Hard Lessons Learned From Experimenting With Altcoins

This is a recording of a recent Twitter Spaces conversation about lessons users have learned from dabbling in other cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin.

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Transcript

[0:06] Alex McShane: …It’s too much risk. These trusted third parties that are leading these projects are security holes as the saying goes. I would rather just have faith in consensus than this aero-type protocol that is Bitcoin. While it might not be perfect, it is the best money I’ve come upon in my life.

[0:29] Crown #Bitcoin: I think the big thing about shitcoins, generally, is that they’re all trying to create various forms of perpetual motion machines if we think of money as energy. And you can in this sense think of money as energy. It’s your ability. It’s the mechanism that drives the machine. And when you use money as an incentive, which is what some of these taps and DeFi protocols tried to do and what Luna tried to do, they tried to use money or forms of money that they created as an incentive to drive these systems. And ultimately, you can’t create energy out of anything, you can’t create something out of anything, and the same goes for money. You can’t just say, “This is going to work because we’re going to give you 20% per year to hold it,” and where’s 20% going to come from? Well, it’ll be really popular, so surely we’ll be able to afford it.All these things boil down to perpetual motion and all this adding gears to a machine that ultimately will just be mathematically impossible to work.

[1:32] Alex: That’s a great point. I think the term that I really like, I think this was coined by Nick Szabo, unforgeable costliness, that’s the difference between Bitcoin and every other asset in the digital realm. Find me something that you can’t reproduce. Bitcoin has a real cost. You’re not going to give me a Bitcoin for free. This is the whole thing with mining. It takes energy in the physical world and transmutes it into the digital realm and it brings laws of conservation into the digital realm. And we’re going to start to seeBitcoin being used to solve all sorts of problems I think, by adding friction to a frictionless wild, wild west of data where we don’t have any laws of conservation currently. You can see that in the spam attacks on every platform right now.

[2:39] Chris Alaimo: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. Adam Back is literally in the whitepaper. And even he, I definitely can relate to being an engineer myself by degree. Hewas trying to improve Bitcoin in its early days, he’s like, “Oh, maybe if we make it faster,maybe if we do that and this, try and improve it.” And there’s a great quote or interview that he’s doing. He’s like, “Every time I tried to improve it, I broke something else or caused issues elsewhere.” So he really realized that Bitcoin is perfect in its current form or the way that it is. And like I said, this dude’s reference in the white paper,but he was trying to do incremental improvements or improvements for privacy,improvements for speed, or at least on the base layer. And even he struggled to find a real compromise or an improvement that fit properly.

[3:27] Alex: And I think, one important thing is for what Bitcoin does for us, mostly now, like a store of value, coming up on medium of exchange, maybe this year. So we start to use Lightning Network more and more for goods and services and Bitcoin is perfect for those things. The solutions that we need are education and user interface solutions, these are problems that businesses can solve. They’re not things that need to be baked into Bitcoin itself. I mean, for me, day-to-day, there are no traits or features that I want more out of Bitcoin. It’s only limited so far as my ability to engineer and use it.

[4:11] Chris: Yeah. No, I would completely agree. While a lot of people are saying that the price is going down at least in nominal terms, the goal is an accumulation of SATs or Satoshis on a larger scale. You’re trying to accumulate a digitally scarce asset and I think even Saylor said this, even within the last day or so, he’s like, look at everything over the last couple of months, nothing’s done that well. And over the last 24 months,Bitcoin has been the best asset performing over anything, where it dipped down inMarch at 2020. If that’s when you’re comparing all assets having their collapse, or fall inMarch of 2020 to where they are now Bitcoin has, by far, outperformed every other asset class across the board.

