The end game
This is our world cup final
Today, I woke up with a weird feeling inside me.
I can’t quite describe it with words, but it was some combination of excitement, nervousness, and a will to focus, with a tinge of sadness and anxiety.
I’ve been bull posting on this account since its inception. The path of least resistance for Crypto is up.
We have the biggest funds in the world about to issue ETFs for Bitcoin, but now also ETH.
Rates are now more likely to reduce than they are to increase.
2024 is an election year.
Stablecoin inflows have stopped falling, and the trend has reversed.
The halving is just a few months away.
The gods of the old financial world are using positive language to describe our digital assets.
Those of us who believed during the darkest hours of the bear market, when all the scams were shown the light and our industry became the laughing stock of the world, are now, finally, all at once, starting to feel vindicated.
The next 12-24 months will likely provide wondrous opportunities. This GCR tweet is more true now than ever.
So if this is the case, why do I also feel a bit down?
Well, I think it's the realisation that this is the final match.
Not the final match ever. But the final match of importance.
Like a 33-year-old England player who is about to play in his third World Cup. This is it. The last important tournament of your career.
Of course, you can always go and play in America after this and play in front of cheerleaders and fans on their phones who are only there to show off on Instagram that they’ve seen Messi play. But it’s not the same as playing in Europe in front of crowds where to them, you winning a tournament is literally as meaningful as the birth of their first born child.
I think that's kind of the way crypto will go. There will still be a booming market, filled with opportunity. But the opportunity for the average person will not be as meaningful as it is today.
While the ETFs are clearly huge for the reputation and price of crypto, it does run the risk of regulatory capture running rampant.
In a world where crypto is captured by the suits, I do think it becomes far harder to turn that $1,000 investment into $1,000,000.
I think it's likely we see this with airdrops too. Things like the Coinbase on-chain verification probably wrecks the hopes and dreams of many British and American users who will be further protected from receiving free money.
The KYCification of blockchains slowly erodes the meritocracy that exists today and death marches us back into the world that closely resembles the traditional system that we so wished to escape from.
While those willing to engage in Algod style “location arbitrage” and employ the help of others will profit tremendously.
The same is also true with the blockchains we know and love. Part of the reason NFTs were so wildly profitable for so many was because they were SO inefficient.
Again, this has started to change; we now have Blur letting you bulk list, bid and sell.
Solana, and eventually Monad are now competing with Ethereum. Fees will go from $100s per transaction down to pennies.
Every user and his dog now has a different sniping bot, a Uniswap bot, and a plethora of NFT creation tools.
While, of course, this is good for the average user, the people it benefits most are the arbitrageurs and the sophisticated market actors who can profit by making the market more efficient.
And when the market is more efficient, it’s probably less likely that I, a random internet user with a laptop and a Solana phone, will be able to consistently make significant profits by participating in the latest metagame.
The wealth distribution becomes captured more and more by the top 0.1% of actors, not the top 10%.
I think many others feel the same way too. There’s sort of this shared knowledge in the air, that this might just be the last cycle where it's viable for people like us to “make it.”
This probably makes this the most degenerate and wild bull market ever to exist for that very reason.
As time goes by and people have yet to hit their fictitious net worth valuations that they extended out again for the third time after reading how $10m is not enough to retire on, I predict they will become even less lucid and thoughtful when placing their bets.
So what is the plan?
The plan is the same as it always has been.
Work as hard as possible to find the market inefficiencies and place my bets in a way where upside is almost guaranteed and downside protected.
Follow the cult leaders, but leave before they meet their demise.
Don’t question and ask why this super dumb thing might not be the future, instead invest first and ask questions later.
When your stupidest online friends are up seven figures and talking about how they’ll definitely get to eight in a month's time, sell everything.
The good news is, despite the market becoming more efficient, pockets exist where the stupidest thing possible happens again and again with sometimes shocking frequency.
Those of us who can work hard, try to rein in the euphoria and think with a clear, calculated mind still have plenty of time left to make it.
We just won’t get a better chance than now!
Have a great weekend.