When I was in Israel in September, I met a guy who runs a merchant cash advance company out of Cyprus.
It's fairly common for Israelis to move their businesses there for tax purposes. From what I understand, you can claim residency status in Cyprus if you live there 60 days out of the year. Their tax rates are very low and it's only like a two hour flight from Israel.
So this guy heard that I was doing work with crypto and basically asked me: "Do you know anyone who is looking to sell massive amounts of Bitcoin?"
🅱️ang 🅱️ang
By that point I hadn't done much work in crypto for a good while, preferring to focus on building a social media management company instead. But I figured that I could ask around since this guy seemed keen to satisfy one of his major clients.
Because he does merchant cash advances, he does a lot of work with banks. During our conversation, he told me that he'd just kind of fallen into making deals with a few of them who were looking to buy BTC.
At some point in our conversation I asked him, "How much total are they looking to buy?"
He goes, "As much as possible. Up to $10 billion."
Now.. that's a lot of fucking money. But these are banks we're talking about. So it's plausible that they'd have that kind of cash to throw around.
At the end of the day it's impossible to know why the market is crashing. Maybe some original adopter somewhere wants to go balls out and buy his family some awesome gifts for Christmas and figured he might as well do all his shopping on Black Friday.
Does it really matter? Not really. A crash is a crash and we can speculate until the cows come home. But the fact of the matter is that it's down A LOT and nobody knows when it's going to go back up, if ever.
Sadly, I made the stupid decision of leaving a good chunk of my savings in crypto, figuring that I could always generate cash from freelancing or - god forbid - grinding out a few months selling hair straighteners in some shopping mall. But of course hindsight is 20/20.
Oh well, lesson learned. Next time I'll just eat the fucking eggs right away instead of putting them in baskets. And NEVER underestimate the power of having an emergency fund, regardless of what you think your earning power is.
Because I'll tell you the truth - the last thing I want to go do right now is sign three to six months of my life away to go sell hair straighteners in Africa or some shit.
I mean sure, it would lead to some amazing experiences, deep friendships, and I'd have a lot of cool stories to tell. But the momentum required to uproot myself from Manhattan, get rid of my precious fur coats, say goodbye to my new friends and resign myself to over a hundred days of having slight variations of the same conversation over and over is too much for me to fathom right now.
One thing that I've considered is working as a trainer for short periods of time in different malls. Companies will fly you out and pay you a base salary to train their staff on how to sell. You get commission on your own sales as well of course, and generally this is higher than normal (even for an experienced salesperson) in order to offset the time you'll inevitably have to spend training the staff while at work.
So that's one option. And one that maybe I'll take into consideration. But with today being Black Friday and less than 5 weeks to go until the end of the holiday season, this crypto crash couldn't have come at a worse time. If I leave today, I'll only have five weeks to make as much money as possible until the malls are dead for a solid month and a half. Who knows where the crypto market will be by then?
And that's assuming I leave today.
Which I obviously won't do. I need to sublet (or get rid of) my apartment. I need to send all these extra winter clothes back to my parents or store them somewhere. I need to strap on my fucking knee pads and mentally prepare myself to crawl through the thorns and stones of indecisive women and the artificial lighting of whichever modern day shopping mall I'll be chaining myself to for the next three months.
La petite mort
Because let's face it: there isn't likely to be a miracle any time soon. Yeah yeah, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future and I for sure don't have a crystal ball. But I see a lot of posts on here with people blindly proclaiming shit like:
"Steem is the future! I'm powering up because I believe it'll go back up!"
Nothing could make me feel worse about my decision to hold for so long. No disrespect to the Kool Aid Addicts on here, but seriously... what the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you power up ever? You want your $0.12 upvote to turn into a $1 upvote in the future? Why?
I think it all really just comes down to social pressure from the community. Powering up is the "cool" thing to do and shows that you support the movement, which itself is totally flawed. But I don't feel like beating that dead horse anymore, so let's leave it at that.
Anyway, it doesn't even really matter WHY shit is going downhill right now. It is. And y'all can sit there with your starry eyes and vapidly claim that the crypto market will recover someday... but the truth is that you don't know, I don't know... nobody knows.
The difference, ironically enough, is that very few of you seem to have bet as heavily as I did on the crypto market and now I'm the one who is going to face real world consequences for being an idiot and leaving 90% of my wealth in the fucking stupid ass shit market. It's not fun to see your savings get cut in half overnight.