[4:57] Jacob Pope: Yeah, and you don’t even factor in the money printing, on top of that.Like imagine pre-COVID, you see some of these stocks that what they were and then with the run-up to what they received with the muddy printing, and now, they’re back to those numbers that they were, prior to all that they’re not at the 40 dollar value or 50dollar value that they once were. It’s a 50-dollar value plus all of the money that was printed. So the actual value that you have on those is just really damaging. And that kind of just goes to show you the lack of understanding of unit bias in our society. Most Of the people that are holding those stocks are like, “Oh, it’s great. I’m still up,” but it’s like, no, you’re not, man. You’re still fighting that inflationary dollar that’s like the money printer.So, it’s just really depressing to see kind of what’s happening in the markets if you’re not holding on to Bitcoin, really fortunate that we’re in a position to where we are. It’s a great privilege and it’s cool that we get to put on spaces like this. So, if people have questions about all coins definitely, we’d love to answer those. But just being an employee at Swan and with the UST downfall, I mean, it’s pretty awesome for us because Corey we all kind of look to him for not like I wouldn’t say guidance or anything but he has a really good sense of signal and he was speaking out against thetokenomics of it all the pain, the ponzinomics, or whatever you want to call it. And so,from us, it was just incredible to see how fast that happened. He was on CoinDesk at 9:00 a.m. two days ago, Corey, talking about the fall of a tether. It could be a day, it could be a week or a year from now, and then within an hour, it started to collapse. So, it was just wild. I don’t think any of us have ever– me, personally, I’ve never been interested in altcoins. I kind of came into this from another world of stuff.I was never tempted by the altcoins really, never really saw the point of it, because it’s just kind of the same shit that we have, just even worse than the Fed. Vitalik’s worse than the Fed, I think.

[7:00] Q: Okay. Can I bitch something? But I don’t want anyone to get mad at me.

[7:04] Alex: Dump your toe there, Q.

[7:08] Crown #Bitcoin: I’m not going to get mad at you. Go ahead.

[7:10] Q: I have a nice little ETH stack that I got so early on that I’m like, ugh, like I’vebeen selling incrementally from time to time and dumping it back into Bitcoin, but I’m Also like, ugh, do I have to get rid of this?

[7:32] Crown #Bitcoin: You realize you lost half of your Bitcoin on that stack in the last five years?

[7:39] Q: Kind of. I mean, I bought a lot, it’s like sub-$100, so.

[7:45] Crown #Bitcoin: No, I’m not talking about dollars but money in Bitcoin, you could have bought .14 Bitcoin per Ethereum in 2017, now you get like .069 or eight like that’s half. You lost more than half, actually. You lost more than half of your Bitcoin for not selling five years ago. It’s not a kind of, it’s just a regular real number.

[8:07] Q: I did buy five years ago, but okay.

[8:09] Crown #Bitcoin: Oh, okay.

[8:11] Q: Neither here nor there.

[8:12] Alex: Yeah. It’s like one of those things personal choice, you know. I mean, it’s the same thing with a lot of people like we talked about a lot. Like retirement funds or just like this cash they’re saving for a rainy day. I don’t know about you guys but the money that I’m saving for a rainy day isn’t Bitcoin. My emergency funds are denominated inBitcoin because it’s safe, it’s safer and it’s not being devalued. I mean, it can be problematic, and if you have a smaller stack, it might be hard to tolerate the volatility.And I get that. But I think just by sheer virtue of the conviction and spending a lot of time reading and talking to people about Bitcoin, you realize there’s no other asset that you want to hold. At least I do. And I’d be curious what push could be some other people onstage here, over the edge. If at all. If they’re kind of Bitcoin-only, what got you to the dance? And what keeps you from getting curious in the sideways market when you get super bored? What keeps you from venturing back into shitcoins or, Q, what keeps you from trading more ether, trying to find the next crypto project?

[9:34] Chris: Yeah, just invited some people up on stage if they want to talk about it.

[9:38] Joe: If you don’t mind, I’ll go. Thank you for hosting this, guys, first of all. I just kind of wanted to wrap back with McShane. I think you brought up a great point,especially with what Adam Back is doing. I know he’s trying to build liquid but that’s not really on the base layer of Bitcoin. I’d just be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on data. Again, I think the biggest thing here is education. I’m a Bitcoin maximalist. I’ve gotten pretty lucky at buying ETH pretty low. So, Q, I’m kind of in the same position where I am dabbling off portions of ETH at limit orders and cycling it right back intoBitcoin. And, Crown, you bring up a great point. Yeah, if you put it on the ETH to Bitcoin Chart, I am, in fact, losing Bitcoin, so that is another viable point. But I’ve had the stack, I Bought it at so low, I just feel more comfortable selling it off at higher and higher prices denominated in the US dollar and it could be a psychological education thing. So, I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on that.

