Similarly, Fantom’s scaling technology never really did work. At peak L1 degeneracy, the chain was ill-functioning, and almost every project on it was a blatant developer cash grab for retail liquidity. However, Fantom was latched upon by actors within the crypto space such as Cronje, Dani, as well as the /biz movement on 4chan, leading to it being one of the best performers PRICE wise.

From $0.01-$0.02 before 2021, to nearly $3 at its peak - it was one of the best performers this market cycle, besides Matic, Luna and Cardano.

Let’s see these charts:

See how DOT was pretty much outperformed by all of them?

(DOT maxis don’t get mad I know some of your ecosystem coins ran 10-50, maybe 100x but the liquidity probably wasn’t enough to cash out your whole bag)

That’s the power of a cult.

So how can you spot and invest in a cult?

3 basic tips…

1. Do not invest or trade solely on fundamentals based on tech. Speculate on fundamentals based on human psychology + a bit of tech.

We love a good hero, and we love turning them into a villain. Spot the heroes before they rise up, long their coins, and short their coins as they turn into villains.

Messi tweeted months before the 2021 cycle top that Dani was the Steve Jobs of DeFi/Crypto/something like that - one of the earliest calls into buying into SPELL, ICE, TIME, before the normies bought the top.

Now, there was a fundamental innovation at the base of SPELL and TIME.

With SPELL, you had a memeable Magic Internet Money stablecoin that made it easy for you to lever up on your shitcoins in a raging bull market.

With TIME, you had OHM (a rebasing ponzi scheme at its core), but on cheaper gas, and better yield. It’s as simple as that.

With these basic innovations + cult = massive pampamentals.

You can buy based on fundamentals, or buy based on cults, pampamentals, and enough technological innovation to trigger a pump - the choice is yours.

There are plenty of examples of such psychopaths within our unique asset class. Richard Heart, Dani Sestagali, Tetranode, Do Kwon, Zhu Su, CZ, and many more.

Build a framework of spotting the right psychopathic tendencies in founders, and when you’ve found one with a brand new token that others haven’t spotted yet - that’s the time to slide the button to the East and enter with haste.

With every investment decision, simply ask yourself: “What will make this go up?”

“What are the pampamentals?”

Don’t midcurve it.

See cult + new tech + possibility of pump = good buy.

How to spot good cult leader? They’re usually:

• Narcissistic

• Psychopathic

• Machiavellianism

  • Folks I literally gave you a chart at the top of the article, use that lol

You want to look for someone that is willing to make bold statements, willing to take risks, and enjoys being in the limelight.

The most bullish thing about Charles Hoskinson isn’t the tech, it’s his ability to stop his investors from selling with yet another livestream about ethics and peace.

2. Don’t get high on your own Ponzi when you can just buy drugs instead. Seriously

You dumped your life savings with size into an altcoin long. It’s pumping. Your net worth is surging, the fire is in your eyes, your heart is burning with the emotions of escaping years of drudgery with the newfound money in your pocket…

But it’s not your money yet.

It’s only your money when you’ve cashed OUT of the position, and it’s either on stablecoins on a cold wallet that you can’t access easily (so you don’t gamble it away, you filthy animal), or in your bank account, or in some illiquid property that’s losing money but is impossible to sell without a lot of pain.

Countless men have been rekt by believing a green unrealized PnL on their screen is their future.

It isn’t your future yet, fool.

If you want to profit from your Ponzi gamble, cash OUT, and cash out in parts.

Simple strategies for this:

• Sell your initial at a multiple of 2-2.5x, and keep selling parts of the profit the higher it pumps (if a high risk position)

• If it breaks base support on the pump after you’ve cashed out your initial and there’s profit, sell the entire position to preserve the gains. Simple lines on a chart can work at times. If you sold everything when BTC lost the 50k level but came back up, you would’ve at least kept some gains depending on your entries.

• Embrace the high of a pump, but understand that what the market gives, the market takes. Take it from the market before the tide goes out, and you’re swimming butt-naked while Caroline is relentlessly chasing after you on a jetski right after she’s snorted a line of amphetamines (recreationally). Not good. Not good.

Just a heads up: If you live in a Western “democracy” and can consume soft drugs legally, just do that instead of gambling on crypto if you’re not good enough to win at it.

Your coke sugar high with a bucket of fried chicken after you’ve inhaled a joint or two, and staring at some dopamine destroying videos are probably a better way of getting high instead of trying to hype up a bad investment decision on a telegram group at 3am in the morning.

3. There will always be another cult (pump). Always.

If you missed out on a recent pump, don’t fomo. Fomo is the mind killer.

For example: Not one of the silent generation Americans could’ve predicted the British invasion when it happened and the cult of the Beatles.

They probably didn’t predict the Laurel Canyon CIA psyop (look into it) that became a huge cult and still tortures us today with Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams being drummed into zoomer eardrums via endless TikToks today.

