The market sucks right now so it's probably hard to talk about money, but if you're planning on making it through this winter cycle it's important to talk about who is actually making money in crypto right now. Most of them don't go on social media (because they're too busy making money) and I kind of get why - even for myself, getting "financial advice" from people who are obviously massively in the red does get tiring after a while - but I do it mostly because my app is forward-facing and I need to at least be "present" to some degree. So - I'm still gonna be here for the foreseeable future, even as I continue to question the validity of all these platforms to begin with.
Anyway - money - yes, the thing everyone hates but at the same time, needs, in order to eat, drink, and get those debt collectors off their backs, at least for a little while. The first rule of thumb is that all financial advice is wrong: think about it, if the guy telling you how to make money was so good at it, shouldn't they be busy doing that, instead? "Crypto influencers" are the equivalent of those people who sell books on how to get rich - which, if they really knew how to do that - they'd probably be doing that instead of making a few bucks selling those books to YOU!
In crypto, the biggest "winners" are the OGs - those who were in from the very beginning. (Early to mid 10's.) They basically got in super-early and made a lot of money basically HODLing - in colloquial terms. You can generally tell who's new to the scene because the newer crowd actually thinks HODL actually stands for something...whereas the reality is that it actually came from a guy online who was shitposting drunk one day and just misspelled HOLDING. Yep, that's how history is written folks - people just talking shit. 😂
So you have to be careful with this crowd because money does weird things to people and the ones that got rich from the mid-10's - many of them decided to pull the ladder behind them and make it harder for people like you to get in, which is when Bitcoin/Ethereum started buying into the "scarcity economics" idea, including many of the major coins out there.
I call this "Crypto NIMBYism", and if you don't know what the latter acronym stands for, I suggest looking it up because it is the biggest thing holding back Western society right now. It has less to do with economics but a certain type of mindset of...yep, "successful" people making it harder for newcomers to come in because "I got mine". Sure, do that decentralization stuff...it's cool...just, "not here". Not In My Back Yard, as they say.
I suppose we'd call these people the "whales" in the space right now. They're kind of a mystery to most people because they tend to be elusive and rarely seen - not wanting to attract the attention of the mobs and insanity that this space creates on a regular basis so there's some good reason why they like to stay hidden, for the most part. Also because deep down, many of them know they're actually doing the thing where they're basically converting the hopes and dreams of newcomers (like you) into gas fees, to preserve their 1% price gain, YOY. Some of them probably feel a little bad about it, honestly, but not bad enough to stop.
If the crypto crowd were smarter, they could probably do a back trace on these "whales" and identify them for who they are but that takes actual skill and effort - and in an industry where most people don't even use ledgers to credit/discredit outlandish claims, it might as well not exist, honestly. So as long as people continue to get duped and DNDYOR (Do Not Do Your Own Research), then the status quo of Bitcoin going up 5% a year can be maintained! All is well, nothing to see here, folks. 👮
Bitcoin doesn't even bother with staking rewards, so it's kind of this weird economic anomaly that's completely disconnected from modern banking methods. The whole "Bitcoin Halving" thing people get obsessed about is a reaction against the Western world's current inflation problem - but it's what you call a "reactionary" position where they think the "solution" to inflation is deflation - which is also disconnected from the reality that the real problem is wages not keeping up with expenses, not literally having less of something and making it more expensive for everyone, which...well, it makes no sense at all. Currently there's a weird synergy between the whales who are taking advantage of people's desperation from fiat's inflation and cool "founder went missing" story (which is legitimately cool, admittedly) and the low-information "investors" who don't realize that Bitcoin is a really crappy deal on almost all fronts and no self-respecting person would ever take it seriously as "real" money. Most of the OGs still sticking with it are mostly doing it for the nostalgia, really - similar to NIMBYs who bought their homes in the 70s and hold onto it like it's the only thing in the world that matters. (HODLing that real-estate - do nothing with the land while the numbers go up, occasionally yell at the next generation trying to "get your bags", if you know what I mean.)
Ethereum was supposed to be the alternative to Boomercoin, lead by wunderkind - uh, let's just call him VB. So he's was the young and upcoming talent that was supposed to take crypto to the next level, with this thing called "smart contracts"! Smart contracts are everywhere now, but you gotta keep in mind that there was a time where Bitcoin people argued against the very idea that crypto should have any utility whatsoever, beyond being a "store of value". (Still the case, I suppose. I remember when they were talking about the Lightning Network back in like...2014. When is that thing gonna get done?) It's like there was a certain pride involved in being lazy and useless but hey, anyway, here's this new thing called ETH and a weird little project called Cryptopunks that digitally gave those NIMBYs the middle finger!
