If any of those names doesn't ring a bell, let me explain.
Nassim Taleb, one of the most profound thinkers of our times (the "black swan" term was coined by him in one of this books, and so was "antifragile" - both of them being actually titles of the said books). It so happens that after an initial love affair with Bitcoin, Nassim is currently extremely critical of the whole movement. If you follow him on Twitter, there isn't one day in which he doesn't predicts that "Bitcoin is going to zero".
Michael Saylor is the CEO of the business analytics firm MicroStrategy, which is known better for holding important Bitcoin resources in its reserves. His net worth is around $500 million (at some point in his life he was a billionaire) and he is one of the most aggressive Bitcoin supporters. His MicroStrategy buying announcements were important signals in the current bull run.
They are holding completely opposite views in regard to the same topic, and yet, none of them is "right".
I mean, Bitcoin may actually go to zero. And Bitcoin can also go to the moon (a metaphor for reaching $1,000,000 in fiat value).
But if any of these will happen, it won't happen because of either Nassim Taleb, or Michael Saylor.
As a collective hallucination, money is moved around by communities, not individuals. No matter how influential one individual is at some point, no matter how big any "Elon Musk" effect may seem initially, at the end of the day, money is worth how much the collective owners of the said tokens agree it's worth.
What matters is the amount of trust they are willing to put in it. Of course, they may lose hope that the said money is sound and valid, and that will decrease its value. They can also invest more trust in it, which will make the value of that "money" to appreciate. Some people will dump, some will pump.
But what matters is that average, that median penetration of that specific type of money in the total of population.
I guess the two takeaways for this post are:
influential figures in crypto are over-rated. Both negative and positive crypto celebrities are worth less than they are given credit for. Nobody owns Bitcoin, crypto, so nobody can say it's going to zero, or to the Moon. It's a function of the collective that owns it and moves it around.
it takes time for anything to build value. Seeing crypto (Bitcoin, Hive, Cosmos, etc) as a short-term speculative asset has 99% chances for bankruptcy. It's very close to lottery. Don't get fooled by some short term winnings in whatever "trend" occupies the front of the crypto world, it will be superseded very fast by something else.
For instance, 5 years ago, you could mine Bictoin in your basement, with a battery of ASICs, and it would have been profitable. Now this is an activity in which the initial investment is in the millions. If you would have entered mining with the expectation to get rich in a couple of years, you would most likely had to get out really fast to at least keep some of the profits, otherwise you would have been destroyed by cheaper electricity and better, more expensive mining devices.
Now you can enter DeFi with a couple of thousands, and make some bucks. But in 2-3 years the protocols and pools will coagulate towards capital and it will be more and more difficult to get in. Gas fees on Ethereum are just a small signal of what's coming. And yet, many people are claiming they do "DeFi", and they are becoming millionaires. Some of them may actually be there. But most of them will be left behind, their winning slowly drained by the migration towards other protocols and the increase in fees.
So the "getting rich quick" mantra of crypto is a Fata Morgana, an elusive story, ignited every 2-3 years by some new fad, like mining or DeFi.
What's not a Fata Morgana, though, is the slow accumulation, the daily humble grind in which you are balancing whatever value you can generate in fiat, with an alternative economy.
This daily trust is what will create that new status that you expect to reach in 2-3 years, only it will do it in a couple of decades. The good news is that one of these decades already passed.
Choose wisely.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
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Earning through crypto and profits by mining is now a days expensive and complicated, though few people are dreaming to be rich in moment by high inflation of cryto like what happened to the BTC earlier, but that was an accident for the market and won't happened regularly but seems like be a earthquake and unaware about it. Probably and possibly better to know the market and earn a decent way, and ignoring people's prediction who are not interested nor investors in crypto.