I’ve been lazy, I resigned to the fact we’re in a bear market and told myself to stay on the sideline until it’s game time. This is not the right move to play. I cashed out my crypto, I put down the deposit for a property and I’ve got a tenant. That’s steady for me, it’s safe and sensible and makes me feel a little accomplished. I’ve taken my foot off of the gas, I’ve not been active in the community, I’ve not been researching projects and I’ve been messing around with degen plays and petty cash. It’s time to get back into the crazy high APR farms. I’m risk off, I’m only fucking about with a couple hundred dollars if I lose it I lose it. It’ll be less than everyone else has lost during this bear market.

Being lazy means I’ve been keeping up to date by watching stunna breezy and richard heart YouTube videos. Finding high apr farms means doing my own research, finding the hidden gems and riding them out until everybody else finds them. The research required will get me back up to date in the space. It’s impossible to do well in crypto unless you’re an active member of the community; talk with friends about investments, explain what a smart contract is to work colleagues, start writing articles again. Crypto twitter is a god awful place to be, I swear it’s full of paranoid schizophrenics and it fucking rubs off on you. Last time I got deep into crypto twitter I began telling my partner a raw meat diet cures depression. But it’s an essential part of the community and it’s a special place to be in time and space. The Link Marines are my favourite, a group of super nerds deep into 4Chan forums who discovered assblaster’s posts. He exposed chainlink as a fully commercial cryptocurrency with ultra close ties to mainstream finance. All the Vcs were big banks and he told us the road map from the start. I never discovered AssBlaster’s posts until a year ago but everybody who did back in 2017 is set for life. They travel, go fishing, snowboard, trash the government and take clean food very seriously. I’m always educated and inspired by Link Marines. It’s a great community.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

A passage from fear and loathing. It’s the soul of the book, the whole essence is in this passage. I watched it a couple of nights ago and this scene made me wonder if I’ll look back on this time in the same light. As crypto becomes more mainstream it’ll be castrated. Coinbase, Binance and crypto.com go against the whole bitcoin whitepaper. Centralised middlemen who take a profit, with leaders who can be kidnapped and tortured to bend to government needs. Government and big banks will castrate crypto. BTC is outdated, useless and expensive, it’s not anonymous unless it remains on the blockchain and is never cashed out. The light in Satoshi’s whitepaper is fading. But I wonder if when it’s all said and done, we’ll look back on this time fondly, remembering the generation of redditors who became coders, amateur economists and tried to take out big banks and restructure the world of finance. I wonder when the high water mark will be, I wonder if it’s already been. My guess is when Crypto.com bought the staples centre.