#HologramThread: #crypto

In 2020, I got into Crypto. I have made money. I have lost money. I have invested in Good Things®. I have lost thousands by getting scammed. And I have lost money mostly for two reasons: Greed and Stupidity.

Curious? What kind of investor are YOU?

Look, the economy is rigged. We all want to be billionaires. I've been a #UBI advocate for several years, and I believe that ECONOMIC FREEDOM is a fundamental human right. Without the power to NOT WORK, someone else will always have more to gain from your labor than yourself.

I'm not a financial professional. I declared bankruptcy in 2009. God knows I could never live by Dave Ramsey's rules of money. I am not, nor should I be, a financial role model to anyone, anywhere. So, this advice is worth exactly what you are paying Twitter to show it to you: $0

Lesson #1: I am a technologist. I approach things from the 1's and 0's. I learned 6502 assembly language before you were born and presented a "graphical negative" project at the Missouri State Fair in 1983. (Honorable Mention; not a lot of assembly programmers in MO back then.)

When I look at something to invest in, I'm looking at some of the principles of the technology. Is it OPEN? Can people SEE how it works? Is it decentralized? Who makes decisions? What is the UTILITY of the project?

This means I have never bought $DOGE and never will. Sorry.

Lesson #2: Are you a day-trader? Do you sit at a dashboard trying to get faster feeds so you can arbitrage a few bucks between coins while they reconcile $DAI and $USDT? Can you write a "front-running bot" that parses #Solidity or #Substrate smart contracts?

No?

Real talk?

You aren't going to wake up a billionaire any time soon. Sorry. You'll have to do this the old-fashioned way (mostly). If you were to sit down at Edward Jones, they would tell you about "dollar cost averaging" and some other "market go up" talk.

I'm gonna skip all that.

If you are at the bottom of this handy-dandy and in-no-way-comprehensive-chart, then here's the deal: If I were talking to you about the stock market, what would I say? "Buy mutual funds. Find funds with a history of good returns. Get yourself into some good index funds."

"Take a little bit out of each paycheck and push it into your funds. Diversify a bit, but primarily, a good index fund will take care of most of that for you."

That's it. If you are "I don't understand crypto, but ..." then $BTC, $ETH, and the upcoming $DOT are going to be

similar investments to mutual funds. Why? Because other crypto things are built on them and out of them. Over time, those tokens will be like index funds for their ecosystems. Invest a little each check into them, check back in a few years, and you'll be fine.

Not only that, but you can do this from freaking PAYPAL, these days. I use an app as my primary on-ramp (this is not a paid ad, but please use this link to get me some referral bux - lol): https://crypto.com/app/4p6hgrktau 

Lesson #3: Greed and Stupidity.

In September, I took 32 ETH and made 4 separate "hot" #DeFi investments. I tracked the earnings in a spreadsheet. One of these things claimed to be getting 27,000% APY! I did my own research, joined some Discord servers and Telegram groups, and

tracked it all by value. At the end of the experiment, if I had just held onto my $ETH instead of exchanging it for all these crazy tokens (that often paid dividends in yet other tokens), I would have had 32 ETH. When the experiment ended, I had 28 ETH after converting it back.

Some of these things were earnestly interesting experiments in programmable money ( $AMPL). One of them was a "rug pull" (lost ~$2k on that; got lucky). One of them was an informed gamble I made on converting YAMv2 into YAMv3. One is a project I still shill for ( $DOKI).

And while I love $DOKI, I am still down serious actual $$$ on that project. Not as much as some due to "day-trader" behavior that I used to sell and "buy the dip" when I could, but it's not going back to $600 any time soon.

And then there's yesterday when I had a bad leverage

trade on $ETH because I got greedy on a "long" and fell into a profit-taking hole. I had just cashed a $10k long, and I was blinded by greed for being such a genius. Doh!

(This is why I never put more than 25% of my eggs in ANY GIVEN BASKET! You can't win them all!)

Lesson #4: There are no secrets.

If someone has a secret to getting rich, they used it and are rich. If they are selling you their secret, that's their whole secret: Selling ... TO YOU.

If you aren't willing to do domain lookups and smart-contract parsing like @haydentiff,

then I would encourage you not to fall for "get rich quick by doing _____ RIGHT NOW!" pressure tactics.

Can you make more money if you understand it better? YES ... But that's true about nearly every profession on earth. The more you study, the better you'll be.

If you are NOT willing to study, and you want to make money, anyway, you can. It just won't be as much. Will it outperform your 401k? Probably. 10x? No. Maybe 2x if you are super lucky. Maybe 0.8x, though, too. I'm not a time traveler. I can't see the future.

~ Holo