Two years ago, Easter of 2020, I was chatting with some friends about crypto and one friend was starting to set aside some money and invest. Seemed harmless to do with âfun moneyâ. We were in a pandemic after all, so no one was doing anything anyways. This was the height of the Gamestop and $DOGE meme stock market drama. I dismissed crypto at the time, but I used my Stocks app to follow the prices of $BTC, $ETH, $SOL, $DOGE, $SHIB, $LUNA, $XRP, $XTZ, and a some others that crossed my periphery field of view.
You see, itâs not hard to sell me on crypto. âBig banks, payday loans, and fees are problematicâ = yes. âWe can decentralize identity and web loginsâ = yes, cool. âWe can decentralize paymentâ = yes, even cooler. âDAOs let communities have ownership in the projects they likeâ = yes, in theory1. At its core, even the basic idea of a sci-fi reality where we zlorp our space credits to each other on our holo-visors seems like a probable eventuality.
From Easter 2020 to Easter 2021 I watched in my Stocks app as the price of $ETH went from $180 to $2230 (+1,288%) and $SOL went from $0.60 to $31.70 (+5,221%). Dang. Regret. I should have bought. But two weeks later I watched as both of those coins lost 50% of their value overnight. Phew. Vindication.
The price of course rebounded and climbed 10Ă around November 2021. Dang. Regret. This was the peak NFT era, it seemed crypto was approaching a critical mass. Actual smart people I knew were holding crypto. Actual smart people I know were leaving their FAANG jobs to join Web3 projects. Every conversation I had ended up talking about crypto. The FOMO was building.
I somehow convinced myself that I needed to go in and go in big. If my $500 turned into $600 or even $1000, that doesnât materially change my life that much. Itâs not âBuy a boatâ money. It had to be a large number. So I started pooling together about $10,000 to spread over a handful of coins that I thought had a strategic advantage:
- $ETH - smart contracts are pretty smart
- $SOL - a greener alternative to $ETH
- $LUNA - backed by a âstablecoinâ and that sounded nice
- $DOGE - for the memes but it goes up every time Elon tweets about it and you can buy a lot of it for cheap
At the pace crypto was going I was confident I could double my money over the course of a couple months. I needed to pull the trigger.
After gut-checking with friends (who were like âSure, manâ), my wife (who to this day says, âI donât get itâ), my financial advisor (who was like đŹ), and doing my own research⊠I decided not to pull the trigger. The lack of consumer protections, the surface area for criminal activity (scams, theft, laundering, wash trading), the way your cash-on-hand is also your investment portfolio, the fake scarcity, the rich getting richer, the low-quality art in the form of monkey JPGs selling at inflated prices, gas fees, and the carbon costs⊠those all bothered me immensely. Ultimately I felt like crypto was a 2010 solution (electricity is free!) that didnât fit 2021 problems (we are soon approaching the 1.5ÂșC thresh hold!).
Instead of investing actual money, I installed a Stock Market Simulator on my iPad and played pretend crypto. If my imaginary numbers went up, I could revisit the idea. But over the course of a couple months, I watched the numbers turn redder and redder.
As of writing this: $ETH is down 58%, $SOL is down 82%, $LUNA has lost 99.97% of its value. Iâm not some genius investor that shorted the entire crypto market and made millions, but I keep thinking about how I dodged a bullet and saved about $8000 by not investing in crypto. Phew. Vindication.
Itâs all relative. If I had bought two years ago, Iâd still be up a bit. A lotta bit actually. But back then I would have invested something small like $500. Still, my $500 of imaginary $SOL would be worth $44,000. Dang. Regret. Thatâs incredible, yet all feels so made up. Itâs like how Uber is a taxi company with no cars, crypto is an economy with no tangible goods and services.
I could still end up with egg on my face here. The minute the market drops 10~20% and I feel vindicated about my decision to hold off, some pumpânâdump happens to spike the price up +20%. And for some reason my lizard brain still says âDang. Regret.â Weird how that works.
Anyways. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time.
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DAOs weâre almost the selling point for me on crypto, but I now sort of feel like most DAOs reinforce oligarchies rather than enable democracies. â©