Dear Fidelity Customers, Welcome to Hell
This is not financial advice.
I’m not advising anyone to buy, sell or trade Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies or any related or product such as derivatives, indexes, etc.
Do your own research. Don’t trust anybody. Possibly, run a full node.
Dear Fidelity customers,
on behalf of the crypto community (which doesn’t really exist so I cannot really speak on anybody’s behalf) I’m very excited Fidelity brought you here, to us, on the doorstep of our fun, little Hell on Earth — also known as “Crypto”.
If you — for some reason — have the insane idea of actually getting through the Gates, this post is for you.
Disclaimer: there are other cryptocurrencies, some of which seem to be seeking a different purpose than Bitcoin, which I personally find interesting, that have different security and governance assumptions and live outside Bitcoin itself at the moment of this writing — e.g. Ethereum, Monero— but I will refer mainly Bitcoin in this post, for the sake of your mental sanity.
A Hell of a Ride
In this fun, strange world you’ll find bold, revolutionary ideas, Rube Goldberg machines sold as the latest great invention, liars, scammers, crazy dogs, and most importantly, you might end up finding yourself — who you really are — into all of this madness.
You just entered the freakest freak circus of freak ideas and freak jargons—PoW, Solidity Developers, Maximalism, Carnivore diets, Nocoiners (most of you, now), Dapp, Bitcoin 2.0, Ethereum 2.0, EOS, HODL, BUIDL, Layer 2, Sharding, DPoS, Faketoshi, NFTs, Cryptokitties, DEX.
WTF, you may be thinking— right?
Dante’s Hell looks like a kid playground compared to the one you just got admitted to.
Some of you will run away, immediately (good for you). Some of you will come back from time to time. Some of you will run a full node, eventually.
Some of you — maybe you — will leave your daily jobs and join or start a company in this space.
Some of you will start the “Next Bitcoin”. I swear to God it will eventually happen.
Most of you will lose some money. Some a lot.
Some of you will make some money. Some a lot.
Few of you will make life changing money.
Many of you will become scammers. Some knowingly, some not.
In our Hell even nocoiners make good scammers.
Over with the Hell thing. Is there anything real around here? Or it’s only nerd libertarian internet money fantasy?
Most of you probably think that Bitcoin is real as much as other people believe is real.
That’s why most of you — at some point — will get to think that if Bitcoin made it it’s because other people believed in it.
And if that’s true, then if we all believe in something — that something is real!
Don’t fall for this trap.
“If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy” — Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Whitepaper.
I’m not sure I ever agreed with this, but surely this is not true anymore.
Bitcoin works because it’s based on disbelief.
Bitcoin worked when only Satoshi and Hal Finney (you better start learn our mythology sooner than later) were using it.
Bitcoin works today — with millions users — because of the shared knowledge on how the system works, its limits, the attacks it continues to survive, and the computer power mixed to brainpower that every day works to make it better, more robust, less prone to catastrophic failure.
(Well, we actually risked quasi total destruction recently)
The tricky thing, my dear Nocoiners, is that shared knowledge takes time to materialise, and takes time to propagate.
As a smart friend of mine pointed out reading a draft of this post — it’s not even that Bitcoin needs anybody to understand it really. Maybe no one still does.
One last thing: your journey through this very unique Hell takes time to complete, and it ends up at the Schelling point.
Where is such point, if you’ll ever get there and how much you’ll lose or make in the journey — that’s the whole game.
Enjoy the ride ✌️
PS: my twitter profile 👉@tobdea
