A little less conservation, a little more action please

A couple of days ago, I was chatting briefly to @edicted about CUB and my strategy there and he said that I am playing it safe and then last night, I read an awesome post by @empoderat about their journey and it nailed it home at how conservative I must have played the last years.

The post is nothing special as an individual post, but what it represents is quite awe-inspiring, considering what they have achieved in a relatively short time. Going from ~100K to seven figures in the last three or four months isn't the accomplishment, it is going from 10K at the bottom of the bear to 100K+ that is the most interesting part for me. What it shows is that I could have done the same - in fact, I could have done far better by following the same strategy -

But I didn't.

This isn't a "coulda, shoulda, woulda" post, where I can say "if only I had done yadda yadda", it is a reminder to myself that while I often feel that I am taking risks, my risk profile and tolerance is nowhere near as high as it is for some people. I am okay with this, because we each have our own journey as well as personality and set of conditions we need to face daily. Not only this, our pasts have also imprinted on us and direct our future. I am far more risk-seeking than I was and considering my own conditions, took what I have considered a "hail Mary" approach to financial availability in the future. However, acknowledging this today makes me think of other aspects.

What is awe-inspiring in what was accomplished is that pretty much anyone in crypto had and likely has the ability to do the same, relative to the stake they are willing to work with. I have no idea where @empoderat is from in Europe, but going 7 figures will likely put them in a very good position anywhere. That is quite incredible, considering this is just the start of the crypto industry and all that is to come. People like them are going to change the world at a very localized level and hopefully, improve the lives of many, both directly and indirectly.

It is because of this that while @empoderat hopefully will never have to worry about money again in his life, the value they generate through actions is compounded throughout the entire ecosystem, inflating the value of what they have worked with, to spread among many more. For example, they have backed the LEO and CUB journey and in so doing, have helped build the infrastructure and gateways that thousands of others are utilizing now, including myself. Without the early backers, the future investors and users will have no place to hang their ownership. This pushes out even further to allow more and more people participate, attracting an increasing amount of wealth from the legacy economy and pushing it into the building mass of the new economies, the ones that are built, operated and owned by groups of individuals who legitimize them by supporting each other.

For example, if @khaleelkazi hadn't been active in developing Leo Finance and bringing value to its users, the chance of people following into Cub Defi would have been quite a bit lower. While the investors are interested in the ROI from the pools, it is the social capital built by the Leo Finance team that gave the project credibility in the first place. Now, there are thousands of users benefiting from those early investors and risk takers and while it is easy to say "I wish I was them" the fact is, that most people are even more conservative than myself in this world - so wish all they want, they would be very unlikely to take the opportunity given.

One line from the post stood out:

I'll be laughing at anyone who calls us 'lucky'.

and this is what I quoted and to which I replied:

I do count myself lucky - because I was presented an opportunity and I had the balls to take it and stick through it. It hasn't been easy to hold the half decent stack I have, while the IRL is crushing, but here I am.

What is considered a conservative approach for one, might be on the edge of insanity for another - it is like a pain tolerance, where it is very hard to compare experiences. Crunching the numbers of the investment, doesn't take into consideration all the other factors that matter to the individual. While my numbers are nowhere near seven figures, the approach I have taken has allowed me to feel some of that life changing fear that @empoderat speaks of, the one where the life known for so long, may never be the same again.

There is a massive asymmetry in the gains (when it works) from what is invested and even the risk model taken and the result for an early adopter. But despite the individual gains of those who went in early, when it is part of a disruptive industry that will filter out into the entire global population in some way, there is a massive asymmetry between what those early individuals get and the total value of everything that is generated from what they have helped build.

What is going to be the most important differentiation between all the past industries and the blockchain-powered crypto industry, is that all the wealth generated by all the others have been largely on the second-layer of the economy, an economy owned by very few hands at the infrastructure level. This time, while a lot of wealth will be generated on the second layer for the user level, the infrastructure of the economy ownership itself, is distributed across any people and has multiple independent economies that work as infrastructure for millions of second-layer experiences. This means that the responsibility of owners is to generate value for users who are also owners, because if they don't, there are many more economies that they can take part in and they have the freedom of financial mobility to move across all of them.

The importance of what is happening now is not trivial, it is a fundamental change in the way the world operates as it puts power into our hands to choose the direction of society through the economic decisions we make, rather than having to put our wealth into the hands of others and trust they will make decisions in our best interest. The level of disruption to the economy that is coming is something that has never been seen before, because it has never been possible before at the level at which it is going to happen.

It is easy to focus on the wealth in relation to the economy that we know today, but it is a drop in the ocean of what will be generated tomorrow.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]