How you end up in crypto? The question is so simple, but I still struggle to answer it. I will try to do it here, while sharing things I learned along the way.

Honestly, I never expected to be a crypto trader and armchair analyst of ponzinomics. I was always curious, really liked physics, biology and thought I’m going to be a scientist. I studied nanotechnology and physical chemistry in university and expected to get my PhD abroad.

But, by the end of university I understood one thing, doing science in the academy is not something I want to do for the next 40 years, there is tremendous amount of bureaucracy and no dynamic.

Around that time I noticed that many people I liked with the same background and thirst for diverse knowledge ended up in consulting firms as McKinsey or invest banking. That’s how I started to study finance and in particular how banking system works. More about it later.

I saw one guy from McKinsey who went to work for venture capital firm and he mentioned that technological background is something VCs are quite in need for.

Fast forward and in a year I was already in Silicon Valley working for VC which invested from robotics to synthetic biology. There my learning of technological cycles and speculations on early stage companies started.

Silicon Valley’s early stage VCs are mostly smart people with unique perspectives. But many of them were riding internet wave and believing everything they touch will turn in gold. But it’s not. Technology cycles are finite, have enormously different effects and time horizons.

@cdixon has great essays and talked about technological cycles on several podcasts at lengths. Here is essay. https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e

After 2 years in VC, hundreds of podcasts articles and books I felt like I have a solid grasp of how to spot a significant technological shift. And I knew that it’s not something that traditional VCs were looking at that time.

Internet was already monopolized by FAANG, and everything that touched physical realm as Robotics or other hard tech have completely different network effects and CAPEX. Even more so, Silicon Valley felt mainstream, something conventional.

But let’s take a step back, I am Russian and in 2014 ruble was tanking to USD by 50%. I was trying to understand how banking system works and why it doesn’t sound logical when you read about it on Wikipedia.

That’s where I started to look closer at bitcoin. Honestly, while I was aware of bitcoin since early 2013, the amount of hype and scammers surrounding the field was so huge that I didn’t look at it until the rubble crisis.

So by 2017 I was completely sure that my work at VC firm not going to lead me to the next technological shift and at the same time my mind was becoming more and more infected by crypto.

I left VC in June 2017, expecting to have a gap year to find something new. Funny enough, I couldn’t see that the next big thing is in front of me, it’s my weird crypto hobby. By 2018 crypto consumed me completely.

I was not trading shitcoins or taking leverage, sticking to ETH and BTC was my only strategy, because shitcoins were too stupid to even touch.
There was a lot of trades, but only one decision made all the difference for me. I sold near the top in 2018.

I did that because I really felt crypto had a huge potential, but to build real things takes time and patience. However, the market participants wanted the revolution tomorrow. I knew that such dissonance will demolish the market.

Most of my time in crypto was a bear market. I saw shitcoiners and leveraged up traders loosing their sanity and all their money in real time.

It brings me to another point, most of the popular crypto traders who are making a lot of money recklessly on the way up, will loose it when market shifts.

What I can suggest to novice retail traders is to be patient. Crypto is the market of infinite opportunities, as long as you have the money you can play with it.

Do not complicate your trading, there is no technical tool that will make you money. Trading should be boiled down to a simple question is the price going up or down.

Have just a few positions. And strong conviction in them so you can hold through 50% drawdown and 1000% pump.

Paper trading is bullshit, you can learn how to trade only by trading real money. At the end of the day trading is an understanding of your own emotions, so you need to have monetary attachment to your position.

Know the personality of traders you trade against and overall mood of the market, for me sentiment is the greatest indicator. You need to sell the bubbling greed and buy the blood.

Know the market structure and current market narratives. It’s always better to trade against sentiment, but within the narrative’s scope.
It’s hard to trade successfully things nobody cares about.

As the bull market approaches take it responsibly, because such technological and social shifts are rarely happens twice in one lifetime. We are so lucky to have this opportunity.