icpp_pro

🎉The mAIner marketplace in the funnAI app just passed 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ ICP in sales volume🤯 Since the launch in January, 264 mAIners have been traded by 137 users🤖🤝 You too can get your first or next mAIner today, there are active listings👍

🔥The funnAI Index is at 12.0% today i.e. funnAI is burning nearly 700 Trillion cycles just today which represents 12.0% of all cycles burnt today on the total ICP network🦾 🦜Happy mAIning😀

🎉The mAIner marketplace in the funnAI app just passed 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ ICP in sales volume🤯 Since the launch in January, 264 mAIners have been traded by 137 users🤖🤝 You too can get your first or next mAIner today, there are active listings👍

First, there was Bitcoin. And BTC was the real deal; it was good, and it grew. But many misunderstood BTC. They thought that dumb people were just pretending and fooling one another to think that a currency made up from thin air could be valuable. To their minds, BTC was just someone grabbing the paper bills from their Monopoly game and going “hey everyone, let’s treat this as real money”, with enough suckers falling for it. This post is not about explaining why they are wrong. It’s about the consequences of so many people thinking this - and people who don’t think it, but take advantage of those who do. And to some extent, those who don’t believe in made up money (they think “crypto is a scam”) but want to take advantage of others who do…but are instead themselves taken advantage of by even less scrupulous players. The core mistake is thinking BTC demonstrates that money can be made from nothing. BTC doesn’t do that. But nearly every other “cryptocurrency” tries to. Even those that don’t are effectively plagued by the expectation that they should, because “that’s how crypto works”. The problem, in a nutshell, is that crypto has turned into a casino entirely based on “greater fool theory”. The game is simple. Someone launches YACT (Yet Another Crypto Token). You know, of course, that it is going to be worthless, but that’s not what you evaluate. You evaluate if it can attract dumb people who fall for the token’s sales pitch, and enough other gamblers to play the pump and dump game with it. Your plan, obviously, is to get in on the pump and exit before the dump. You never even consider holding. To you, this is not an “investment” but a casino bet. And it relies entirely on finding an asset that greater fools than you will fall for. At least it used to rely on that. But games like this quickly start stepping up their meta levels. After a while, and after enough pump and dumps, it was clear to most that actually *nobody* really believes in all these new tokens anymore, with everyone just hanging around waiting for suckers. So the game evolved. Lacking true suckers, players just kept playing their PvP Pump and Dump games while increasingly aware they were only playing against other people like themselves, and the game had been reduced to truly just being a game of chicken between grifters - in summary the rules were now: who would rug first? But the game never stops evolving and soon enough bigger players realized these “cynics” playing pump and dump on each other were nice targets. So suddenly the cunning, seasoned, cynical players were the marks, being as we say “max extracted upon”. So, first retail had enough and exited. Then increasingly the somewhat more experienced trader base got rekt and exited. And that is the long and short of it. Everyone thinking they would be smart by taking advantage of dumb folks who believe in made up money have gotten rekt. Thing is…crypto was never about making up value from thin air. Crypto is about *capturing* REAL value, that exists before the crypto, and encapsulating it with math like cryptography and game theory, to make it first and foremost safe and durable, and secondly more useful as it can be transacted online. By now it seems most people have forgotten, after years of the deafening noise from the crypto casino, that crypto actually has a real value. But the crypto casinos are finally dying, much like online poker died after having had a boom of mainstream popularity with an initial bonanza where good and decent players could feast on the bad, then good players mostly pvp-ing each other, only to finally become max extracted upon by a few very refined players with advanced bots. I don’t think we will see retail coming back to the crypto casino. I don’t even think we’ll see the dwindling crypto X return to the crypto casino. Crypto is dead. Which means that finally, crypto has a chance. The crypto casino was tremendously detrimental to any serious crypto projects working to capture and build on real value - the kind that almost anyone actually putting money in crypto scoffed at as delusional, as missing the whole point of the game. All the investments were going into the casino and serious builders were seen as “suspect” for not being more open about obviously being scams (“it’s ok, wink wink, you can tell us - we’re in on it!”). Any more serious investor taking one glance at all this realized immediately that this was not a market to get involved in. But maybe that can charge now, that the Big Tent of the crypto casino tent is on fire and few seem tempted to try to get back in. It’s very similar to the dotcom boom. It too was a circus that played out much the same way - imagine a whole economy based on everyone realizing that a web based book shop won’t change the world, but everyone speculating on thinking everyone else could be thinking it might. They were all rekt, of course. And, of course, the online book shop went on to change the world. This is, finally, the time in crypto to figure out not what dumber people will go for next, but what smart investors are eyeing. The age of real crypto is just beginning. Sneed.