The Money Chase

GM Frens.

Wow. Not doing the morning briefing for a few days is fairly epic in terms of the amount of time I have to do other things. I really gave myself a job with it. I may drop the frequency down to 4 days a week when I return from this hiatus.

My biggest mistakes in the crypto space were because the idealist in me saw a potential for true decentralization and told the investor in me to shut up when I tried to bring up objections. Early on - biggest mistake: Litecoin - I loved the silver to Bitcoin's gold narrative that Charlie Lee spun. He's a good dude but when he sold all of his LTC, it was essentially a rugpull to everyone who had bought into his narrative. Ouch. Next were Digibyte and Ravencoin - I loved the decentralized, community controlled ethic and the tech just really worked. Both are among the fastest and cheapest blockchains to operate on still - and both have innovated and brought smart contracts, NFTs, and more - but neither was appealing to bankers and boomers - and thus have largely failed. I bought into Filecoin - thinking that having a blockchain cloud run as a sort of DAO was the goal. I was wrong. ICP was my next big failure - the dream of turning the entire internet into one big blockchain computer designed and controlled by ethical foundations and big brain think tanks - epic - I bought heavily and then the early airdropped tokens were all sold in a race to the bottom. I still believe in ICP, but it has been my second worst investment to date. The worst investment - Wonderland. The Defi space has always been confusing to me and I've largely avoided it but when I heard Daniella speaking about taking the power of fractionalization and money creation away from the banks and building a society where the bottom built and controlled the wealth - my desire to avoid investments I didn't understand was over-ruled by my desire for a better, more just, and more equitable world. These investments in a world that seems better have largely eaten up any profits I've made in crypto - and yet, I still hold most of these positions and will continue (exception is $LTC) - $RVN, $DGB, $ICP, $FIL, #TIME, #MEMO - my losing bet on a better world - so far.

This could carry on to my own projects as well. The meme-coin project I cofounded and worked on back in 2018 $LUPX was essentially trying to do what Pixel Vault has done. We were building a media collective to create cartoons, movies, and more. NFTs weren't really a thing yet. The whole thing ran into some speed bumps when part of our team proved incapable of being sensitive to biased representation of minorities in the media - while we were figuring out this ethical minefield - our main dev (who was anon) and one of our cofounders got involved in a huge ICO scam - and not satisfied with ripping off the investors in that project - they chose to also rug pull all of us and our community. It was devastating.

My NFT project could easily have been something like Bald Panda or Holy Cows or Society of Cute Piglets - but instead, I saw that a huge disconnect had taken place in the realm of faith and belief. I saw that a giant hole had opened up where people were rejecting religion but had nothing but tik-tok to fill it. So, I opted to create the Bald Jesus projects instead - filling an ethical vacuum with a philosophy that can be boiled down to "Don't be a dick...and you know exactly what being a dick is....so don't be a dick." We've evolved a lot since then - but the bottom line is that I could have invested my time and energy into making million dollar project - but instead, I invested my time and energy into trying to make a better world.

I still don't know if investing my time, energy, and money into trying to create a better world is stupid or not - but I keep doing it. Maybe the better way would be to just focus on making lots of money and then make the world better - but that's not the path I chose so far - mainly because I have seen in my life that the money chase always ends with staying on the money chase and the ideals people start on it with are often abandoned along the way for .... the money chase. It is never enough, people always feel like they need more, there is always a next level that must be attained first. So, homie doesn't play that.

I'll be back with the Vagobond morning briefing in a few days. Stay safe out there.