You can’t predict the future. We predicted nuclear fission zeppelins and floating cities in the 1920s, all we have today is ElonMa.

But in that time frame, there have been countless cults, pumps, dumps, bubbles, euphorias, and speculative hypes and seasons for any good speculator to take advantage of.

Plenty of 2014 crypto OGs didn’t predict the rise of Ethereum, especially when all there really was then was BTC. Plenty of 2017 OGs didn’t predict DOGE or SHIB.

And plenty of 2021 newbies didn’t predict this recent echo bubble.

Point being:

• Missed the cult/pump, move on, look for the next one, there will always be another one.

• Always have a checklist when looking at an altcoin or NFT to speculate upon.

  • What was the starting market cap?

  • How many holders does it have?

  • What is the distribution? (Tokens, supply, vesting, etc)

  • How idiotic are the holders, will they cash out at a certain Schellling point, or HODL it to zero?

  • What are the current buy/sell pressures on the coin’s spot price?

4. Don’t forget, you can play a cult both ways

First, you can long the cult either on spot or with leverage depending on the token, chain, and mechanisms you can speculate on it with in this market.

Second, if allowed, you can short the cult down with leverage.

Many held $LUNA to absolute zero.

Many did the same with FTM, AVAX, and all the vaporware L1s that inflated to overvalued market caps this previous bull cycle.

These were all lovely shorts for smart traders in 2021-2022.

And recently - STX is a great example of a cult pump (Ordinal hype) you could have profited on the rise off…

And probably short even now with low leverage for some decent gains.

Be cult agnostic, but profit maximalist.

See a cult forming around the Metaverse tokens like SAND, MANA, GALA, etc?

Get into it before it peaks and sell into the hungry masses as they buy the token.

Short it when the sentiment tops and shifts, and don’t get liquidated on a scam wick.

To wrap this article up, let’s recap the TL;DR bullets with some addendums…

• Understand the “Mass Desire” and quiet desperation of the market you’re dealing with - many will never drive the Bugatti or sleep with dat Romanian 10. They’ll pay for the OF videos though. Many will never live like the top 1%, but that desire will push them to ape their wage savings into a pump.

• Search for the confluence of psychological biases and triggers that can entice a mass of men to invest into a project (Fundamentals + psychological conditions + monetary conditions)

  • Fundamentals: new innovation forms, sparking interest as well as participation from the market

  • Psychological conditions: there is space and a void within the market for a narrative and a persuasive hook to take place in the mind of participants, convincing them to inject liquidity into an asset class muh muh Echo Bubble

  • Monetary conditions: the participants have enough money to actually participate lol it’s that simple

• Spot the ideal cult leader, and belief system and goal that can convince the market to transfer their savings into a dodgy token

• Understand the mechanics that fuel the ponzi, and how and when it will collapse

  • $LUNA works bc of yield, $FTM bc it’s cheaper and smaller, $STRONG bc it’s stable yield, $CRV bc muh DeFi stable liquidity, etc etc.

  • Know the reasons why they pump and you can spot when the reasons are fading in strength, and GTFO with some gains to spare

• Ride up the ponzi, add fuel and fire to the cult (shill it, you fool!), and spot the key flipping moment the ponzi cannot sustain itself any longer (Bitconnect, Strongnodes, Ohm, Time, Layer-1 Ghostchains, Move2Earn, Play2Earn, riding the Euthanasia Coaster, as GCR states)

• Actual TA - always sell that base support break/bounceback before it’s too late. If the base support of a parabolic trend breaks, chances are, it’s over. Get the hell out with gains and wait for the next easy pump to gain from!

Speculating in cryptocurrencies could not be simpler than this.

Now, actually making money, that’s a different question altogether.

But this article should already have given you several insights you can use for your next play.

Want more bubbles to study?

Here are some good examples of bubbles for you to Google and read about:

• South Sea Bubble. Newton gets so rekt from this, he bans his domestic servants from saying South Sea in his presence ever again, fr fr cap af, not bussin’

• Tulip Bubble. People got so nuts about these things when credit and leverage was available on them they nearly killed a dude for digging up one and cutting it open. They were also worth a ton of money at the top.

• DeFi Bubble: Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Chainlink Oracles allowed people to finally borrow properly on chain, and speculate on $FOOD related tokens as well as basic $MEME NFTs. YFI made millionaires out of a new smart contract innovation, and so did the early DeFi airdrops/blue chips (now DownOnly) that came out then.

• The Link Marine (Chainlink) bubble - Spend some time googling how Link was a 4chan favorite, and all the autism, memes, and cultish behaviour that surrounded it. It’s a good case study on a project that was… “too risky to hold”. (bonus points if you get that reference)

Want to read further about the psychology of the masses and to understand this more? Some books for you might be:

• The True Believer - Eric Hoffmann

• Propaganda - Bernays

• Mastering the Market Cycle

• Persuasion - Eric Cialdini

As of publishing this article - we may be in the early innings of the upcoming bull market.

