Are you here for the money?

Why should we all be invested in Crypto. From beginner's to enlightened belt.

TL;DR: One of the enlightened OG belts out there put it simply:

The Beginner belt

Crypto is often first approached for its speculative properties. Which is fine, if one can stomach its volatility and high risk.

The recent winter has for some tarnished the word "Crypto" which I often hear should now be relegated to a dark past and substituted with something more palatable. What Facebook did when it moved on to Meta. An anaesthetic, sleepy rebranding.

Although typical of our times, when truth is often masked, pain adulterated and responsibility obfuscated, I find this rather childish. Crypto represents much more than a bunch of bull market scams.

Anyway.

If you're a beginner, beware. You might be here for the money, but somebody's else money is here for yours too. It's very easy to lose your hard-earned cash if you're not extra careful. Some basic rules I have learnt the hard way in my 7 years in the space:

• Crypto is the new frontier. It is the riskiest investment available. If you can't stand crypto's volatility and risk, stay out of it, for your good mental health and portfolio.
• There are no rescuers in this space. Your mistake, your loss. You're alone out there. You're flying solo. You'll grow up or out of here.
• You need to always DYOR, do your own research. Don't trust anybody.
• If you haven't yet, join CT, the crypto twitter community. Start following people (I can recommend some!). Learn. Unfollow some that don't add value. Add more. Comment. Debate. Get smarter.
• Crypto needs time to be understood and it's extremely fast. Don't cut corners.
• The frontier is vast. Focus on one domain. You can't know everything. Not anymore. I focus on DeFi, while just reading about NFTs, Metaverse and other interesting stuff.
• Understand your profile well. How much time can you dedicate to Crypto? Are you a trader or an investor? Are you here to trade short term volatility or invest in long term value? Plan accordingly. If you're mixing the two, you'll surely lose money.
• Be very cautious. If your profile reads "investor", start by investing in the 2 blue chips, ETH and BTC (or just ETH, if you ask me). Learn as much as possible in the process. There are platforms that offer learning rewards. Try a few.
• Play with Dapps with small amounts of money and learn the ropes. It's the only way to really understand what's going on and how it all works. Reading about it is far from enough.
• Be extra careful when it comes to security (always use a cold wallet, a dedicated email address, don't save passwords and seed phrases on any digital device etc etc) or as a first step use a trusted exchange like Coinbase and keep your funds there.
• Invest most of the portfolio (80-90%) in safer bets (ETH and BTC and related products like staking and lending). Use the rest for degen stuff (bolder moves / projects) when the time is right (DYOR).
• NEVER USE LEVERAGE and derivatives unless you are a badass ultra-pro trader. Dopex is a great platform but don't bet on the volatility of ETH..

• ALWAYS take profit, especially on the bolder moves.
• Don't FOMO. It's a waste of time and energy, and more often than not, you end up loosing money.
• Try and keep some dry powder always available for when new or sudden interesting plays arise, or in case of a market crash which is often a great accumulation opportunity.
• Celebrate the dip - buy it - be excited when the market crashes because it's the chance to accumulate at low prices the projects that are (probably) here to stay - ETH and BTC in primis.
• Don't be a tourist in this space or you'll lose it all. When the bear awakes and takes you down you'll leave for good to never come back having learnt nothing but maybe - and that would be good enough - humility.
• If you survive one or two bull/bear markets, you're probably here to stay. That's great. Your curiosity and sometimes greed must have driven you to this point and your energy can be compounded to advance the whole space. Be here for the money, fine, but also for the technology, for its promises, for the social experiment, for the camaraderie, for the intellectual challenges, for the journey. Participate in the community. Enjoy the ride.

The Intermediate belt

When you hit the bottom of the rabbit hole it's time to pause and look back. Why are you even here degen?

ryanb.eth has an asnwer: "New short essay on web3 fundamentals. Here's a summary of the root fundamentals that make web3 genuinely useful, innovative, and on track to deliver revolutionary benefits for all of humanity:"

If you're part of the Crypto class of 2020 and you're still here, you've survived one full cycle. Congrats. You'll have internalized the learnings of the Beginner belt. You know what you want, where to get info, who to follow, what to run away from.

The intermediate belt is earned when you can easily see beyond the mere money making-and-losing machine that crypto can be.

