Put Up Or Shut Up
The great thing about the crypto space--and trading more broadly--is that it's a put up or shut up environment. It doesn't matter what you think might happen, or what you think should happen. What does happen is binary. The market either goes up or it goes down. You're either correct or you're not.
Societally, we're inundated with relativism. It's a lot of soft, qualitative discussions about topics where you're not allowed to offend people's sensibilities. You're encouraged to reach a compromise because, after all, everything is subjective, and both parties have just as much access to the truth. It's not that you're right or they're wrong, you're both correct and it's simply a matter of perspective.
This ambiguity, while in the short term allows for a detente, on larger timeframes creates more tension. It removes meaning. We're left aimless, and devoid of conviction.
This is a relatively novel phenomena. At the turn of the 21st century, we entered modernity. Progress and rationality were seen as the pinnacle of thought. Artistically and intellectually we worked from axioms to find the peak of the mountaintop. Using human reason and ingenuity alone, we wanted to achieve all that the world had to offer. What we found, was that it wasn't that easy.
In Mathematics, the logicism--the belief that all of mathematics was reducible to logic--was met with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. In Physics, we were met with quantum particles and their effects, throwing a lynch pin into our ideas of a purely rational Universe. In the arts, the exploration of form and idealism was met with skepticism and the deconstruction of meaning. Clean cut simplicity was met with ugly complexity and the obfuscation of meaning. The wave of postmodern thought, swept over the world, and we only recently have begun to "recover" from it.
One after another, our preconceived notions of truth and stability were questioned, but nothing was put into it's place. The social and intellectual upheaval of the past 50 years have done quite a bit to remove meaning from many people. In our current age, there are very few certainties, and there are very few avenues for meaning. I believe for many of us, meaning has been found in crypto, and the market more broadly.
When you have a theory about a trade, you can talk until your face is blue. You can create all of these qualitative--or even quantitative--theories about how the market should behave, but at the end of the day the market is either going to go up or it's going to go down. Simple as that. There is definition. There are winners and there are losers, and there's no one to blame but yourself.
"But vers, there's low liquidity and the MM was shook me out." You should have factored that into your trading strategy. "But vers, they panic dumped because China banned crypto!" You should have had better risk management. Don't trade with more than you can afford to lose; set stops.
The fiscal responsibility required to play the market is what I, and what I suspect all of you find meaning in. The exhilaration felt when you make a winning trade, and your wallet has multiplied several fold is incomparable to anything else. There's a reason so many of you have gotten so obsessed; why our partners are sick of hearing us talk about crypto. We have found something definitive and meaningful in a society that has very few avenues for that.
This is a great opportunity, put your all into it, take responsibility, and make a better life for yourself. If you're reading this, you're an early adopter about to ride the wave into the future. The blockchain is going to be the catalyst for the Internet of Things, it's going to be the catalyst for a truly global, borderless society. It is going to be the underpinning of our virtual social structure. Get familiar now, load your bag, and thrive in the coming paradigm.