All the work you (should’ve) done in the bear is hopefully paying off.

So as I always say…

Eternal Sunshine of the Pump Embracing Mind.

Hope you enjoyed this article!

• How memes can control price more than fundamentals

• Examples of such behavior and pumps in the past

• What to look out for, to find future pumps before other market participants.

In summary:

• If you want something to pump, it needs to have good memes/memetic energy - $imgnAI is an easy recent example of this mechanic.

  • We live in an attention economy - this is why certain coins are range bound, certain stocks / assets go through pumps and dumps.

  • Traffic is governed by algorithms, which are governed by the symbols and novelty they hold on the masses. With enough repetition on a population, behaviors can and will be created - as plenty of intelligence agencies have discovered and utilized for decades.

  • The average Westerner (or rich Asian) / market participant suffers from crippling screen/dopamine addiction outside his working hours, with his thought patterns governed by the societal structure he is raised in - this gives a unique opportunity for those who can realize this, and harness it. Read Eric Hoffmann’s True Believer for a deeper dive into this.

  • This is why memes instruct markets through the ideas they push on market participants. The right meme/image/moment on the Internet that can trigger enough dopamine for algorithms to identify it, and help push it to virality = a manifested reality as a result of a meme.

  • Think of the memes that led to GME’s short squeeze, DOGE/SHIB’s massive pumps, LINK’s bear market dominance, etc.

• Great memes can come from a moment, or a community, and need not be governed in reality - it simply needs to believed in enough by the market participants for that reality to take precedence over reality

  • The same human tendencies that create global wars and conflicts are the same tendencies that cause the price of $BTC to go up and down. They are all interconnected, and it is the language and schemas we are raised in that often stop us from realizing this simple truth.

• Thus: when analyzing projects for their long term viability, do not solely examine them on fundamentals. Examine them on their memetic power, and the narratives they push forth.

• The base of this thesis? Art, Politics, and Science are all interdependent, just as energy and structure are interdependent on every level.

• Therefore, art by proxy influences behavior, which influences art, which influences behavior - until a trend is broken, or reality rears its ugly face upon the trend’s participants.

• Memes are the poor man’s art form, an audio-visual canvas that allows the suspension of reality, and the creation of new beliefs and ideas with little judgement.

• Thus - this is how Memes are Financial Visionaries. This is how Art Instructs Markets.

Now let’s analyze 3 simple case studies to illustrate this concept…

Case Study #1: Chainlink - $LINK.

If you were an OG that stuck around during the 2018 bear market…

You’d have heard of $LINK sooner or later, especially if you spent any time on /biz back in the day.

While Chainlink offered a clear innovation for blockchains - decentralized oracles helping determine outcomes and prices of information OUTSIDE the blockchain - it also captured the mind of bizlets.

With Deep State conspiracy theories, Sergey is Satoshi, and the stratas of $LINK holders (make it stack, suicide stack, etc) - it’s no wonder in the sea of vaporware that was the post 2018 ICO market that $LINK got a consistent bid, and outperformed nearly everything up until 2021.

What said Chainlink apart from plenty of 2020 darlings was that it had a cult of dedicated memoooors pushing it relentlessly, believing Sergey would lead them to the promised land.

If anyone wants to tag me with it on Twitter - there’s a picture of a /biz post of a guy who bought an apartment with $LINK, after only eating broccoli, beans and chicken for years and putting all his money into it. One of the sentences should be something like: “I was so hungry bros”

As the missing piece to the “God” protocol, the art and memes around $LINK built its cult of diamondhanded marines that ended up bagholding the $55 top.

But if you had stacked $LINK from below $1 to $5 - you had a very solid make it play on high liquidity.

At risk of sounding pedantic, I highly doubt without the memes and artwork of the Link Marines, that $LINK would have had such an outperformance on the market as a whole, or even still be remembered by most crypto participants as being a token with highly prized fundamentals.

Bonus example: $FTM was also a /biz darling that was spotted early there, and if you accumulated it around $0.15-0.25 in Summer 2021 before selling the Nov picotop - you had another great make it play there.

Case Study #2: $DOGE

Many faded DOGE. I faded DOGE as a pleb in the 2021 cycle (certified midwit move).

But why did it work so well?

Memes.

The combination of Elon pumping $DOGE with memes, the lack of fundamentals and its memetic energy, and the seething tech maxis that fuelled short squeezes further up sent $DOGE to the moon, being one of the best performers of the whole cycle if you had accumulated it in 2020 and sold the picotop early 2021.

Plus, the cute image of Kabosu, and the low unit bias compared to the 5 figure price of $BTC = normies buy it, normies pump it.

The idea of $DOGE to $1, no matter how unrealistic, drove countless newbies to the market to buy $DOGE and ignore previous price action, squeezing shortoooors and sending it to Valhalla.

