Yelling Loudly

When I was 18 I used to spend every weekend getting up at 6am to visit car boot sales.

I'd wander round looking at the items on display, see something that looked interesting and search the recently sold prices on eBay.

If the price online was a multiple of what the old lady was selling her kids unwanted birthday presents for, then I'd buy it, list it online and arbitrage the price differential.

I think I made like 3k in total over two months and thought I was a genius because I could now afford a barely working car without having to work in some soul destroying retail job interacting with unnecessarily angry customers.

It's funny because at the time i thought i'd found some cheat code to life. It felt pretty easy compared to the jobs I'd experienced before. But in reality it was quite a lot of work.

I had to wake up early, which as a teenager is harder than it sounds. random fields often have basically zero phone signal so searching for prices online was rough. People would sell fake stuff. Customers would say the goods were damaged and demand refunds and eventually eBay and Paypal froze my account for literally zero reason.

But it was still way better than interacting with members of the general public.

So when I logged on today and prepared to write a pretty negative post about the trend of CT and what Kaito had done to it I paused for a moment and thought about my old life.

If I had the opportunity to earn this level of money for simply posting some words to strangers on the internet I would have printed off a picture of 0x_ultra and placed him in a frame on my wall.

18 year old me wouldn’t have had the privilege to spend time pontificating about the wider ethics of an industry that has existed since the dawn of modern civilisation (Marketing). I just simply needed to buy a car so I could get a girl to talk to me.

If I knew that one day something like stayloudio offered the chance to make potentially five figures for three days "work" and I had spent my time COMPLAINING about it, I'd have been so ashamed of my future self for wasting such a good opportunity.

Our brains, and my brain in particular has been so warped by the free and fast money crypto has to offer that maybe sometimes I need to take a step back and realise that ultimately democratising access to opportunities is the main benefit of crypto.

Trying to stop them because I "disagree with the idea" is really no different to the people that told me Bitcoin should be illegal a decade ago.

And worrying about the wider impact of incentive mechanisms and long term effects is intellectually interesting but also kind of like that old man shouting at clouds meme from the Simpsons.

By disincentivising it am I literally pulling the ladder up on former versions of myself.

Because incentives will always exist, and humans will always be humans. Teams will look to use them to their advantage and others will look to find the loopholes.

So I hope everyone does whatever they want with this. If you want to participate in Loud go for it. If you want to debate the industry ethics do it. If you want to mute everyone talking about it do that too.

People in crypto are literally here to gamble. It’s unlikely Loudio will onboard your Nan and she’ll put her pension fund into this. It’ll be the people losing it all on leverage trading, or burning money on memecoins, or simply people that just enjoy having fun with their disposable income that are subsiding this experiment.

At this point crypto has been around long enough that basically everyone knows the game, being overly paternalistic about it is kind of antithetical to the entire point of Crypto.

People should be free to determine where they spend their money. Even if you think that thing is stupid.

But at the end of the day this will result in a thousand or so people making a few grand and that’s infinitely better than the money going to sniper bots, the Trump family or the LA vape cabal.

And to be blunt. These opportunities will not last forever. Crypto is getting more efficient. Make the most of it whilst it lasts and accept that it simply is what it is.

And yes - full disclosure, maybe this post will result in me making some money too. Great. Don't buy it. It will probably go to zero.

Loudio.