[10:47] Crown #Bitcoin: I mean, in the shorter term, the best time to sell was inDecember. You had almost .09. Right now, it’s .067. That’s like, I guess, a quarter, close to a quarter, one-fifth of your Bitcoin gone since December. It depends on the timeframe. But the thing about holdings with ETH is everybody knows that the DeFihype is done. I mean, Luna is kind of like the period at the end of that. Right? It’s embarrassing. It was embarrassing before but now even the people who were happy about it are embarrassed.Ethereum is like a smartwatch, they make new ones every year and they get shittier over time. They’re easy to make, they’re a horrible source of value. It’s hot when it’s new, right? But then, it’s worthless.

[11:41] Alex: Was it Joe? Joe, sorry, did you just ask that question?

[11:45] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of asked, too, but the first one was more of the improvement that Adam Back is doing with liquid. I mean, I really wanted to just touchon education and how we could fix it. Because, I myself have been huddling and buyingBitcoin, especially daily now, and I understand the proposition. But anybody else I talk to is like, they don’t want to listen to me and it’s not like I’m coming to write on the whiteboard. I’m just like, hey, do you see house prices going up around you? Can you make sense of things here?

[12:28] Alex: Yeah, definitely, definitely been there on your side report, man. I also think that when we go through bold markets, kind of like euphoric markets, I find myself being really talkative about Bitcoin around friends and family to basically almost no effect. Right? People are who they are. Everyone has very deeply personal lifelong experiences with money. No one wants to be told that they don’t know what the fuckthey’re doing, even kindly, right? It’s hard to even hint at that. Everyone’s just got a very particular approach to life. So, what I’ve found is just wait and the price will lead them to you. You can help out your loved ones if they’re willing to listen to you, but everybody else, your friends, they’ll see your success and you might lose some people along the way. They just can’t really grok it. But, most people, if they’re being honest with themselves they’ll be interested in what solutions you have to offer or what you can teach them about Bitcoin.In terms of the Liquid thing, I’ve never used Liquid. I’d like to look into it. I think there’s anything wrong with learning about these projects just so you can talk about them coherently. So, I would defer on that Adam Back question.

[13:50] Joe: Okay. Okay. Yeah. No. No, I appreciate your insight and regarding the friends thing, yeah, I lost tons because of the volatility. I say to just only buyBitcoin and then they buy Shiba Inu and everything. Everything goes down from there and I’m like, “I told you so.”

[14:12] Crown #Bitcoin: I wonder, Joe, what is the use case of Liquid that causes you to be excited or more curious about it?

[14:22] Joe: No, no, actually, I don’t use it. I’ve just kind of listened to Adam Back talk a bit. I think he’s been on Anthony Pompliano’s podcast a couple of times and he’s spoken about it. Some of the innovations, at least it sounds like, there are some cool things going on over there. Again, I don’t use it so I can’t say as a first-time user, what interests me about it.

[14:48] Crown #Bitcoin: They have little transactions already. You said some cool stuff,but to me, I mean, of course, I love Adam Back, but I think people really talk about it because he’s the CEO of Blockstream and sort of it in the products.

[15:04] Joe: No, that makes sense.

[15:08] Alex: I’d also say, Joe, this might be kind of controversial but just go try it. Come to your own conclusions, man. Some things in the space might surprise you. I’m not advocating for any projects, but the best way to confirm your suspicions about something, I think, is to just dig in and do your own research.

[15:27] Joe: Yeah. For sure, for sure. Thanks, guys.

[15:30] Ferric William: If I could jump in real quick, too.

[15:32] Alex: Yeah, definitely.

[15:33] Ferric: I know everyone kind of wants to say this is the death of alt coins to a certain extent like I just heard someone say the death of DeFi, but there’s still going tobe that crowd of people who bought at the all-time low during the pandemic and that was $90 at one point at its all-time low. So, there are people who are still up like 20x.So, I’m not here to defend Ethereum because my whole take on everything is thatBitcoin is the only thing you can rely on to still be up for years from the time you buy it and as long as you can wait for years and whether that you’re not going to feel a damn thing about the price of Bitcoin. I’ve weathered that for a time frame. I don’t care about this drop. And, altcoins, at best there again and people should recognize that.