Market fundamentalists, boomers and tech maxis cry out in pain looking at an endlessly pumping DOGE candle, while normies with stimmies and Bar Mitzvah savings diamondhanded the pump.

The fundamentals didn’t matter. The fact that there was no “value” in the token didn’t matter. The fact that $DOGE has endless inflation (a good thing, actually) didn’t matter.

I remember seeing a BTC maxi reeeeeeing out on r/cryptocurrency on how all his normie friends wanted to do as crypto newbies was to buy $DOGE.

Pity he didn’t just join in the pump with them and get a few multiples out of it.

All that mattered was that the memetic power of $DOGE, and the image and idea it represented to market participants created a reflexive loop that pushed the price upwards in a parabola that would give Isaac Newton South Sea Bubble PTSD.

Case study #3: $imgnAI

$imgnAI came out a few weeks ago, and stayed at a 7 figure market cap for quite a while before it suddenly rocketed to 50 million at the top. GCR made a nice penny off it, and so did plenty of others that aped in early.

How and why did this pump manifest?

Let’s examine it through the Memes Instruct Markets Framework.

What helped trigger the pump was this image:

Turns out, fake internet titties will get most market participants left (dudes on CT) interested in a new narrative.

And with a rumour that $imgnAI was the technology used to create fake internet tittes?

We commence the pump.

The image goes viral.

Non-gripto natives get mad at the image, OF girls start freaking out and putting on clothes to find a trad husband, Joe Rogan shows it to Lex Fridman on the JRE.

The meme of “AI + titties” was a Lollapalooza to behold.

Didn’t matter that imgnAI was NOT what the artist used for fake internet titties.

As AI coins were already pumping hard then ($FET, $AGIX, $OCEAN, $TAO) - so AI + male sexual gratification = meme that spreads like wildfire.

Suddenly, $imgnAI isn’t a 5m mcap shitcoin that’s destined for the gutter.

No, it’s a coin that’s going to cure cancer by giving us amazing AI images that make it even more valuable than ChatGPT!

And so it rockets from there to over 50m at the peak.

And a 10x on 8 figure liquidity is not to be scoffed at, especially after 2022.

Some apes turned 1ETH into 100ETH with this.

After all, as they say - respect the pump.

When a certain whale (who also deposited millions into FTX as you were withdrawing) began yeeting 6 figure sums into $imgnAI - we were nearing the top, and since then, it’s been mainly down only (for now).

Bonus: The sympathy pumps that also happened on other AI image generator shitcoins, which were great to play if you were early to them. ($NERF, $CAI, off the top of my head)

All it took for $imgnAI to take off were a couple of catalysts, a great meme to sell apes on, a few players in CT starting to pump it, and boom, the pump manifests.

As long as you didn’t buy the top of course.

Recapping the thesis, and applying it going forward:

Art, Politics, Science are all interdependent, just as energy and structure are interdependent on every level.

Thus, the Art/Memes a market is exposed to through social media influences market participant behavior.

Think about it: How many held BTC through the 69k top due to the meme of S2F sneding BTC to $150k soon?

How many held their worthless L1 vaporware tokens on the dreams of the Zhupercycle?

The beliefs of participants influence the behavior of the participants, and beliefs do not come from reality, rather, the perceived reality of participants - which are shaped by the images, stories, and memes they are broadcasted and interact with in the online sphere.

Bonus illustration of the thesis:

Let’s flesh this out with how Trump 2024 may trigger the Golden Bull once more, as GCR has hinted at…

• We need dovish policies from Trump to facilitate a bull market in stonks - our beloved internet ponzicoins thus run harder as a beta to boomerstonks

• We need good memes to get Trump back into office - has Trump ever failed at generating great memes and moments in the online sphere?

• As the zoomers say, Trump has rizz and drip, making a mockery out of all his competitors (although he got screwed in 2020 obviously)

• So in essence Trump has killer meme powers - makes people vote for him - gets into office - hires Dovish FED - memes into reality a superstonks market - market pumps - people FOMO into the pump - bull market in full swing

• BTC halving in 2024, we start ranging towards ATH, permabears short the range high, we breakout into a new ATH and ETH/alts begin running again - and wagme to the sun?

In essence:

This concept should be a no brainer to the turbo big brains who have killed it in crypto, but is something plenty of normal folks struggle with.

Shouldn’t only valuable things pump? Shouldn’t things with clearly unrealistic value not work?

But they do - because the right message and meme given to a big enough mass of people will make them hold up the price until it is too high to maintain it - or make them short something until they’re liquidated on a squeeze.

Your perception on market events, and their prices on the assets you are speculating on does not matter.

All that matters is the perception that majority of market participants will have from it - and whether you can predict, and profit off those movements.

So in the world of idiotic market participants…

Understanding their idiocy is the way to go.

Memes in the future: Signs of outperformers?