Especially when you know what's waiting for you when you run out of money: three to six months of repeating the same canned lines over and over in an Abercrombie-and-Fitch-perfume-scented shopping mall while you fantasize about the golden days of coconut oil and tropical Thai beaches.
When I think about how much money I wasted over the past year on stupid shit... oh my god. I remember being in Australia almost exactly a year ago and having $25k+ in my bank account. If you ask me where that money went I couldn't tell you. I mean, I definitely dumped a lot into BTC during the height of the market. But even this year I made a ton of money from consulting that seems to have vanished into thin air.
And what do I have to show for it? A few more pictures on Instagram? A few more friends on Facebook? A few more stamps on my passport?
Crawling through the mud = good
Maybe I'm being too harsh. This year has been one of my best in a long time. As was last year.
Overall it's been net positive. I think I'm just irritable because I'm feeling the pinch and resisting what I know I'm going to have to do very soon.
It's not that I don't love working in malls. Honestly I can't think of another job that offers more visceral pleasure than kiosk sales.
Selling itself is exhilarating, I get to travel all over the world, and my job is actually to flirt with girls all day and play with their hair.
Not only that, but kiosk sales reward you proportionately for how positive and upbeat you can be for an extended period of time. Grumpy people don't make sales. Happy people do.
So you effectively train yourself to be happy, because you know that the alternative is to be in a pissed off mood and not make any money. The worst part about having a bad day on the kiosk is that everyone can see you're failing and hating your life.
They can see the sadness written on your face. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
That's leverage right there. And if you want to succeed in any field, you must have leverage.
I'm reading a book right now by Nassim Taleb called Skin In The Game, where he talks about this exact thing.
Reading this book is like trying to swim through molasses. But I love the way this guy writes. Plus he's also Lebanese, and I have a secret crush on all things from Lebanon. Don't tell my Israeli friends.
Anyway, I'm only about 50 pages in, but from what I can see so far the book essentially says that systems evolved from the people involved having something to lose from their personal choices.
In other words, you can't structure an economic system where certain parties can only experience an upside without a downside. The risk has to be fair.
Interestingly enough, this may be why the crypto market is so appealing to some when compared to the stock market. Look no further than the 2008 crash and ensuing bailouts to see how this shit works: banks lost all their money because of greedy agents writing bad deals that they knew would eventually collapse. Instead of suffering the consequences, the government bailed them out and tried to patch the system with regulations.
But we all know that regulations can be gamed. Get enough lawyers, hire enough ex-regulators and you're good to go.
But the crypto market? That shit is the Wild West, virtually unregulated. If people lose all their money in crypto, well then it sucks for them. Doubtful that we'll see any bailouts because of a crypto crash any time soon. Not to say that this is for the right reasons, but obviously the powers that be are hesitant to encourage mass adoption for this exact reason.
(Interestingly enough, Taleb also says that entrepreneurs understand this better than anyone because THEY are the ones with skin in the game. They survive only if they succeed. More on this later.)
Who's got your money?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFrag8ll85w
Anyway... enough speculation. Like I said, that shit doesn't matter.
You lost all your money, now it's time to make some more. Don't fantasize about the next bull run, because at the end of the day you can't control that shit. And while programs like @steemonboarding seem to have honorable intentions, I don't believe that teaching people how Steem works in German is going to be what brings this platform mainstream or raises the value of the token.
And not to take away from any of the work that @steemmonsters has done to make their game, but I don't think that's going to appeal to anyone who doesn't already use the platform and want to support what seems to be the only initiative that is run like a traditional business and not a money-printing factory. No offense to the other sidechains.
There was a post by @aggroed a few days ago that asked for business plans to bring more business owners to Steem. I wanted to respond, I really did. Especially since my last post was a comprehensive 5000+ word guide about how to start a social media business. I couldn't help but notice the timing of the contest.
I spent two nights trying to write the damn thing but couldn't make it work without the post devolving into a massive rant about what's wrong with this place. And what's another post dedicated to beating a dead horse going to do for anyone?
(One thing I will point out is that it's kind of ironic that a contest submit a business plan was offered to a community with admittedly very little business experience. Would you ask a fat person for fitness advice?)
