Thread by @sethisimmons

1/ A short thread on mistakes I’ve made along the way that (hopefully) other’s can learn from before they fall into the same traps:

Please don’t laugh at me 😂

P.S. — these are in no particular order.

2/ Trusting that Bitcoin is anonymous by default.

This one is common, but I still dread the trail I’ve most definitely left behind in my early days for all time.

Thankfully I’ve found people in Bitcoin that provide good advice and options, but early on I had no idea.

3/ Believing and buying whatever is shilled the most.

I may or may not have put substantial money into VeChain and Litecoin early on before realizing the drawbacks and issues that come with them.

4/ Believing that blockchains were great for things other than money.

This one led to part of the VeChain idiocy, but it seems there was a lot of “blockchain is the future” that ignored the clear drawbacks of blockchains. They have *very* limited useful scope.

5/ Trusting in whitepapers as a source-of-truth to show legitimacy for coins.

Fell for a lot of crappy coins early on because of flashy or well-written whitepapers, needless to say 😅

6/ Thinking that coins that I could have “a lot” of would be more valuable long term.

This pulled me into clear scams like TRON along with zombie chains like Litecoin. Once you realize that Bitcoin etc. are divisible it helps get past the “I need 1mil coins!” phase.

7/ Believing that Bitcoin would integrate any innovation that came along through altcoins.

This was a big reason I became a bit of a maximalist before I grew more open — I fell for the influencer pitch of “Bitcoin can be anything” despite ossification.

8/ Listening to #NumberGoUp influencers.

I fell for the Pomps and the Helds who seem to always be pushing the #NgU ability of Bitcoin as the cure to all technical issues. Easy to fall for this when the number is going up, but bear markets help to cleanse it a bit.

9/ Leaving coins on exchanges.

Early on I didn’t grasp the need and importance of self-sovereignty and often just left most or all of my cryptocurrency on exchanges for easy trading.

Took a while to realize that strips cryptocurrency of all of it’s power!

10/ Believing that everything outside of Bitcoin is a “shitcoin”.

I missed out on so much innovation and research by falling for the trap of maximalism. Even when a coin is technologically sound (like Monero) there is always *so much* to be learned and pulled from other coins.

11/ Falling for affinity scams.

As I found great projects like Monero I soon fell prey to many affinity scams that used proximity or forked code with Monero (among others) and tried to leverage Monero’s rep for their own gain.

I’ve helped perpetuate these in the past, sadly.

12/ Falling for PnDs because they’re shilled/created by people I trusted.

This one is primarily about ArrowChain, but I fell for the concept and chose to ignore the glaring flaws because a Twitter personality I trusted was behind it.

Don’t trust, verify. I wasted time/money 😬

13/ That’s all I can think of right now (longer list than I’d like 😅) but I’ll add more if I think of them.

Hopefully this helps open up some questions or eyes and helps show that *everyone* makes mistakes.

The important thing is to learn from them and stay open to learning.