There are a few easy memes that clearly have promise for the next expansion of our ponzinomic asset class:

• Pudgy Penguins/Lil Pudgies are an NFT collection with clear memetic energy among less degenerate crypto participants, and have continued building up volume while maintaining a rising floor price throughout the bear market.

• Miladies/Remilios are perhaps the counterculture example of this, while not the most ethical collection, the “milady” meme is here to stay and if holders don’t sell? Price can only go one way.

• $RLB - a decentralized casino in a world of increasing degeneracy valued at its current prices with its users and tokenomics? Undervalued. It will run hard in the right conditions.

• Ultrasound money - $ETH - when the time comes, our darling will run again and murder retail with $300 per tx gas fees once more.

• $GMX - the GLP mechanism is a good enough narrative to get people to keep investing into the project, and to not exit their bags.

• $ARC as a project combines the decentralized casino thesis alongside a GLP “owning house yield” meme - nevermind the participants, the narrative is strong enough to induce max bidding

• I’m a big fan of TridentDAO and $PSI due to their Risk to Earn mechanic, cult and memes (but if you follow my twitter, you know that already)

• There are many other coins that will eventually run hard, this is by no means a comprehensive list.

• 4EB9DE4696ECFACDBDB9E462F5ABB83F7EA19F5BAABC461C23BCCFD99E24963B167E80BC48D6A15034BFD4BC24D86FC8585F19A6BF63298FCC9D9E03F71F1865

Further reading for those interested:

Ray Peat - Can art instruct science? http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/william-blake.shtml

Eric Hoffmann - The True Believer

Punk6529’s threads on memes - find them on Twitter. I like this tweet in particular.

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Here is the TL;DR for speedreaders, with the full article below.

• What is alpha?

  • Alpha and edge are different sides of the same coin

  • Alpha is information you can exploit to make money

• What is edge?

  • Edge is being able to extract yield from the market due to an understanding or skillset the participant has

• What are the various types of alpha and edges?

  • Time-sensitive alpha

    • Requires an edge of quick thinking and connecting the dots

    • Example: trading the news - Andre Cronje leaving and his coins - shorting FTM, KP3R, YFI was free money

  • Mass psychology based (repeated chart patterns due to participant behaviour)

    • Requires an edge of knowing how to enter/exit with profit

    • Example: airdrops and bullish exploits, bad news

      • Airdrops have a pattern anyone can game

      • Hacks always have a similar pattern: DEUS, Cream, Audius, CEL

      • Extend this to bankruptcies, and token lockups of 2023 - FTT, SRM, SOL even

  • The greatest edge you can have is: Intuition

    • The best edge in any market

    • You can learn from other people’s mistakes, but you’ll probably only learn from your own

      • Profit maxis are the true winners of this space, you can love the tech after you’ve made it

  • Understanding history rhymes, though it is never the same

    • You cannot profit from the same formula twice

    • Understand how mass desire is built and shifts, and the catalysts for it to shift and you can harness the power of the markets to multiply your capital by magnitudes

    • It takes time for mass desire to be built, but once built and accumulated, it moves violently (DOGE, Shib, BTC)

  • Bonus Edge: Be Like Water, Always

    • If you can adapt to every single season and narrative without becoming emotional, or getting caught up in the ponzi - that’s how you can consistently profit and build your stack up over time

    • There will always be another pump, waiting for you to enter before it’s too late.

    • You must hone, build, and trust your instincts if you want to survive and thrive in this market.

    • Go to where the money is, and know all tools on a level where you have a basic edge above other participants.

Alpha is defined as:

But in the art of Crypto speculation, alpha simply means:

Actionable information that will make you money.

Knowing this gives a speculator an edge on how to understand alpha, and benefit from it.

There are several types of Alpha in crypto, but in general, alpha has these characteristics:

• Time-sensitive, as the market has yet to price in the news or catalyst that will create volatility

• Can only be exploited by a select few before the trade/play is exhausted

• Combines several fields of understanding (crowd psychology vs news, fundamental smart contract/blockchain tech usage, etc)

Heart’s take on alpha is correct - to a degree, alpha does not exist, edges do.

One can even argue: the desire to be spoonfed alpha, is a sign that the participant has zero edge within the market and will be obliterated with time.

What is an edge in crypto then?

An edge is simply being better at something than other market participants. Maybe it’s synthesising information, playing shitcoins, playing nfts, etc.

No one can have all of the sectors of this nascent asset class mastered - therefore, finding your own specific edge and skill to profit from this game of hot potatoes is needed, or you will be eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So perhaps the right phrasing is:

There is always alpha to be found in crypto, but it requires a honed edge to take advantage of them.

And similar to Eugene Schwartz’s theory on headline/market creation as a direct-response copywriter, alpha always changes. And like a knife, edges grow dull with time, and must remain honed, or cease to exist.