[16:33] Crown #Bitcoin: Yeah. I mean, there are people that are up on Hex if they bought it when it first came out. And, of course, I hope anyway and nobody here would think like, “Oh, man, my Hex is down, maybe I should wait five more years,” and I think we all know that, right? The difference between Bitcoin and something like Ethereum is that when you’re down on Ethereum, it might not ever come back up again. When you’re down on Bitcoin, it doesn’t really matter because you already know what Bitcoin Is, the fundamentals of Bitcoin, and why it’s valuable. So, I’m sure about something like Hexor Ethereum. It’s viable to think of it as like theoretically. It’s not the all-time low now, so somebody bought it cheaper.

[17:15] Ferric: Yeah, and I guess the point I’m trying to make, too, though is, at this point, if anyone feels shitty, it’s because they know they could have sold their altcoin for more Bitcoin. They would be up in Bitcoin is why the average person feels shitty. They inherently know that if they’re at least taking this ecosystem seriously and the lesson to take from this downturn is really just that you would be up more Bitcoin if you weren’t so euphoric in shitcoins.

[17:49] Alex: Yeah. And I think when you hold onto those shitcoins, you’re really just priming yourself to be fiat-minded and to think fiat-mindedness, think in terms of dollars.I would say that it’s just a sign that you haven’t really grokked it yet, or you just don’t have the conviction of people who spent a great deal of time learning about Bitcoin. It’s very hard to see the world through some of these other projects try to denominate your life in Ethereum or Doge or something just try to make things make sense through the frame of reference. You’d be feeling like a schizophrenic, it just doesn’t work.

[18:33] Ferric: Right. I do think there is one trend that we might see come out of this though and I wouldn’t necessarily think it if it wasn’t for the fact that Luna, well, Terra was trying to back themselves with Bitcoin. They were trying to bring that security into their evaluation. But next time around, you’ll probably see more people trying to get into the altcoins or tokenomics that are directly tied to the Bitcoin blockchain. So, be that tax or sovereign or people trying to do things on rootstock in general and then more attention to Lightning. I just think you’ll see more attempts with DeFi in that category because people are seeking that solid foundation.

[19:22] Crown #Bitcoin: I think that if you’ve done it before, it’s always true of everybody. There are always outliers. But if you’ve already played the game before and you know how the game works, it doesn’t matter, to me, it’s built on Bitcoin or Ethereum, Tron, and the game itself is a silly game. And I think most will figure out, what was the point of my– when we first see yield for the first time, I don’t know how many people dabbled in the DeFi stuff when you first look at the DeFi thing and it promises you 300APY, the first thing you’re going to think is, well, I can triple my money in a year, right?But anybody who actually knows about DeFi even when it was in the height of it knew, if you’re getting three hundred percent, you can get that for like a weekend and you better hurry up and dump before everybody else because the thing is going to go down to 30percent. Even then, the token will dump so bad that even if you make two thousand percent, it’s not going to be worth what you put in. Only the brand new guy thinks he’s going to get three hundred percent APY for the whole year.That said, that whole concept, I don’t think it’s about the foundation. I think it’s about the games that are being played as people learn those games, they realize that they don’t want to play them anymore. You cannot create a perpetual motion machine. So, I kinda see, other than new money, I don’t see people coughing on to whatever new DeFithing comes out because they already know those are bad games. That said though,the new money that does come, it doesn’t care what it’s on. They needed to be a website, they could click on the money, pay with whatever money they had, and then gamble. Whatever’s easy, it doesn’t matter how centralized it is, that’s the one that the new money will go for, in my opinion. It’d be wrong, of course. Until society as a whole kind of has internalized that these kinds of incentives don’t work. And that eventually happens, by the way. It happened with penny stocks, it happened with MLMs.Everybody kind of internalizes as a society, even if you didn’t participate, you kind of learn through osmosis why these things are bad and you don’t want to touch them.

[21:31] [ads] [23:30] Ferric: See, I agree and disagree at the same time because with DeFi, it’s the whole hope of eliminating banks for loans and there’s going to be a DeFi fallacy that erupts where everyone will always say that the reason I failed was it was not big enough or it was just not strong enough at the time that it was attacked or something like that.There’s always going to be an excuse. Just look at how communism is or socialism.Everyone will always say they just didn’t do it right. And I think DeFi is that perfect ecosystem/use case where someone will always say, “They just didn’t do it right.” And you’ll never escape those people until everyone is just purely on the Bitcoin standard.