In my opinion (that nobody asked for), bringing business owners here is pretty fucking simple. You have two options:
- Enable ads on the site
- Pay professional content creators in US dollars to submit high quality content that is naturally shareable on the internet and use paid ads to drive traffic
I've been saying this shit ever since I've been on here. In fact, I made such a big deal about using this site as a platform for your business that I even got myself some haters. Sure I wasn't the most diplomatic, but I just hate the way people desperately beg for handouts here like a bunch of low status welfare recipients.
You don't have a money problem, you have a creativity problem.
I realize that most people probably won't be motivated to spend a few days writing a 5000+ word post, editing it several times, add dozens of interesting links AND paying out of their own pocket to promote it. But then again, most people aren't motivated enough to work 7 days a week on their own business either.
50,000 users on this site and virtually none of them own their own business. Why do you think that is?
Because this place attracts people who are in love with the idea of getting paid to produce content. And with the criteria for receiving upvotes being 100% subjective ("I like you and/or your post so I'm upvoting you"), this platform has turned into a cliquey popularity contest. High quality content creators are not rewarded appropriately, if they even exist.
And yes, there are curation teams out there who presumably try to promote high quality content - but so what? What is a @curie upvote worth these days? $5? Big fucking deal. Unless you live on the subcontinent and eat rice with your fingers, that's not likely to do you much good. And I don't care who you are or what country you live in, $5 is not going to solve any of your problems.
Pretend you're BF Skinner for a second
Perhaps even more insulting is the fact that I rarely get any upvotes for my own writing.
Let me toot my own horn here for a second: nobody puts as much effort into their posts on here as I do. Very few people are as talented writers, if any. But why don't I get any upvotes from high SP accounts? Why don't they upvote me?
Calm down. It's a rhetorical question. I know why. Because I'm an asshole.
But think about it: if I was actually making money on my posts instead of losing money through paying for upvotes, don't you think that I would post more often? Don't you think that I would step my game up and write even BETTER pieces of content if I KNEW that I would be getting financially rewarded for it?
And therein lies the problem: high SP accounts are more interested in the politics of seeming "fair" and upvoting safe pieces of content by people who aren't controversial, bland ass boring ass fucking milktoast motherfuckers who are too scared to say anything that contradicts the popular narrative, who tout the company line and parrot the same trite soundbytes we've all heard a million times:
"Steem is great guys! I'm powering up!" "SMTs are gonna solve all our problems!" "Steemit is the future!"
Good for you little Arjun, you get a gold star and $0.10. Now run along and buy yourself some fenugreek.
But guess what - nobody who doesn't have their head jammed all the way up this community's ass is going to give a shit. Because that content is trash.
Actually, trash is the wrong word. That content has no appeal to your average person who doesn't ALREADY have a vested interest in the Steem blockchain or Steemit community.
In order to attract THOSE people, the solution is actually pretty fucking simple: all you have to do is get high quality content creators to submit their original content HERE first and then either 1) use your fake money ponzi scheme to fund the promotion of their posts (not to the Trending page, but through targeted ad campaigns like Facebook ads), 2) ask them to promote it through their own channels, or 3) both.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is there any good content on this site that isn't Steem-specific?
- Is there any content on here that has a wide appeal and is useful to a wide swathe of humanity?
- Is there any content on here that people would share through traditional social media channels for no other reason than that they think it's cool and interesting?
- Is there any content on here that people would share WITHOUT the ulterior motive of wanting to bring people to the platform and increase the value of the token?
Gonna have to say the answer is no.
13 Pictures That Prove Barack Obama Is Actually Osama Bin Laden (You won't believe number 4!)
But just imagine for a second if this place was run like Buzzfeed, who has done an excellent job of building a powerhouse publication through clickbait titles and listicles.
Yes they're stupid and pander to the dregs of mainstream culture who are incapable of nuanced thought. But is that really so much worse than the starry-eyed freebie-seeking circle-jerking low-vibration shitposters that infest this place?
I don't think so. I'd rather have this place be full of listicles that could ostensibly serve some purpose (I can only think of 25 ways to eat chips) than having to sift through hundreds of trash posts written by people hunting for $0.10 upvotes so they can buy some turmeric.
**And the crazy part is that there are so many high SP accounts on here that could literally fund initiatives like this through their own pock