“Because no formula works twice”

Look at the charts of the biggest pumps of 2017-2018, 2020-2022, and understand that 99% of them will never break previous ATHs.

Yes, you’re a bagholder, I’m sorry.

The easiest edge in 2020 was knowing that Ethereum would clog up the moment another speculative bubble happened to the asset class, and thus would incentivize participants to bridge to other L1s, creating ponzi upon ponzi of growth.

This was how BNB, Avax, SOL, FTM, Luna, KDA, and many other blockchain VC ponzis pumped to valuations unheard of in any other asset class.

Another edge would be knowing how DOGEcoin runs each market cycle, and simply accumulating it waiting for a breakout as Bitcoin broke its previous ATH of 17k.

Examples of different types of Alpha and Edge coming together:

1. News-based Alpha & Speculation

Picture this: it’s far too late in the bull cycle, the bear is coming through, and uber-dev Andre Cronje announces that he is quitting DeFi.

There is one clear immediate move for any speculator to reap the rewards of this asset class:

Short EVERYTHING Cronje is associated with with reasonable leverage, and reap the rewards.

But to profit from this alpha, you must be part of the first pack of this trade.

Crypto being a market of pure emotion, zero fundamentals and cult of personalities - doesn’t take a genius to know how the market will react to the news. Price will go down, and with hellfire and fury.

https://decrypt.co/94483/yfi-ftm-tank-after-andre-cronje-anton-nell-claim-theyre-leaving-crypto

Note banteg’s tweet in the article: while Yearn will function without Cronje, it had zero impact on the price taking an immediate decline upon announcement of his leaving.

Didn’t stop the price from tanking in a bear market.

This is a classic example of news-led alpha.

Similar to GCR’s rebirth DAO, the ones who were able to find out the approval of a BTC ETF were able to leverage long huge gains into the spike of BTC before our dear ponzi started collapsing.

So news-based alpha is clearly something to exploit in this market.

But then, what edge is needed to exploit this alpha?

The edge is simple:

1. One must be able to hear news about the market before participants, or take action on news before the market reacts

2. One must take an immediate decision and speculation on how the market will react to the news catalyst, and have a margin account on derivatives ready to short or long based on the announcement!

3. One must have the framework to be sure that the decision to speculate is +EV, and has a high probability of occurring. Brain dead simple but true.

   1. Shorting DOGE pumps post bull market have always been free money, but doing that in a raging bull would have liquidated you very quickly

4. One must then close the speculative position upon fulfilment of the speculative outcome (aka, close before you get squeezed, you fool!)

I have chosen to elaborate on this alpha because I expect this to not be fully gamed out with time, due to the lowered IQ rates and financial knowledge/world understanding of future crypto participants (though the Stanfords will likely be the ones you compete with down the line)

2. Mass Psychology Alpha / Chart Patterns

GCR has tweeted that airdrops often follow similar patterns that most market participants have not exploited.

Have a look at these charts, and see the similarities…

LOOKS chart:

Note the initial spike, a second dead cat bounce up before the euthanasia coaster fractal appears once more.

UNI chart:

Note the same movement of price: a rally up as market participants bid the new airdrop, a sharp decline, a dead cat bounce, and a slow bleed out until the bull market of 2021 started kicking in.

APE chart:

Note: APE wicked to $20 on various Cexes upon listing, and could be shorted down to $10 before it was defended, and price rose again. Due to equities rallying, APE ran to $20, before bleeding to single digits in the bear market.

OP chart:

Note the spike close to $1, the upward pulse to $1.50 range before the token bled out in the bear market, and is now seemingly recovering. And of course, later in 2022, it broke ATH, and is now doing decently albeit weak dev energy. (I remain bullish otherwise)

LUNA2 chart:

Note once again, the listing at above $15, the immediate airdrop sell pressure (if you were down on LUNC, you’d obviously try to recoup your fiat losses by selling your LUNA2 airdrop), a 100% rally to $10 due to the eternal hope of a gambling retail market.

Then due to the bear market, a slow bleed out to goblintown. (And some future pumps down the line bc crypto is retarded)

1INCH chart:

Note the defending of the $1 schelling point, similar to Luna2/Ape, and the subsequent relief rally before the 2021 bull market started pumping up the entire asset class.

All these charts show something similar - an immediate drop from airdrop sellers, a weak pump as bottom buyers/order books flip the opposite direction, and then a bleed out before more catalysts lead to further volatile price action.

How does one play that like GCR stated?

There are several ways to do it:

1. Since we’re talking about airdrops here, make sure you’re Sybil-ing the hell out of any possible ones if you have enough stablecoins to do this (otherwise, keep waging ffs)

2. Short the airdrop if it is a big one (aka APEcoin), and exit at a bottom

   1. See GCR apecoin schelling point tweet

3. Buy spot when it bottoms, and sell the repump/reflexive move back up

What is the alpha in this case?