[24:19] Alex: Even then, I would argue. The markets have clearly shown that it wants stuff like this, right? We want our snake oil salesman. We want quick fists like monetary weird solutions. I don’t think they’re going anywhere. I think the lesson here is that they’re fundamentally different and other than Bitcoin like these are orthogonal systems. There’s like a market of competing cryptocurrencies, and then, over here,there’s Bitcoin, and they’re not in any way interchangeable. And I don’t think that you’re going to have any bootstrap to somehow catch or beat Bitcoin. They’re not even playing the same game in my mind. I’d be really curious to see what other people think about that.

[25:08] Ferric: Yeah. They’re definitely not the same game. I think people are just trying to think of how a bank will work with Bitcoin and that’s the DeFi, in general. I honestly think that’s kind of where people are at.

[25:25] Alex: Yeah. I mean, I wish I could tell you, everyone will just be their own bank.But in the near term, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think there’s a real danger of some kind of custodial captures like custodial wallet solutions and people just willingly trusting and getting themselves into more kind of fractional Reserve dilemmas just by virtue of they just want to trust, they don’t want to make that trade-off where they have to be responsible for their own security. I guess, two cents on that, take your pick of one-off exchanges, guys, and be your own bank.

[26:08] Ferric: I think, also, people are just too far removed from the gold standard and the concept of how you actually make money in that ecosystem. So, it kind of puts us in the situation we currently are, right? You lost the custodial battle and then they just tell you that you have to expect interest on the money that’s there instead of them providing you a service which was protecting your money and now you’re just completely brainwashed as a society to expect interest, and all of those things, instead of you having to work with the money you have.

[26:48] Alex: And it’s also, like, you’re brainwashed to just expect inflation. This isn’t even a question now, like, should we print this? No, it’s like, how much, like, how much of it do I get? Right? That’s the whole argument now, it’s crazy. People are just living on borrowed time and kind of like this temporal money that’s being taxed on one end, it’s laid out the other. It’s not useful as a measure of anything for very long. It’s scary stuff,man. People might be triggered to compare it to slavery, but it’s some sort of modern-day form of capture. I think it really really stalled out society.

[27:32] Ferric: The problem with inflation, though, is really just the fact that you didn’t have infinitely divisible money, and let’s put a theoretical point out. If you had the gold standard and the population was constantly growing, let’s just pretend gold was a set amount and it wasn’t actually growing every year in quantity. The only way to keep prices reasonable in a way that would be exactly similar to deflation or without bringing inflation in the unfair quantities that it is currently would be if you, say, you doubled the currency but it was like a stock split. And the problem is they’ve always had this thing where, well, prices are too high now and the people who save their money have all their money, the new population can’t spend enough to afford anything. Well, that’s how you bring prices down and encourage people to spend money, too. It’s just one of those things, though, where the government was like, “We can just print the money and spend it for ourselves.” Basically, robbing people who saved.All Bitcoin does is bring infinite divisibility and remove the money printer, but it was effectively the same thing as if you made it where each dollar split and now instead of$1, it was $2. Just the person who already had the dollar kept the dollar – both dollars.

[29:07] Chris: Brecht, you’ve had your hand up for a while, what’s happening?

[29:13] Brecht: Hey, guys. I just want to give maybe a 30-second little testimonial speaking lesson from altcoins and tell my quick story here that I read the Bitcoin Standard. I understood Bitcoin. I fully believed in it, but I was too smart. And so what I did starting months ago was I had the idea that instead of buying any Bitcoin at all, whatI was going to do is buy really early profitable shitcoins all the way from promising later ones, I mean, all AIs. I mean, even down number 400 on the list. Find really, really strong fundamental projects, invest in those all the way down to BICO, Shiba Inu, you name it, void or token, all of those. What I was going to do is catapult those in and buyBitcoin at whatever price, double my money. And if I had just bought the bitcoin going in the first place, which I’m very proud to say,yesterday, I bought 1.1 Bitcoin at 25,400. If I had done this a long long time ago, then the two assets I want the most are time and money, I would have a lot more time and I would have a lot more money. The amount of time I put into researching bullshit and I’mtalking to the point of mental illness, absolute obsession, literally 14 hours a day ofwatching charts, doing technical analysis. I wasted all my time. I should have boughtBitcoin in the first place. If I had, I’d have a lot more money and time right now.

