Troy Phung

If you applied the same trading philosophy to your life, you could exponentially change it. I like to ask people about their pivotal moments - their plot lines, their character arcs - when I meet them. Most people can't name one in the last 5 years. VCs will spend 100 hours intellectually masturbating but never ask "how far am I from my own J curve?" A few years ago I asked myself: what are my core competencies, and if nothing changed, would I actually be happy? That question changed everything. For some people it's living in a whole new country - stepping out of the comfort of home and figuring out who they are outside their family. Going sober for a year was eye-opening for me. It taught me a lot about who I am. For others it's as simple as saying yes to new experiences for 6 months. Most people treat their life like a portfolio they inherited - too afraid to rebalance. The day your life changes is the day you stop optimizing the wrong variables and start making bets on becoming unrecognizable.

There have always been casinos in crypto. The first viral application on Bitcoin was Satoshi Dice (2012). The first viral smart contract on Ethereum was King of the Ether Throne (2015), which was basically a hot potato ponzi scheme. Once you have programmable money, the first thing people will do is gamble and play stupid games. It's human nature. There's always been a hot casino in crypto. Always. The ICO casino, the DeFi food coin casinos, the NFT casinos, and now the memecoin casino. It evolves over time, but gambling is deeply ingrained in human nature. Literally as soon as humanity invented writing (ancient Sumeria in 3000 BC), there's records of people gambling. The casino is shiny and gets a lot of attention on social media (it's where fortunes are quickly won and lost, and it's easy to convince yourself that this is your lucky break), but if you only pay attention to the shimmer of the casinos, you're missing the bigger story. The story I originally got into this industry for, that sounded like sci-fi to me ten years ago—that crypto is a better substrate for finance, that it will forever alter the nature of money, and that the balance of power between individuals and governments will be permanently changed—that story is actually happening. Bitcoin is challenging nation states. They are now buying it on their own balance sheets. Stablecoins are bending monetary policy. Central banks are scrambling to respond. Permissionless smart contracts like Uniswap and AAVE are now bigger and more valuable than unicorn fintechs. The world is warping around crypto. Maybe it took longer than you thought, but transformative technologies almost always take longer to diffuse than you think. I thought generative AI would completely transform the job market within a couple years, but three years after ChatGPT, it still doesn't show up in GDP or employment stats. It's hard to change the world. Takes work. The industrial revolution began with the commercialization of the steam engine in 1781, but even the industrial revolution didn't have any impact on productivity, employment, or wage growth until 1830—that's 50 years later. The Internet, as we all know, took 20+ years. Did you think we'd be displacing all of finance, the most regulated and governmentally sensitive industry in the world, in the span of just 5 years? If you're despondent that you were working on a memecoin L2 or whatever and didn't get rich, take a deep fucking breath. This industry doesn't owe you that. And yet, all this spiritual capitulation on the timeline, believe it or not, is healthy. A forest only stays robust when it periodically sheds the deadwood. Without occasional fires to clear it out, decay spreads and the whole forest rots. It's a harsh reality, but the only way to keep growing is to clear out whatever's no longer contributing. All this negativity on the timeline needs to flush out one way or another. Let people keep shuffling out, and the air will clear. Either these people must change their minds and refocus on the future, or they need to leave so the rest of us can do our jobs. Because the job is not yet done.