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Being Early Is Not Enough - You Also Have To Be Right

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@jerrythefarmer
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6 min read

While the markets keep bleeding and speculators keep speculating it is a good time to remind ourselves why we are all here and what our end-goal is. I think we can all agree that we are still early in crypto since the main development and innovation is yet to come but is being early good enough?

Are We Really Early?

The average number of unique BTC addresses that are active on the daily is about 600k which should be a clear indicator that you are fairly early to the BTC game.

If we use a different metric and look at the number of unique ETH addresses the numbers will be a lot higher but the conclusion should stay the same.

There is a total of 180M+ unique addresses on Ethereum but we should also take into account that most ETH users have at least a few addresses to their name. Even if the median number is just two addresses per person we have roughly 100M ETH users which is a very meaningless number for a planet with 8 Billion people.

It is worth noting that these are the two leading cryptocurrencies that are well-known worldwide at this point in time. If we use smaller projects like Hive and Leo Finance you couldn't be more early if you wanted to. Last week's stats are showing that I'm the 7th most active user on Leo even though I'm not even putting in the hours I want to.

Even the steep uptrend in Leo frontend users is still showing that your content is competing with about 4000 other people which is laughable if we are talking about worldwide adoption.

As you can see, being early is not the problem. Being right is the hard part.

Did We All Make The Right Choices?

Even with all the low numbers displayed above, it is highly unlikely that every single one of us will make life-changing money in crypto. This industry is a lot different than 2017 crypto and a lot more vaporware is coming in the years ahead of us. If you get caught up in hype cycles you will probably end up two steps behind instead of staying in front of the crowd.

Networks > Protocols

To make the right choices one must understand the value of the asset they are holding. If we were to compare Hive to Binance Smart Chain or any other centralized database disguised as a blockchain the underlying token value will be much different.

If we go a step further and compare Hive to OHM or some other popular DeFi protocol, there would be no competition. One token gives you ownership over a whole network while the other may or may not bring you value for holding it long-term and trusting others that they won't sell before you do.

In the end it all comes down to a simple question - do you think Uniswap or any other Dapp deployed on Ethereum will ever decouple from ETH price movements? Also, do you think that Uniswap will ever be able to capture more value and investors than ETH.

If the answer to both of those is NO why do you have more exposure to Uniswap than ETH?

Long-term potential > Speculation

Another thought experiment that can give you some really valuable answers is this one - would you be more comfortable holding ETH in the long-term than any other project that has a token and is operating on Ethereum?

For the majority, the answer will probably always be Ethereum but did you ever think why that is the case? Apart from ETH being a network that is an absolute necessity for these dapps to even exist, there is a lot of uncertainty when prices start going up.

If you got into BNB at $8 per coin and saw it hit $800 you would probably consider selling most of your stack because no one likes to hold speculative assets, especially when they are up by a factor of 100.

If you understand anything about blockchain tech you know that only truly decentralized protocols can withstand the test of time. BNB and Solana may find their place in the crypto ecosystem but them staying in the top 10 is highly unlikely if you ask me.

Too many VCs and founders are sitting on piles of these shitcoins that both they and their investors know are overvalued. Most of those selloffs are causing the current market crash but I am expecting a lot more turbulence in the coming months before the market completely recovers from these cancerous cells that are killing the progress of technology for the sake of making a quick buck.

This current state of affairs can be summarised in one simple tweet.

We are at a point where those that did nothing for decentralization but got rich from exploiting it, are also mocking it openly . Give it some thought and you will soon realize that the richest people in crypto are exchange owners like CZ and Sam that brought absolutely zero innovation to this industry.

They copied and pasted order books from the tradfi markets and adjusted them for crypto. And that alone wasn't enough, they also had to create centralized databases that they sell as blockchains to people that simply don't know better.

In other words, the market is due for a steep correction but no one told us that yet. They need to unload their bags and refill them with centralized Web 3 tokens before they start the next shill wave in crypto.

Communities > Companies

Looking back at where we started and where we are now it is easy to conclude that going with centralized entities such as Binance, FTX or Crypto dot com is the way to go but it is also rational to expect that they can't be viable long-term plays.

Eventually, their incompetence and blatant centralization will have to become clear. BSC already has issues on the daily while Solana is struggling with uptime for almost a year now. Blockchains that can be reset and reorganized by a push of a button that is not in the hands of the community are not blockchains.

If you dig even deeper and look into the problems many mainstream blockchains are having you can also expect them to have very turbulent times ahead. How many people actually know about the ETH DAO hack? How many people actually know that the Satoshi wallet is holding over 1M BTC that would actually cause mayhem if they were ever to be moved or sold.

If we are talking about single points of failure ETH and BTC would have these as their prime examples. And if the knowledge of these numbers and events is bothering you then you can safely assume that it will bother those that will come after you as well.

Zero-Sum Games Aren't Fun

Crypto is a zero-sum game and if you are making money that means someone on the other end is losing it. Being on the winning side of every trade is virtually impossible but that doesn't mean that we should all give up.

Instead, we should try and look for projects that have no loopholes and that won't crack under pressure from regulators. Remember when Hive blockchain issued a cease and desist and got the middle finger because there was no one to sue? That is the superpower of community-owned projects that don't have talking heads as representatives.

If you want to sue Hive for the content that it is hosting or for any other reason you will end up in a dead-end because there is no single entity representing Hive. Now imagine if BSC or Solana got the same cease and desist case. Could they also show them the middle finger?

Exactly.

To be right in crypto is to find that one long-term play that won't disappear during bear markets. That's also not enough. Your investment shouldn't require you to check prices every single day because it can go up or down drastically in a matter of hours.

Check your portfolio one more time today and be honest with yourself - how many of those tokens actually have a chance to be around in 10 years? If it's not the majority of your holdings it's time to organize your finances a bit differently.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta