Thread by @jonsyu

I'm seeing a lot of people FOMO quit their jobs to join "crypto", probably out of some over-romanticized view of what goes on in these projects. Let me illuminate you about what actually happens:

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1. You have an earnest team that believes in decentralization as a theory, but realize that it's impossible to build any project of complexity without extreme centralization for long periods of time, potentially some parts indefinitely.

2. You aim to build a community, but in reality 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.

3. You want to decentralize governance, but only a handful wants to participate in governance. Doesn't change people from getting royally pissed at governance decisions despite not doing a single ounce of work.

4. You realize that most of the "influencer" network of crypto is actually a cartel of individuals who all know each other and collude in pumping the same bags. They all cost around $20k-30k for a review, btw.

5. Some VCs are good. Many don't do an ounce of due diligence on your project and fight tooth and nail for larger token allocations with minimal lockup periods. Most of them are actually beyond useless. Some are deeply unethical and are straight cons.

6. Crypto never sleeps. And guess what? That also means that you never sleep. Half your audience is in the west, the other half is in the east. Singapore time is almost entirely during sleeping hours in the US. Have fun with that.

7. Legally, you can't talk about "token price", but it's your ultimate marketing tool. If it's necessary for the security of your network, you're screwed. You HAVE to shill the token, and you have to assure people that the price will go up (but that's also illegal in the US).

8. Traders/VCs drive the vast majority of your user acquisition early on, since, again, the token is what most people care about - so you really need THEM to be excited, and they by FAR have the largest followings in the space.

9. The LAW. SO MUCH LAW. SO. MUCH. LAW. Expect to pay well into six figures of legal fees in your first year. Also, most lawyers won't actually know how to answer any questions cause everything is still a grey-area. This'll depend on jurisdiction of course.

10. There's actually a good chance that there's not a single person in your entire state or country that knows how to do your taxes.

11. People will make up rumors of your project on a daily basis. Either hopium or FUD. It is Brandolini's law on steroids. Hopium is actually worst than FUD by the way, because FUD unites your community around truth, whereas hopium unites them around price.

12. Information asymmetry is extreme in this industry. There are telegram rooms of just founders and influencers that discuss price-moving news. You are not in those channels most likely.

13. Bear markets is when you find the real demand for your products, which is likely magnitudes less than your worse fears or on-chain metrics indicate. Low liquidity = desert of demand.

14. You will be proud of your project at times, but then get nervous when you see people ape'ing into obvious scams and then you question whether anyone actually knows or cares about your project at all, or if it's just one of a basket of random asymmetric gambling bets.

15. You will realize that the source of the majority of problems for your blockchain project is that it is built on a blockchain.

16. And my personal pet peeve is that, by and large, most of crypto actually does want Bitcoin to die. Perhaps not in a "I want Bitcoin to go to zero", but in a, "Bitcoin doesn't do anything and so I want its value to be rightly distributed to my project, which has real utility".