On the Crypto Lottery as a Signal of Late Capital
... The rich keep getting richer, but what about us?
Written by Resident Zoomer Enoch
If you’re even marginally “online” like I assume you are due to the nature of this publication, the rise of crypto has been on your radar for a while. But I think recently, it seems to have become a signal in the other direction. The rise of altcoins has been very timely, as the West officially becomes a banana republic. Entering the second year of the pandemic, traditional crypto investments skyrocketed. A hat tip to those who realized capital from this rise in alternative markets. But this brought about a huge amount of PR for those who were in the game early, and now had capital and a platform to speak from…
I dare you to check hashtags of the likes of “web3” “ETH” “DOGE” et al. on Twitter on a slow evening. The result is frightening. Observing the bare underbelly of the lower and middle classes is both demoralizing and black-pilling.
We can all tell that these people don’t own significant capital. Why would they be effort-poasting on Twitter otherwise? I’m sure there is similar language being used in more “traditional” pyramid schemes. “FUD is rampant, and it is our job to eliminate the last dissenter of the newest shitcoin.”
Taking a step one year back, the markets worldwide were pumped beyond belief in 2020. Whether in the name of ‘poor-person relief’, or whatever other adjective fills the pocketbook of the Fed printing billions around the world, people—including the youth—had cash to burn for the first time. Generally, the market saw a massive influx of retail investors with Trudeau-Bux burning holes in collective pockets. Don’t get me wrong, creating wealth as you can is great. But a lot of money landed in the hands of semi-doxed alt-coin creators. The ball continued to roll from here. One only needs to peruse CoinMarketCap for a few minutes to see some of the great investment opportunities on display. From the likes of Elonomics, to Shiba Floki Inu, to Cummies—surely these will rip the capitalistic chains off the collective wrists of our young brethren, right?… … Right?
Not so fast. While the younger generations have been sidetracked into hopeless investment opportunities that frequently turn into bare “rug-pulls”, real wealth was being created (elsewhere)…
Bill Gates bought land. Jeff Bezos went to space. The list of pandemic-riddled wealth flexes goes on for pages, I’m sure… Like mentioned above, wealth was actually consolidated over the last two years, unlike it has ever been done in history.
If we can all take a step back from scouring Telegram or Discord for the latest “guaranteed” 10x coin with the word ‘DOGE’ in it, maybe these market moves could tell us a little bit of ourselves in the process. In Canada, inflation has skyrocketed. The price of a house has continued to make eyes water, as land becomes investment capital for the uber rich, instead of somewhere that someone lives. This isn’t a problem for the elite; they have enough cottages to sell off if things get too rocky for the economy generally. But as people get priced out of driving to work and look to taking the train, where is the marginally tiny amount of capital going from the younger generations?… Anywhere besides what could help us.
If we put our thumb on the pulse of young people in the West, opportunities for wealth seem slim—or the door has slammed in our faces already before we’re old enough to open a TFSA. So instead of looking at how we got here, we’re burying our heads in the sand with distractions like the crypto markets or Metaverse land (digital “real” estate).
With ever-present social media, young people working ‘just-OK’ jobs watch random people from their own demographic rise to millionaire status just because they bought the right shitcoin out of thousands, and just a few days before Coinbase decided to pump it. Capital isn’t accrued anymore, but thrown around like betting on the moneyline for sports teams. There’s no rhyme or reason for these “success” stories, besides maybe if you just threw a few thousand in, you could for once not hold all the bags that these people are selling to us. ‘Spin the wheel’ on CoinMarketCap as housing becomes something you may afford if your parents die soon enough.
As the rich get richer though, ‘alternative-alt’ market opportunities continue to present themselves. A theme from the recent Scylding conference seems to be: ‘enough thinking, time for doing’. I wasn’t an attendant, but after corresponding with IAA’s boots-on-the-ground correspondents, it would seem a significant base has been built for wealth creation outside of traditional markets. Keep your ears to the ground within our networks. Being able to point capital towards those who agree with you and want to see you succeed, instead of toward trans-nationals, isn’t just for hippies anymore. The Scylding’s Farmer’s Market might be approaching quickly.
But we mustn’t turn towards traps. It should be obvious after many years of DeFi rug-pulls that altcoin markets for chronically online people are really there to punish more than anything…
I don’t have a three-step plan to create wealth outside of the Globalist American Empire’s grasp. But the most productive use of time would be spent on learning from those that have done it, besides those who claim to have done it. Like those pesky business students might say on LinkedIn, “your network is your net worth”. Working together, collaboration, are all ways to make inroads into the current system and extract wealth (and power) in the process.
Take Nick Fuentes as an example. Politics aside, Fuentes truly is un-cancellable at this point. After being removed from every payment service, cloud provider, and streaming service, he still pulls thousands of unique viewers a night to his weeknight streams.
Andrew Torba is also an example to follow closely. After also being removed from most of the traditional online formats, he’s begun building servers in his basement, and Gab has slowly survived as others have fallen before him.
I’m not saying you need to be blacklisted on Cloudflare to have truly made it. You can continue to use PayPal as is expedient. But it’s time to look towards people who have done it, who have actually built net worth (not from Reddit pump-and-dump groups), and maybe learn a thing or two in the process. I cannot speak to the release date of IAA’s international VISA competitor, but if we maybe stop looking at APE token, and instead look towards building compounds in the mountains (you know, actually owning property), our grandchildren might be able to buy meat from a cow who saw the sun before being slaughtered.
tl;dr: the lottery ain’t a get-rich scheme, it’s a stay-poor one…