Alpha is: most airdrops tend to play out similar chart patterns, providing free money for those who can play it properly.

Edge required is: knowing when to enter your position, when to close it, and how to control your greed from bottom buying/top shorting so you win, and not lose against the market.

Considering how airdops are still in vogue despite the growth of the crypto asset class - hopefully, this alpha will remain actionable in the upcoming echo bubble later this decade.

3. When buying the dip usually works: Bullish Exploits

In this asset class, for one reason or another - there is free money in nearly every single hack, smart contract exploit or protocol theft - if you understand how to game it.

The game is simple: if there is a hack, wait for the panic selling to finish, buy the dip, and sell the returns as the price has an upward pulse to try and find equilibrium.

Examples: RUNE https://cryptonews.com/news/rune-recovers-11-after-crash-and-thorchain-usd-8m-hack-11175.htm

Down 20%, but up 10%.

DEUS on Fantom: https://bitcoinist.com/hacker-steals-13-million-in-deus-finance-exploit/

Arguably, buying hacks and exploits is a high-risk strategy by any traditional means, but for some reason, it seems to work.

Even buying CEL’s bankruptcy announcement would have netted you a 100% gain in 6 weeks on spot - showing you the idiocracy of this asset class. You’d have made even more just buying the dip, knowing that the bear market would push retail to short CEL to zero, leading to a massive short squeeze (as the chart shows).

Why should a token trade at a 9 figure valuation despite the fact that the company behind it is bankrupt? Who knows.

The alpha in this case: Buying bad news will let you sell the relief rally upwards for consistent monetary gain.

The edge: Knowing how to knife catch (buying red candles with massive volume showing the sellers are getting exhausted), and cashing out with decent returns, not looking for a make-it-in-one-trade play.

So you’ve now seen 3 examples of alpha, combined with an edge, to produce a strong +EV likelihood for the market participant.

When does this not work?

• When the mechanism of the exploit is going to send the token to zero - if a hacker’s found a way to mint tokens and sell them relentlessly, it’s not a play to buy, it’s a play to short it to zero

• When that 19 year old kid exploited INDX is another example of this.

There is however, the greatest edge that should be analyzed…

The Greatest Edge: Intuition (it’s the tree of life, bro)

The cryptic Shoebill revealing more insights for the average joe.

Defining intuition:

I know a decent-sized crypto whale who cashed out to stables in the vestiges of the bull market before ETH continued its tear towards 3 digits, simply based on… intuition.

How does one develop this edge? How does one use this edge with whatever “alpha” the market is giving, to then turn thousands into millions?

Intuition is an edge that allows you to filter through the noise of the crypto market, and spot projects that aren’t rugpulls, that aren’t scams, and to speculate on the behaviour of market participants.

And as GCR said, “I can’t teach it to you, but you can find edge”

By finding your edge, you can win within these markets, and transition from profit maxi, to actual blockchain maxi.

It should be noted: GCR, a trader who turned several thousand into a comfortable 9 figures, has given mystic clues as to how he personally built his edge that are left on the Internet for those to find.

To understand what the man has said, what is apophenia?

qAnon, Illuminati, Flat Earth, faked moon landings… many of the conspiracies the 21st century homo sapien is surrounded with comes as a result of apophenia.

If you thought in the late bull cycle: “Memecoins have run massively, I’ll just start buying tons of memecoins, they’re going to run like Shiba and Doge!”

Rekt.

If you thought the increased adoption of the blockchain and NFTs in the mainstream were a sign that the market was mature, and that we wouldn’t endure another bear cycle due to how the speculative asset class works?

Rekt.

If you thought the Plan B Supply-2-Flow model would happen, because it seemed to have worked in the past?

Rekt.

So what is, the tree of life?

In this case: GCR uses the term “tree of life”, he is asking the reader to figure out the framework, and the principles at play that led him to making the correct decision, based on his intuition.

The simple intuition at play? Probe going against a trend if it has run its entire course. If everyone’s getting rich and buying, who’s left to buy after the last person has bid BTC?

What direction is the market much more likely to go in as the bull market begins to weigh down on the asset class itself?

Markets are cyclical, and bull markets are often dragged down by their own weight towards the end of their cycles. (Reflections of a Commodity Trader)

I asked a 7 figure friend his perspective on building intuition and an edge, how he perceives the market. His thoughts were:

“I’m a fan of learning the markets the hard way, it teaches you a ton. Only a moron would get repeatedly rekt by influencer shills and Pool2 without learning and adapting.

Since I’ve been in crypto for so long, the way I think about it is:

New information = how can I profit from this?

It’s as simple as that. Do not be anything but a profit maxi until you’ve made it, and then you can be a tech maxi. Cobie’s a great example of this, he’s made it and now tries to help the space in his own way.”

Building intuition is extremely difficult, due to how market participants are swayed by the reflexivity of the market, and how participants get hypnotized by apophenia to see what isn’t there.