As I've written in a previous article about the transition from Web2 to Web3, the broader advantages of the latter is crystal-clear:

• Web3: mainly decentralised. Geo-globalisation retreating but interconnectivity exploding. Significant revenue generated.?New business models?created, in part enabled by previously impossible micro digital payments. Decentralised, spread ownership and revenue. Trustless transactions. Immutability. Ownership of one's own data (which kills Web2's business models). Full interoperability (which again kills Web2's business models). A nascent?new financial system. Decentralisation of work (hybrid, remote, Metaverses). Significant decentralisation of decision-making. Exponential, small scale experimentation with new governing models (DAOs, governing tokens and much more) with the aim of possibly creating?new, larger scale, more functional frameworks better suited to govern modern democracies?(think of the constant impasse in USA's politics!).?Open-sourcing of power?in a borderless world where developers, politicians, lobbyists, creators can easily form meta-organisations beyond and above states whose historic definition is becoming irrelevant. Open-sourcing of knowledge and work. Multiple crypto currencies co-existing. Tokenisation of everything. Web3 applications in real world which will onboard the first billion of people to this?new World 3.0.

As an intermediate belt you might see all of that and its implicit revolutionary potential but you still remain focused on investments. Even if your privacy or other fundamental rights are in question. Why? because Web3 start-ups and projects are so damn interesting. They are a proxy of the future. Compare that speed and innovation with what's left of the once shimmering Big Techs now looking ordinary and decadent.

But what's currently the best source of Web3 alpha? Crypto twitter my fren.

If you're an intermediate belt with an animal spirit craving for early-stage investments you might already have minted a glove, removed it and participated to The Bankless Fight Club:

From fightclub.vc:

"Access to early-stage investments often is limited to?venture capitalists?(VC) due to the exclusive nature of VC networks. The Bankless Fight Club is a sub-DAO of BanklessDAO whose mission is to democratize access to the VC deal flow and enable economic sovereignty."

Fight Club includes a platform of venture DAOs, educational programs for venture analysts of diverse backgrounds, and apprenticeships that bring financial tools to the unbanked.

In the effort to democratize deal flow, Fight Club allows its members to bring investment proposals to the DAO, where investing members will subsequently vote on them. The money used to fund these projects comes from a pool of capital called the “Genesis Fund”, set aside to support Web3 projects across the cryptoverse.

Or you might just be invested, absorbed and fascinated by the upcoming Merge.

The enlightened belt

Ok. You're red-pilled. You're willing to learn potentially unsettling and life-changing truths. The market is just noise in the background. You use it, but like you use a taxi. You forget about it as soon as you've reached your destination.

What's driving your thoughts is the borderless potential of what Web3 can achieve. In all directions.

The road to success is paved with challenges though. Some of them, mind-blowing. While its potential is painfully clear in developing countries.

The table below shows the top 20 countries in the?2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index, as well as their rankings in the three component metrics that make up the overall rankings.

Which country is on top? Vietnam. That's right, the country which labels crypto as:

Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies have been specifically designated by SBV as illegal and are banned for trade relationships.?

Experiments are being worked on in many fields. The Non Fungible Planet is another example: NFTs with real world applications.

NFTs Bring Equity to Climate Finance For Earth’s?Sake

ReFi, an offshoot of?DeFi, refers to the crypto version of?regenerative finance: the idea that sustainability and social justice are the primary drivers of investment, and financial return is a secondary concern. The core tenet of ReFi is the regeneration of environmental and societal systems, using decentralized finance as the basis for a self-sustaining circular economy rather than as a vehicle for profit.

Regulation is coming

You're not the only one to be red-pilled. Financial Institutions, Governments, International bodies have all woken up to this new reality. Reactions are complex, multiple, multifaceted.

In some cases, way perplexing. Alexey Pertsev is still in jail for having simply co-written the code of Tornado Cash.

This oblique story could be a prime example of the difference in approach and analysis between the beginner, intermediate and enlightened belts.

A beginner will probably barely care. Or maybe he/she will look up the Tornado Cash coin (TORN) and dream up how to lose money on this possible trade.

An intermediate belt might have money in Tornado Cash. This shit is real for him. All his USDCs have been frozen. His address is on the OFAC SDN list. He needs to understand all implications.

An enlightened belt might have money in Tornado Cash too. But what's more important is the fight for free speech. The fight for decentralisation. The fight for freedom. Against censorship. An enlightened belt has written this piece: The case for Social Slashing.

Who are you and where are you headed?