I have spent the last 3 months understanding crypto: podcasts, telegram groups, books, videos, and discussions with friends.

I still don’t have conviction on any particular space. I mean, at a high level I agree with a lot of things.

When Onlyfans had to almost shut down because idiotic banks did not want to support this space, I understood how easy it is to censor stuff.

When I had to transfer money to buy US stocks, I realised how primitive our banking infra is. Fucking takes 2 days to send money.

If you remember Kanye’s rant a few years back around royalties, you know how interesting the development in the NFT space can be. See Royal for example.

Remittance is another thing. You know a lot of spread in banking is because of gatekeeping.

Visa and other gatekeepers have already started work on how they can fit into this new world.

Coming back to NFTs, people have been forever buying art to signal status. As we spend more and more time online, NFTs is an extension of that behavior.

I get all of these.

I still don’t know how people get conviction to buy NFTs worth a million dollars.

Or increase exposure to crypto by putting 20-30% net worth on this space. Fred Wilson mentioned how his strategy is barbell: high risk high reward (VC and crypto) and then real estate (super low risk).

For an average person, this seems extreme. We don’t buy real estate.

We don’t increase our crypto exposure that much too. But then if you are convinced, does it not make sense to double down?

Just throwing my thoughts.

A lot of people in this space have. They are breathing web 3 24x7. They have NFTs as a significant part of their portfolio.

I remember reading in the book on Coinbase how early employees used to take salary in bitcoin.

How did they have such high conviction 10 years back?

I was discussing with my friend a particular career choice: I had a few VC firms reach out and I was asking him how he decided to jump to VC from an operator role. I was super confused.

He told me something that there are 2 kinds of people.

One who are are hyper rational. They need pros and cons checklists for everything. They want to model everything in life.

And other group like Forest Gump: jumping from one interesting thing to another and letting serendipity do its magic.

Needless to say I am in the former. I missed the rebound in stock market because I kept thinking wow the situation is dire. It will take years to recover. One friend had joked that the way to invest is that when there is a crash just put in money, market always comes up.

I was looking at P/E rations, covid numbers and what not and this guy made his decision on a simple rule: markets always come up. This guy doubled/tripled his money.

It is not about just money. It is about how to let go of this hyper rational self. And also have more conviction.