[30:48] Alex: Can I give you a tip? Thank you for sharing that. It was a really encouraging story.

[30:55] Brecht: Please, I’m all ears.

[30:57] Alex: Try to avoid telling people any specific amounts and times that you purchased Bitcoin because even with what little information you gave right there, I mean, this is an open public ledger.

[31:11] Brecht: Yeah, I understand. Yeah, thank you.

[31:14] Alex: You don’t want the masses knocking on your door when the dollar becomes absolutely– [crosstalk] [31:18] Brecht: That was dumb. Yeah, I understand. Thank you very much, I appreciate that.

[31:22] Chris: You just got to go lose it on a boat somewhere, man. Sorry.

[31:25] Jacob: Yeah, he’s going to have more tomorrow so that number is going to be obsolete, right?

[31:30] Brecht: I hope so.

[31:32] Chris: Thank you for that, story, though. I mean, I think that helps prove thepoint. I think sometimes people think us being, myself, and I hope everyone else up onthe stage being Bitcoin maxis, we’re toxic, we’re mean, we don’t like people, we hatepeople that have fun. I like to believe we have a lot of fun being Bitcoiners. When I firststarted my Bitcoin journey, I was asking a lot of questions, I was like, “Why does thiscoin do this? Why does this coin do that?” I’m not going to name them here but I wasasking just very genuine questions. I just didn’t know. And a lot of times people will either give me an answer and say, “You got to do your own research,” and they’d recommend an article and a book, and don’t get me wrong, it’s very frustrating because it takes a lot of time and effort and work. They’d point me in the direction of this article or they pointed me to the block size wars or they pointed me to an article on Bitcoin Magazine, whatever it may be. And you finally come around to realizing like all these are like vaporware or they’re just obsolete or they’re not good. Even your point, Brecht, that you’re wasting all this time that you could spend with your loved ones. You were just much better off just buying Bitcoin, putting it into cold storage,sitting on your hands and waiting, enjoying it with your family. I don’t know if you have kids, a wife, a girlfriend, whatever, but, yeah, you’re just much better off using your time and you get more time back by doing that. You feel that your money is safe. It’s not being printed by the Federal Reserve. It’s not being scammed by some VC for an altcoin and I think a lot of Bitcoiners, we try and educate people and, yeah, it comes off as toxic, but I can say people that are very genuine and are asking genuine questions,most Bitcoiners that I’ve met will be very genuine about it.The thing that causes us to get toxic is when people show their bags or listing all the coins that they basically are holding and they’re like, oh, no, yeah, of course, I likeBitcoin. But like they mention a million other coins that they’re obviously holding and I think that’s where it goes from trying to be genuine in helping people to being toxic because it’s like, you see the game they’re playing.

[33:31] Brecht: That’s exactly right. In our meet-up here in our city, if you come and you’re like, “Hey, guys, can somebody tell me what an NFT is?” I’m happy to tell youwhat NFT is, I’m not going to call you dumb ass, whatever. But if you come in there, like,”Guys, I just got to tell you this thing, don’t get mad at me but like this is totally gonna be an amazing project. It’s just new and blah blah blah,” now I’m gonna actually, I’m gonna be kind of maybe a little bit mean with you because you’re literally trying to scam the group right now.

[34:05] Alex: I wonder, though, it might be just worth laying out. There’s a moral problem there because what you’re doing is you’re promoting security in which, for all we know,you might hold a great stake. The difference between Bitcoin and all of these other cryptocurrencies in my mind is that Bitcoin is a property currency and asset, the rest of these are securities. They don’t pass the Howey test. So, when you show them, I can talk about Bitcoin all day, but the amount of Bitcoin I hold doesn’t have any influence on how the network works and I can’t disenfranchise anyone else from using it and it doesn’t pump my bags to get a new user into Bitcoin.That’s not really the case with other cryptocurrencies, especially the proof of stake and other securities out there. That’s probably why the alarms go off when people start to mention specific cryptos.

