Gotazpi @gotazpi

there is simply no better mmorpg on earth than trading, and there is no better venue than on permissionless blockchains

Always interesting consuming content from the 2021 peak and contrasting that euphoria with where we are today. BTC was destined to flip gold, ETH was the future of the internet, DeFi and Web 3 would imminently change the world. Few people foresaw what the next year would bring, let alone the next four. Almost the exact opposite of what people expected played out, save for the muddied success of BTC. Today we are at the polar opposite end of the spectrum, and it isn’t just that people are pessimistic, it’s that they’re also unimaginative. “It’s just money and speculation” has become a common coping mechanism to make sense of the last four years. Decentralization is dead. And the end all be all will be the big boys from Wall Street squeezing out a few extra bps of PnL by replacing their backends with “blockchains”. Even the few that believe in a recovery have narrower views on what this technology may ultimately be used for and its value to society. I don’t remember the last time I’ve even heard a bull case for DePIN, DAOs, NFTs, decentralized identity, the creator economy, or anything beyond the “current things” that people do on blockchains. Even blockchains applied to AI — the most imaginative technological category on the planet — is met with skepticism and bitterness these days. The bulls’ spirit has simply been broken. I am uncertain of the specifics of how the next year, or four will play out from here. I also believe that some of the things this industry was excited about in the past were genuinely bad ideas and will never come back. But I am certain the coming years will be vastly different from prior ones, and likely much more fruitful. It’s hard not to be a prisoner of the moment, let alone see what lies beyond its thick bars. But if you’re ever to escape, the first step is recognizing that you’re in one.

THE REAL SPACEX IPO LESSON: WE LIVE IN A CAPITALIST MULTIVERSE OF VALUE

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A lot of the trading discourse is poor because people overly focus on being right/wrong (batting avg) at a point in time (one at bat), rather than looking at slugging percent/wOBA (how much do you make when you're right vs lose when you're wrong) Sizing+riding convictions >>

@0xMrBeefman @WhiteWhaleLabs Hmmm interesting...

NEW POST (Let The Bubble Wash Over You) some thoughts on market structure and what the new financial regime looks like including: > convective weather systems > the reality of rolling bubbles > how did we end up here > what does it mean for the future link to full piece below

People keep confusing a bubble with “stocks go up and get overvalued”. A bubble is when when a prevailing trend and a prevailing misconception about that trend interact reflexively, each reinforcing the other until the gap between perception and reality becomes unsustainable. A bubble is not when everyone realizes that right now every iota of AI demand eventually, at some point upstream, must move through memory OEMs. Nor is it when estimates continue rising because things are better than expected. And it’s not just when stocks trade expensive to historical valuations. The reason behind the moves in the AI infrastructure layer so far have been simply that we don’t have enough. They’ve been driven by the fundamental reality more than the perception of the future. It’s why the bulk of the most bullish parts of this cycle have been lumpy and centered around earnings season when companies uniformly come out and confirm there’s still not enough. In the bubble, the reality is driven by the market - not the other way around. Everyone keeps saying “people are gonna freak out if it’s not a bubble!”. I think that’s silly, we have a transformative new technology that needs crazy capital to fuel it coming to fruition, that has and always will result in a bubble as long as we have financial markets. But if you want to call the top in a bubble, you need a much stronger view on what the misconception is and what negative catalyst forces broad perception to align with realizing it than you do on valuation.