So that was around 14-15'-ish and a lot of tech folks (including many in Silicon Valley) rallied around Ethereum as the "next big thing", and for a while, it was looking like they were going to take the throne as they continued to build during the winter years of 17-20'. But then came "the Merge" - their switch over from (now obsolete) proof-of-work to proof-of-stake - a much needed update to the system which allowed for users to actually gain "staking rewards" so that they have some mechanism of actually keeping up with inflation - imagine that! But unfortunately (not fortunately) it coincided with a time when NFTs were also booming - so it attracted a lot of dumb money folks who botched the whole thing and destroyed the integrity of the protocol at its fundamental level.
There are so many components to the failed transition that an entire book could probably be written about it, but the highlights are - 1) they promised gas fees would go down - it didn't. 2) they pushed out all of the people who wanted to maintain the decentralized aspects of ETH - VB actually argued against on-chain governance so nobody really has any idea where the decisions are made now. 3) EIPS (Ethereum proposals) are gatekept by 5-6 people so they can reject any idea they don't like without any discussion whatsoever (they admit it right on the foundation's website, but most people DNDYOR, so - I guess all is fair?) and 4) they passed on the responsibility for doing low-fee transactions on L2 because...well, ETH has turned into a NIMBY neighborhood, too. Lazy, and useless - why bother, when you can do nothing and the price goes up anyway? (Just need to grind a few more people like you into gas fees, which is a more reliable biz model than building something actually useful.)
I understand this failure very clearly because I was running an "ETH2" validator for about a year during that transition from PoW to PoS (which could have a secondary meaning at this point, lol). It was time-consuming, expensive to run, broke down all the time, and even when the node was running perfectly, the returns would be pretty...paltry at best. (Like 5% with a massive down payment requirement. These days you can just stick that in a savings account and get the same returns.) I got out as soon as I could, then entire ETH ecosystem as a whole, right after that. (They made me submit a .json file just to get my own money back btw - no "mainstream adoption" person). Once you get into the details of things, it becomes pretty clear that the "big coins" out there were more bark than bite, because when it push came to shove, it just did not deliver on any of its promises, on any level.
So now that the biggest projects in crypto are pretty much washed-up, the only thing they can do now is do what every good NIMBY does - get involved with politics. As far as AMERICA POLITICS goes, Bitcoin people tend to lean Republican, Ethereum people Democrat, but honestly, does it matter? They both suck in the same ways as the parties do. You got one side that doesn't give a crap, and the other side that says they give a crap, but has no actual plans of actually doing so. Then you have the "third party" coins where they think the "solution" to the inflation -> reactionary deflation position is to go right back to inflation again, where they brag about how much they continue to flip NFT while the inflation cap is at 100+%. People are bragging about those "big numbers" while losing money all the time, kind of like how a lot of "traders" lose most of their "profits" in fees and taxes when you actually add up the numbers at the end. Yes, this space is Insanity 101, and most people should, honestly, avoid it, if they can.
Ahh, but I'm still here, for some reason. I think I did better than most when it comes to an ROI on this whole crypto thing but I'll be the first to admit that the last few years hasn't been great either - yeah, we are in a down market right now. Oh, but Tezos is offering rewards that are WAY ABOVE the inflation rate right now and this has helped me stabilize my finances a bit. I'm trying to explain to people that the reason why XTZ hasn't gone up as much as other coins during upswings is because a lot of those gains you get through staking rewards...the money has to come from somewhere. There are also a few Bakers and tool-makers on the site that are making small but reliable income - unheard of in other chains, honestly. (Most validation projects on other chains are corporate run, probably managed by some guy who doesn't give af because it's not their money.) But I guess it's just something the "BIG NUMBER GOOD" crowd just doesn't get. And I really don't want to get into another discussion with the Bitcoin people about whatever bizarro economic theories they latch onto to cover up the fact that not having staking rewards IS NOT A GOOD THING AND THEY PROBABLY SHOULDN'T DOUBLE DOWN ON IT.
But alas, NIMBYs will always NIMBY - in the words of a political candidate I once supported, "Scarcity Economics Makes You Dumb™️" Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.
This is my third crypto winter already and the bizarre thing is that it's the same pattern over and over but people don't seem to learn. Sometimes the idea of pulling the ladder...I'll admit, is pretty tempting. Drink the kool-aid, forget about the troubles outside, and surround myself with people who will tell me what I want to hear so I can life my life in blissful oblivion. Ugh, no. I can't. Just can't...I don't know what it is, but I just can't do it, for some reason.
(Actually I do know why. It's boring as hell. Why do you think they made an entire NFT project dedicated solely to that concept alone. It's almost as if people are oblivious to the signals they're sending out to the world all the time. We're in much deeper trouble than we thought.)