I haven't onboarded many people to crypto in real life. Quite a few, actually. One of these few, after trying out crypto for a few months, if I remember well, told me he decided to sell everything (he said he didn't lose anything, but I remember I didn't quite believe him at the time). The reason why he wanted to get out was because it was "too much work".
He wanted something much like a savings account but at the returns of crypto, I guess. Put money in, wait a number of years, see them grow. And that was perfectly possible, had he had the patience to wait and not check on the price so often (which I told him). I also told him it wasn't a great time to enter the market, but you know how newbies are... They want to make all the mistakes themselves.
Ideogram helped with this ^
The interesting part is that in real life he is not a person to avoid work, quite the opposite. But I guess he didn't want to commit more time to this, and the influencers he listened to online (despite my recommendations) didn't help.
So, is crypto too much work or was he just looking for easy money? He was... looking for easy money, that's clear to me. It's interesting that he is involved in real estate and doesn't find that difficult to do. I would rather be involved with crypto any day (including in the bear market, particularly if we have stablecoins), than real estate. Others would do both without any issues. So I guess it depends from person to person.
But the amount of work in crypto is the same as in real life - you take as much as you want or need. What I believe was his issue was not that it was too much work, it was that he listened to the wrong people and tried to copy what they were doing, instead of sticking to something like... buying bitcoin and doing nothing else, if he didn't want to spend too much time on this.
It's true, most people treat what they do in crypto as a side-gig or even as fun (if we talk about Hive as a social media chain or the Web3 gaming aspects in crypto), and it's normal, as long as they earn the bulk of their income from elsewhere.
That's why we probably hear "too much work" when it comes to crypto. Because people want to relax, to have fun, to connect with others, and maybe earn a little. Some want or need to hustle, or it's in their nature to do so, but yeah, that's why I believe people say that.
It is too much work if either you come to crypto to relax, or if you are listening to bad advice that lead you to more work than you need or want.
But people should probably not say it's too much work so often. Sooner than many think we will have the opposite problem: too little work. That includes losses of jobs, but also those who will still have something to do will depend more and more of (smarter or dumber) tools doing the work for them.