[35:12] Brecht: You know this thought that I was having, just the other day, it wasn’t that long ago that my parents and their parents were just saying, “Save your money. Just always save some for yourself, save your money.” And now, everybody’s just saying cash is trash and this is such a new thought. This is just a social experiment that’s been happening in the last 50 to 60 years with this fiat standard in inflation. It’s just the most wild thing that you have to continually be a stockbroker, continually put your money at risk in things that you truly don’t understand, just whatever sounds good. And it’s just like an awful way to live with society. And when we go back to the fundamentals, likeChris was saying of loving yourself, loving your family, just storing some money away for yourself, and focusing on your profession, that’s going to build just so much of a bettersociety.And, with Bitcoin, this is not only one of the best things that I can understand becauseit’s like all of these crypto projects and anything like a lot of the fiat stuff, it’s reallycomplex and complicated because it’s supposed to be, it’s built that way for a reason.You’re not stupid. You could totally understand finance. Anybody can. It’s very simple.But when you can understand Bitcoin as well, if you put in the time, but a lot of those other projects, the reason that they’re so confusing is because they’re meant to be. So,it was just interesting to think that, like, since the 401K programs and like SocialSecurity and all this stuff that’s propping up the stock market that has come out and how everybody is preaching cash is trash., I just couldn’t imagine what it’s like. I don’t know.That’s just where my mind’s been lately.

[36:54] Alex: I guess I have maybe an anecdotal kind of segue here. I think time spent inBitcoin tends to lower people’s time preferences. This is something that I think theBitcoin standard was probably the first book to really point out. So you start to see a lifestyle change, you spend less money on bullshit, you become less of a consumer,and the more Bitcoin you control. I don’t know if it’s a rule. It’s definitely not a law. It’s just something I’ve seen just kind of a psychological shift in people. Whereas if you look over the fence in crypto land, it’s just like a sea of green enticing speculative shitcoincasino, a lot of trading going on, a lot of high time preference decision-making. a lot of consumerists, kind of gambling like behavior, but I’d be interested if anyone has felt that kind of change the longer they’ve held Bitcoin.

[37:58] Chris: Yeah, Hannah, I think we just brought you up. I don’t know if you had something to say or something you want to add. All right, I guess she’s away from her phone right now. Yeah, Brecht, if you want to go again, go ahead.

[38:07] Brecht: Okay. Well, maybe that’s part two of what I would have to say is that when you accept that it’s just Bitcoin. So, so simple and really profound when you go ahead and accept that, it liberates you from all the bullshit so you’re no longer interested in any of these other projects. That’s what I found so exciting, I wasted so much of my time, and I’m also finding it’s helping me to focus on things that I wanted before. Now,I’m kind of weighing that against, right now, I view this as a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity and I equate it to – do I want the Bitcoin, or do I want this item that requires maintenance and time itself? So, I’m buying less, I’m putting more into Bitcoin and, from that standpoint, for your time and attention, it’s so liberating when you just accept that this is where you’re going to put your money and your focus and you don’t have to worry about all this shitcoins, what’s going on in the market? And, man, to just recoup all the time that I wasted on bullshit. I would love to have half of it back and put half of my losses back into Bitcoin. It means so much to me but, oh, well.

[39:31] Alex: I think I feel similarly, Brecht. I would characterize it as that singleness of purpose has a really clarifying effect akin to people practicing meditation, working out,anything where you have just one kind of monomaniacal quest in mind, you learn a lot. And I think it doesn’t add. The only thing I take issue with I guess with what you said is Bitcoin doesn’t really have a maintenance cost, but I would encourage people to continue to learn and grow and not kind of set it and forget it. Just keep upgrading your security, keep up with the times, try new things, try new hardware, try new software. It’s fun.

[40:18] Chris: Does anyone think that this is the end of this current bull market, though?

[40:23] Q: What? Do we think it’s not a bear market?

[40:27] Chris: I mean, no, do you think it’s a bear market until the halving? Like, in cycles.

