A very degenerate thesis

This article is from Knower substack, which shares a lot of alphas and insights. If you like the post, please give him a visit and spread the word.

“How to succeed in an unconventional way that might also rob you of your humanity”

Introduction

Are you prepared to spend the next six months browsing Twitter and Discord for 18 hours a day? Are you ready to lose your mind and whatever’s left of your humanity rotating 10 times a week trying to 10,000x your portfolio?

No need to say anything, I’m glad the answer is yes. But first, a little backstory of how I got to this point and why you should take my words very, very seriously.

Back in February 2021, Su Zhu went on UpOnly TV and proposed the beautifully controversial idea of “the super cycle” for the first time (i think). This was back when I had originally joined Twitter, before I’d ever owned any Crypto aside from the Ether I’d purchased on Robinhood a few months back.

I’m not certain how I stumbled upon CT, but it was around this time that I’d started following @hasufl, @CryptoCobain and a few other crypto OG’s. Within weeks, I was hooked on this niche side of the internet that seemed to be filled with mega billionaires and geniuses.

I started out by buying every coin I could find under $3 on Coinbase, and yes, this included Matic, Mana and a bunch of other junk that has since pumped more than I ever would have thought. Soon after, my portfolio nuked about 40% and I sold everything and forgot about the entire scene almost as quickly as I’d found it.

It wasn’t until around August of this year that I even thought about crypto again, as I’d been too busy with school, a summer job and trying to make money on /r/WallStreetBets. Sigh.

I made a little bit of money, about 30% (which is decent anywhere but crypto) and decided to sell everything around mid-august since college was coming up and I wouldn’t have the time to actively manage a portfolio. I think it was around here where I put most of my Roth IRA into GBTC and ETHE.

After this point, things get kind of hazy.

College rolls around and I start spending a little more time on Twitter, browsing it in awkward social situations, browsing it before class, browsing it at night - as one does. I started tweeting more, started seeing more useful info on my feed - and then it hit me.

Why had I wasted so much of my year not following crypto or putting any money back in? There was so much opportunity in this weird, under the radar community on Twitter. People were making huge sums of money, and I was doing physics homework and living in a small dorm room with no air conditioning.

I’d made a huge mistake, one that would probably lead to poverty for generations of mine to come.

Back to the supercycle

I got a little bit off topic there, I apologize. Hopefully my story is enough of a reason for you to convince yourself to spend every waking hour researching crypto and shitposting on Twitter. Now, let’s get to the thesis.

Su Zhu. Supercycle. $500k per Bitcoin, $100k per Ethereum, etc.

As the months have gone by, many have laughed off Su’s original thesis. Bitcoin has failed to reach even $100k, and Ethereum - while having hit ATHs - has failed to reach a somewhat conservative $10k. What happened here? Did the market actually top, and are we all doomed to suffer in a two year bear market and lose all of our hard earned money?

Don’t fret, because this isn’t the case. See, many interpreted a supercycle as a sort of parabolic, immediate up only environment where we run it up turbo and 10x our net worths in a week. This is the wrong point of view, in my honest opinion.

A supercycle will most likely look like a long, painful, drawn-out battlefield across the market. Yeah, Bitcoin and Ethereum might reach six digits each, but will you survive? How many times will you sell the bottom, only to buy the top two weeks later? Are you mentally prepared to experience the growing pains of a market which will have trillions injected into it over the course of the next 2-3 years?

The answer is most likely no.

Many will continue to treat this cycle like all of the cycles that have passed us by, selling too soon and waiting for the inevitable bear market. Friends, don’t take this the wrong way or get too excited, but there will be no bear market. It is unironically up only, except in a much different way.

It’s no secret the market has matured a lot over the past year. We’ve seen a ton of new participants enter - like institutions - and lots of new protocols pop up, making our lives that much harder. Missing a day of CT feels like missing a week - that’s how much new shit is happening everyday.

Hot potato, hot potato

The rotatoooooor. This should be you. Don’t get stuck holding your bags, because money is only going to continue to change hands at a rapid rate. Whether it be DeFi 2.0, L2 scaling solutions, metaverse plays, or some other whacky trend that might pop up, prepare your exit strategies wisely. There will always be another 10x, there won’t always be exit liquidity.

Just think about Olympus DAO as a case study of sorts. People thought OHM was cool, so they started buying it. High APR, number go up, brrrrr. In fact, people thought OHM was so cool and innovative, they literally made 100,000 forks of it and people bought all of them. Every single one.

“Jeez, that must have been a rough few months of trading, how did you-”

No. This all happened in less than a month, and is still going on (to an extent). Our market cycles no longer seem to be 2 years of bull market, 2 years of bear market - we are now in turbo speed, compressed market cycles, with new narratives playing out and popping up every single week.

You think it’s tough keeping up now? Wait until even more people catch onto the weird world of CT and the degeneracy we get up to. Metaverse coins were a thing for like three weeks, all because ol Mark Zuckerburg changed the name of his company. If that doesn’t tell you how much of a casino this is, I don’t know what will.

Decentraland has maybe 2,000 active players, but we managed to push it deep into the top 100 - and it’s still there. I feel like it would be an insult to casinos everywhere if we continue to associate ourselves and this insane market with them.

“But wait, Knower, what about the rotatooo-”

I’m getting to it, okay? If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “the rotatoooor” is the kind of market participant who never attaches themselves to their bags. Always looking for the next opportunity, the rotatoooor tries to make the most of this market by seeking out new narratives and trends before the rest of CT catches on.

In a perfect world, rotatoooors catch every wave and never miss. They consistently manage to 10x their portfolio every month and make generational wealth. Rotatooors prowl discords and twitter threads, looking for any sort of alpha that might help them develop their next investment (speculation) thesis.

As I’ve been following the markets pretty closely, I’ve noticed that this could be the optimal strategy for maximizing profits while we’re still relatively early - if that word can even be thrown around anymore in a reasonable sense. I’ve seen that trends tend to play out in an extremely short window these days, and when they hit, they hit hard.

If you’re able to identify just one of the next big trends, you can easily outperform a majority of market participants just by being early to a couple of coins (or protocols, ding ding ding). I absolutely think that spending your time trying to trade the 1m on BTC and ETH on a 25x position is the biggest waste of time - no matter how “good” you might be.

There are just too many new opportunities popping up everyday, and it’s honestly -EV (I threw that in as a joke) to be spending your days not interacting with the community and new protocols. Just look at how much money you could have made on airdrops alone in the past year. Or don’t that might be better for your mental health.

Parting words and advice

To condense all of that into plain English, simply try your best not to get liquidated or lose all your capital getting stuck in old bags/trends. Seriously, things are gonna start moving at lightspeed soon, and if you don’t get used to hopping out of a losing or winning trade quickly, you might not make it out alive.

Of course, don’t try and isolate yourself from everyone and everything you love in pursuit of money - a lot of what I say is meant to be taken lightly, especially the whole “spending your entire day on Twitter” part.

However, it’s important to realize that we might just be in the supercycle, and the sooner you learn to adapt to these changing times, the better it will be in the long run.

May we all make it.

This article is from Knower substack, which shares a lot of alphas and insights. If you like the post, please give him a visit and spread the word.

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