Instead, the key is seeing what is there, and what is likely to come with honed intuition.

To hone your intuition/edge, you must then be a participant in the market and understand how the game works.

Don’t buy a shilled coin and be someone else’s exit liquidity just because you like their shitposts on Twitter and it’s the first time they’ve done a 10-tweet thread in decades.

Don’t buy a nameless/anon fork of a new contract without checking the wallet holders, that the liquidity of the contract is locked and that you’re not going to get rug pulled to oblivion.

Don’t fool yourself into believing the market is trending a certain way because you want your bags to get bailed out.

Another tool to build intuition is to study history, and to study markets and events of the past.

By understanding that the plight of man has rarely changed throughout history, and the same desires that caused one to dump their life savings into the South Sea bubble in 17th century England are the same ones that cause you to get rugpulled on a memecoin - you may begin to get a clearer picture of who you’re up against in crypto, and what you’re trying to accomplish in this speculative market.

Referencing back to Eugene Schwartz’s advice on writing headlines as a marketer, there’s another piece of insight you can use to build your intuition:

“The same formula never works twice… that’s why studying charts won’t make you a market wizard”

You can study those charts praying for a fractal that you can spot that will give you the gains you so desperately want, or you can understand the reasons and factors that led to market participants behaving a certain way - as the analysis I provided on gaming airdrop patterns shows.

And remember, most altcoins from 2017 and 2018 never made new highs, and the ones who tried accumulating them in the bear to become rich in a bull did not make it.

It was those who accumulated BTC/ETH as the bear market set in, moved onto accumulating LINK as it grew on its fundamentals, rotated into DeFi summer protocol coins, and then into L1 ponzis and dogcoins that became filthy rich from the 2021 bull market.

It was those who saw the alpha of NFT-based communities and the speculation on them, and accumulated Punks and BAYC-related NFTs before they became vogue that rose out of serfdom.

To wrap this essay up, I will analyze two more pieces of advice from Schwartz:

“You see, people don't change: only the direction of their desires do. They cannot be made to want anything, nor is it necessary to create want. All that is necessary is to be able to channel those wants into the proper products that offer legitimate satisfaction for them.

It takes ten million . . . fifteen million . . . twentvfive million. . . fifty-- million . . . one hundred and fifty million people ... to create a vast market for your goods.

But it takes only one slip of paper—or its recitation by a series of salesmen—to direct all those millions of people to your stores, or vour catalogues, or your wholesalers.

Not one single thing has changed in that regard since I wrote this book. Nor will it ever alter in the slightest. So this book is not about building better mousetraps. It is, however, about building larger mice, and then building terrifying fear of them in your customers. In other words, it is about helping to shape the largest and strongest market possible, and then intensifying that market's reaction to its basic need or problem, and to the "exclusive" solution vou have to offer it.”

The tree of life behind this statement is:

There will always be desire for more - it is the human plight.

Being able to spot how those desires will be channelled, and what will make them buy or sell a particular asset is how you can start to build intuition.

I will leave you with this excerpt from Breakthrough Advertising:

I’ll summarize for you:

The selling of products, the speculation of assets, and science are exactly alike and flow from similar energies. Harness that energy, and you can grow your capital by magnitudes.

How can you learn to harness this energy?

Study past events, study history, participate in the markets and grow your intuition. See what has failed but could work in a different cycle, such as Cryptokitties in 2017/2018 and the resultant NFT class of BAYC, Punks, and other bluechip collections.

The crypto class of ‘21-22 has seen many new types of protocols and mechanisms launch, some failing, some succeeding.

Perhaps digging into what failed, why it failed, and how it could succeed in a new crypto bubble will let you rise up from this current bear market, and make it.

And a Bonus Edge: Be Like Water

Making it in crypto requires a bit of luck, a bit of timing, and most importantly - the ability to adapt and Be Like Water.

You must ride the ponzis of the moment, and the trends of the market, and remove your emotional attachment to it regardless of how you feel. Countless speculators ignored the millions made in NFTs until it was too late, many ignored the rise of Chainlink in the bear, and many lost big trying to keep shorting 2023’s recent pump back up.

You must listen to the market, because it whispers its next move constantly. Observe how prices react to news, how TVL is flowing in an out of a chain, the move of money on-chain - they speak volumes for those who are attentive.

To be a good degen, one must:

• Know how to long news trades with leverage with haste, and make out with profits like a bandit

• Know how to sybil NFT mints and whitelist spots, regardless of sector/artwork/etc

• Know how to read etherscan, and track crucial wallets that are early to a new trend or protocol

• Know how to play various protocol setups (Pool 2 farms, OHM forks, bullish hacks, etc)

And most importantly - one must be able to adapt, change bias at a moment’s notice, and to leap headfirst into calculated risk, while keeping an eye out for the exit the moment things take a turn for the worst.

Good luck, fren, you’re gonna need it.