val@valentine_who
Act 1: The Fight
I had a serious fight with my wife. Not the type of fight where both sides throw insults and disrespect at each other. That is something we’ve vastly managed to avoid over the years of our relationship.
But it was an existential and very emotional fight with serious implications for both sides, and for good reasons.
First of all, she’s probably right. Because that’s the law of the land once you’re in a long-term relationship and above 30 of age. I might be kidding a little here, I might not be. Either way, uncs will understand. Even more so if you’re also a dad.
Then again and because X is a space of free speech, I’d like to prove a point.
The reason we’ve been fighting is because of my investing in crypto, which lately and increasingly has become a net loss endeavor for me.
Yes, I could blame it on the market. Or on the fact that “the trenches are cooked”.
But if I’m being honest with myself it’s most likely a skill issue on my end. Because I didn’t adapt. The game I came to love changed while I did not.
When I started trading -first only altcoins, later mostly memecoins- market participants would unite behind a shared idea no matter how random or dumb it was.
What mattered at the time wasn’t just viral attention and cold calculus, but a community with a common goal. Having fun with the internet gang.
Getting creative and messing around with memes, themed content and ultimately, of course, the unique phenomenon of “chart go up” in a seemingly endless fashion.
That was a gameplay I could get behind.
I’m a dreamer and I tend to picture ideas in my head, of what could become of what’s in front of me. Of how things could turn out.
In what I’d call a “builders’ market” that was an asset.
The most delusional bulls will win, right?
What was my greatest strength for a while, however, turned out to be my greatest weakness.
In a “traders’ market” where hold times are rather minutes than months, where multi-wallet bundling and reckless full clipping have become the new normal, picturing a potential outcome, imagining an ideal of a successful meme community for days, weeks or even months in the future is a significant disadvantage.
Any good trades that I could’ve made I roundtripped almost entirely. Conviction was a burden, not an ally.
I’m talking tens of thousands, repeatedly. On several projects which i helped bagwork like it was a full-time job or even lead.
My biggest one being more than $100k worth of supply of irlcoin as a CTO lead and another almost $50k in creator fees that we spent entirely on marketing the coin and community competitions. Fully roundtripped, and more.
Injected thousands of my own funds, while others kept farming a good project to its knees. Not to mention 10/10 which gave us the rest.
Somehow I kept managing to come out at a net loss even on my own launches, even on the successful ones. I know that’s on me. But it‘s not a pleasant experience i‘d wish for anyone to go through over and over again.
Now, coming back to the fight with my wife.
She’s aware I’m in net loss. Not because I had the guts to tell her but because we had a couple bills coming in that I couldn’t pay in time and she was made aware.
I don’t think I need to elaborate on how “well” she took it. And neither how well my arguments along the lines of “no risk no rari” helped my cause.
In case you were ever wondering, “Delusional bulls will always win” is not a valid argument for an agitated human female. Least of all if you’re currently in debt.
It’s not that I’d want to diminish the degree of how much I fucked up. It’s not about denying the fact that I have lost a huge amount of money. And that I bet more than I should have, obviously.
No, what we fought over most was a different thing.
It was about whether I should take the big “L” and move on, leave crypto behind for good.
(…)
