I’m Bleeding
I have a confession to make. I was involved in a brief love affair just a few months ago. Fueled by the usual emotions you're accustomed to in such a state: lust, fear, and a desire for control. I had an inclination that it wouldn't last, but I plundered onward. As I refreshed the browser page to the live price graph, I couldn't believe how I had fell this far down this rabbit hole – how the only thing on my mind was crypto.
I'm not sure if you had a chance to watch the Kentucky Derby, I didn't. But when I envision the horses mid-race feverishly inching past each other in pursuit of a first place trophy, I imagine them wearing blinders. These black plastic cups have one purpose: to focus oneself on winning. Like it or not, in America and perhaps much of the western world, winning, where you get the opportunity to tell the world after your victory, "I'm going to Disneyland" - is having a considerable amount of money in your pocket. In the crypto world, you can transform from the tortoise to the hare faster than anywhere else.
With your money invested, your hide on the line, and your digital bits online those mental blinders thrust out without much need for conscious effort. The rush of power coursing through your veins is the fuel that's driving every decision and thought. What was once a rational and refined being turns animalistic. All you can pay attention to is the elevating numbers, never quick enough, like a kid staring in the oven at cake. And this particular cake was going to allow me to leave my job, travel the world, pursue some sort of writing career, and generally live in my own version of paradise.
What makes this token special, the subject of my devotion, is its ability to earn 0.02% of your total coins held every 15 minutes. This amounts to the insane 383,025.80% annual percentage yield (APY). To give you an example if I put in $1 dollar at the of the year I'd have around $3830.26. If I put in $1,000, I'd be a millionaire three times over. I know this because I pushed a few buttons and made the grand transaction.
Well, actually like our horse example, I galloped through a flurry of steps. The first part of the process involved identifying which one of my credit cards would fund the transaction. Many times crypto is a big no-no for our dear friends at Visa and Mastercard. After cycling through all of my cards to no avail with many shrieking expletives, I found the key to the unrealized treasure: my debit card.
"Wait just a minute" you may say, "how do you expect these returns for performing no action other than just holding the tokens in your wallet?" First my dear reader, every time you buy or sell you get around a 20% tax on the transaction. So if I sell $100 I'll only see about $80 worth in a different token and that money would go those 0.02% of rewards for everyone who's holding the token. And then second, and this is bordering on near certainty, it's a ponzi scheme.
"Zach," you may be thinking, "you were in a ponzi scheme and didn't bother to tell me?" No, no, no. I'm still in the ponzi scheme as we speak and I didn't bother to tell you. See contrary to popular thought, Ponzi schemes are not bad for all investors.
They're good for those investors who bought in early, which was where I thought I had positioned myself on the second day this coin was released. Instead of a high-falutin, balding old man taking your money for his own private yacht, it's actually early investors including the token's creators that use that money for smaller sail boats, while later investors have only the empty promises (and bank accounts) that everyone was sold on to buy the tokens in the first place. It truly is the embodiment of "if you're not first you're last."
So, what was around 9.4 tokens at my start is over 58 tokens, simply for holding till today. What was once at $90 a token when I bought is at $30 , simply for holding till today. Now if the price stays at $30, I'd still have a million though it'd be lonelier than the $3 million I was (sorta) expecting. Bear in mind, we're in a bear market so everything is going down including traditional assets like stocks, but this decreasing price could also mean this token doesn't actually have any value in the long-run and could continue to trend downward (which it is).
With these speculative cryptocurrencies, money is not the only thing you're paying for. I cannot tell you how many times I have opened my phone in a moment of boredom and checked the sinking price usually several times a day. At the start of this, I contemplated many times if I should buy or sell and then buy when it dropped. Let's do a thought experiment - if there was a trial test for a pill that always made you crazy anxious and check your phone - would you take it for a million dollars? How about three million? If you said yes to these questions then maybe buying speculative cryptocurrencies is for you!
There is a silver lining to this. We humans tend to replicate what has worked for us even if what worked for us was largely attributed to luck. In some cases what worked was in spite of our weaknesses, and yet we misattribute our success to the incorrect things. The worry wart will likely be a worry wart millionaire. The paranoid revolutionary becomes an even more paranoid autocrat. External rewards may have come about but what changed the engine, the thing that keeps it going, the gooey insides?
As my token continues to drop in price after two months, failing in the case of my quick-rich-scheme (let's call it what is) is a good way for lessons to sink into the bones. To change that inner functionality within you. Just like the pain of loving someone who broke your heart, hopefully you gained some valuable insight and some humility such as "Yes, I can fall for such things."
Suffice to say I won't be adding another chunk to these speculative tokens that have rich written all over it. But that's not to say that I've removed my initial payment either. There's still hope. Who doesn't want to be a millionaire?