Everyone wants to be retired but they don’t realize that they will probably lose their mind within 3 months without any purpose in their life

Getting to spend every hour of every day as you wish but also being mentally ill enough that one of the only things which truly brings you joy is competition / striving to be better What a fun life

Crypto will viciously test your conviction. We go through entire market cycles, severe drawdowns and extreme euphoria, every few years. What investors feel in a lifetime, we experience every few years. It’s brutally hard to manage positions. You want to be a long-term holder but the market reminds you how right and wrong you are daily. Venture doesn’t have a ticker constantly grading your thesis in real time. We do. Every single day. Right now, some of the most vocal believers are quitting. Throwing in the towel. Dismissing the space. Remember this moment. Years from now someone will scoff and say “oh yeah, you were just lucky for being early.” Being early is goddamn hard. Years ago you could’ve been too early. And being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. We’re not too early anymore. Read the room. Read the headlines. The infrastructure is battle tested. The adoption is happening. And the cruel irony is that crypto natives are quitting just as non-crypto natives and new adopters are about to capture way more value than they ever will. A lot of the groundwork was built by the very people throwing in the towel today. That’s a shame. But markets don’t care about fairness. They reward conviction. For anyone who told you that you were just lucky. None of this is fucking easy. The drawdowns, the noise, the conviction required to hold when the world tells you you’re wrong. Learn to love the pain. Learn to love the work. Or you’ll always be a prisoner of the market and of other people’s opinions. Find love for the game or go play another one. If you’re still here. Still building, still creating, still grinding. I salute you. This is a generational shift and we’re lucky enough to shape it. Long crypto

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On-chain analysis is one of the most powerful skills in crypto. 2020 → we knew NOTHING about Uniswap. Learned sniping by copying another sniper. 2022 → saw a former MEV competitor farming Blur. We farmed it too. 2025 → spotted wallets doing arb at HyperEVM launch. We tried it ourselves. On-chain analysis changed our lives. You need to TRACK and UNDERSTAND what is going on.

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When ppl claim this I always wonder how they think it happens, or have unrealistic expectations on how much $1bn actually is. I joined crypto with $200. If I held my initial bitcoin since then and never traded, I would have ~$300k. If, instead, from that moment I sold the top and bought the bottom of every crypto cycle on Bitcoin, and never paid any taxes, I would have ~$6m USD. If I put my entire net worth into the Ethereum ICO and never touched it, today I would have ~$150m pre-tax. While it was definitely possible to have made >$1bn with the opportunities in the market, these versions of reality would also require me to make no mistakes, and have no need to spend $ in real life, or take excessive risk via leverage. In reality, I grew up in a working class family. I didn’t have a trust fund and I had to pay off my student loan myself. I had a job at Tescos while at high school. After university, I needed to pay rent and fund cost of living and eventually buy a place to live. I worked at startups for relatively little $ salary, and while a couple have done okay, they still are illiquid and worth nothing until some exit. Perhaps if I erase a couple of dumb mistakes and drawdowns, or if I had a lil more grind, then my answer would be different today. But it is easy to say this with perfect hindsight vision. It’s easy to see where you could have optimised better, and decisions you made look dumb when the past makes things so obvious. The truth is I have always optimised for enjoying my life and not going to 0. I never felt like I had a safety net, so it was never possible for me to do anything in any other way. I would probably have less money if I had tried to add more risk or chased $ harder, because being all-in with your entire livelihood is a mental battle and I feel I only win that battle when the stakes are lower. In writing this, maybe I do understand why CT folks believe this, because modern CT sees crypto as a late-stage lottery ticket farm, where the optimal strategy is to 5x leverage up your portfolio in a hope of catching a good 20% move and then leaving. Or, literally going all-in on the next coin they heard Ansem is buying. So perhaps to them, looking back at the charts, of course that’s what successful folks did. In reality, I use leverage close to never (and typically to reduce risk rather than add risk — have used it to add risk maybe 3 times in the last 5 years, and maybe 15 times ever). I never go all-in on anything, have only ever done that on BTC and ETH before in the last decade. When I buy other things, I limit risk to tiny amounts, because I treat it as a 0 until proven otherwise (so, always <1% liquid portfolio). Liquid portfolio is also a smaller % of overall portfolio to future-proof against my own fuckups. Obviously I made a lot of money, I have been here 12 years! CT doesn’t want to hear about “getting rich in a decade” though. I am happy with where I am and have never really cared or optimised for maximising $ earnings, but instead having a nice life that lets me enjoy the game we play together.

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