Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as “productive capitulation.”
Brother Bing’s Guide To Surviving A Bear Market
I had planned to write a self-help-ish piece on surviving the crypto bear market when ETH sank to 3 digits. But writing takes a long time, especially when you are having fun at your day job. And now that I've finally pieced out my thoughts, ETH is riding the Merge wave and approaching $2000—still down from its ATH but at least moving in the right direction.
Perhaps self-help tip #1 is: Don’t time the market.
Joke aside, every crypto OG would tell you that bear markets are for the builders. If you are not a builder, you might feel left out.
Fear not. Brother Bing will now present you with his unique guidance on taking advantage of the time when the market isn’t acting as volatile as an emotional teenager.
First, let’s dispense with the usual crypto self-help tips:
Touch Grass
Find a GF/BF
Find a therapist
Stop inviting deadmau5 to crypto parties
Stop selling monkey pictures
And without further adieu, I am proud to present… Brother Bing’s Guide to Surviving A Bear Market:
Enroll in an information diet program
Crypto is an industry that serves up a more-than-you-can-eat banquet of information from everyone, everywhere, all the time. Sometimes this information contains nutritious insights. But all too often this stuff is people’s junkfood-like opinions disguised as official information.
I’m talking about gossip, rumors, and the giant, collective, circular intellectual masturbation that is Crypto Twitter.
During the bull market, people trade, invest, and arbitrage based on any “information.” Investors FOMO into a project’s $100m seed round without doing any diligence other than hearing rumors that competing VCs also want to write a check.
Users flood into a new protocol hearing that there might be a potential airdrop.
Developers participate in protocol’s hackathon hoping to get and grant and move onto the next chain.
We were so flooded and consumed by information that it’s hard to separate substance from pure meme. And that’s why a strict information diet program is needed.
Such a program involves:
Leave chat groups (Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Signal) that you have not participated in during the last 6 months
Unsubscribe from newsletter that you haven’t opened in the last 6 months
Unfollow influencers whom you know are toxic and only shill their bags
Limit your Twitter usage since you don’t have to know everything all the time
Print out articles that you’ve been wanting to read but haven’t gotten around to
Finally, understand what proto-danksharding is all about!
Appreciate Web2 as if it were a new-born baby
Crypto people like to think that we are recreating the world. Maybe that’s true in some use cases, but more often than not, we are just optimizing Web2 experiences.
And sometimes, though we don’t like to admit, all we’re really doing is simply adding a “governance token” to that Web2 experience.
Rather than bashing Web2 as a whole, we can all benefit from taking a distanced view and understand its pros and cons.
Why are international payment done the way it’s done today? (aka, why is it so painful!)
How do ordinary people find the best yield from their savings’ account? I mean, do they?
Go on secondary market and buy a concert tix. How bad is the experience?
Does my fitness app cover all my needs? And if not, can StepN come to rescue?
This process will force us to really probe Web2 user flow and ask the ageless question: Do we really need a blockchain for this?
Very often the answer is: no.
The only unforkable thing is your ex-gf tribe
As we say in Chinese, hard times bring out real friendship. If you want to build a network of colleagues, friends, mentors, and teachers, you need to make sure they stay with you through thick and thin and bull and bear.
What makes a community unforkable?
It’s your most reliable sounding board
It won’t judge you even if you get liquidated. Oopsie!
It participates in your thought experiments and real life experiments (hotpot dao!)
Likewise, people who still grind and learn during a bear market are the ones who will stay long term in this industry. Take notes on those few souls, and be sure to include them in your tribe.
oh, and going to conferences and raaving together doesn’t mean they are in your tribe
Crypto has seen generations of participants come and go. Many people who were influential in the old days became irrelevant when their ideology failed to evolve with the industry. Having the right community by your side is key to staying relevant.
In short, you need to build an unforkable tribe from resilient human nodes.