[40:35] Crown #Bitcoin: I think it’s the end of the Altseason. I think Bitcoin can decouple and do its own thing and forge its own path. Just like it kind of does even in bear markets. In the bear market in the last three years, you saw Bitcoin go anywhere from$3,000 to $14,000, it’s a wide range, but I didn’t get back to an all-time high, but I do think we can see an all-time high again before the next Altseason but I definitely think this Altseason’s over, hopefully. Especially if this red last, at least, long enough for people to capitulate a little more, at least two more weeks, maybe more. The longer that this red last, I mean, right now, we’re finally seeing some 2018-like red days. Yesterday and today, I looked at Coin Market Cap. there have been lots of like, is it a bear market yet in the last year? And I was always, like, no. Yes, kind of, but not really. Right now, we’re looking it went down 50% for the week, Polkadot 40% for the week, Cardano, 40% for the week, a lot of 50% for the week. These are like a real bear market like 2018 bear market numbers, shitcoiners are getting absolutely slaughtered. If this is going to be like 2018, you’re going to lose half your money every day if you’re still in those things and it’s ugly for a reason. But if I can go on for at least another two weeks, they will definitely get tired of trying to buy the dip and getting wrecked over and over again. When that happens, that’s finally the end of the Ponzi cycle, we can move on to building and thinking about Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin can decouple, and break all-time high without any real exuberance over Ponzi’s. And then eventually, there’ll be some new hype that sparks because of something. Who knows what? That creates another Altseason, but I think, for now, it’s over.

[42:20] Chris: Can I ask you a question, Crown, and I’m not being funny. What the hell is Altseason? How do you define that? What does it mean?

[42:30] Crown #Bitcoin: Altseason is a term– sorry, that has been used for the last, I don’t know, probably six, seven years where all the non-Bitcoin coins start to actually group. Normally, like in 2018, 2019, if you bought whatever trendy thing other than Bitcoin thing,you’re pretty much just going to lose money from the first time you buy with few exceptions, always like some random thing that can pop, of course. But if you’re just out there trying to play the markets in 2018, in all coins, late 2018 especially, it’s going to be a totally different lesson. You’re going to learn your lesson very quickly ’cause you’re going to buy it, you’re going to lose money and you’re like, “That was dumb. Why do I listen to these Twitter people telling me that this was a good thing to buy.” Whereas, in an Altseason, you can buy any dumb thing and still probably make moneyand you can call it a bull market generally, but it’s a little different since it’s mostly defined by just all coins is just a bunch of new dumb money coming in buying all theshitcoins, basically, and then prices are going up. But that part is over.

[43:40] Alex: I would also add that it kind of suppresses Bitcoins price towards the tail end of its all-time high there just because a lot of people get convinced to go in on all as well who had money in Bitcoin.

[43:56] Crown #Bitcoin: Well, yeah, and Bitcoin has always held its own apart from this market like right now, where we see other assets losing the other big quote of classeslosing 50% of the value this week. Bitcoin only lost 21%, which is a lot less than 50. If you think about it mathematically, it’s like 50% is like another doubling from 20 or another half of your money, more than a half of your money. So, it’s a huge difference but Bitcoin tends to get dragged down when market sentiment is bad in general. Also because so much of the trading is algorithmic. So, the algorithm see everything going down and it doesn’t make them want to buy more Bitcoin. But, eventually, it separates. It stops caring as much if all the shitcoins are having a bad day.

[44:46] Alex: I think if we want the average consumer not to get really, really hurt by altcoins in general, I think we have to hope that Ethereum fails to actually switch to proof of stake because otherwise, it’s going to capture that whole bullshit ESG narrative and get the institutional investors to really pump the average person into it, where you’ll start getting retirement funds and all sorts of things involved.

[45:20] Chris: Yeah, John, I just brought you up. Do you have a question or comment or anything?

[45:27] John Mark Cobern: All right. Yes, I was just going to mention that, and I don’t necessarily comment on the young man that was saying that he really regretted wasting a lot of time on these awful things. I’m a little older than most of the people here.I’m 50 and I was investing in the dot-com era and lost a lot of money on some of these dot-com stocks that no longer exist. That event and that lesson are what caused me when I first started studying all this crypto stuff to focus on Bitcoin and see the difference between Bitcoin and all these other altcoins.So, investing in something like some of these shitcoins can be a good learning experience, and just, hopefully, people learn it with the least amount of pain as much as possible. I had a lot of pain in the dot-com era, I lost a lot of money. I just wanted to make sure of that and turn it into a positive. It’s a good lesson.

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