Brother Bing’s Guide to Surviving the Crypto Bear Market
by Arthur · August 14, 2022
Brother Bing had planned to write a self-help piece on surviving the crypto bear market then ETH dropped to 3 digits. But writing takes a long time, especially when you’re having fun day job. And now that I’ve finally made up my mind, ETH is riding the Merge wave and hovering around $2000 – still down dramatically from ATH, but at least moving in the right direction.
First, let’s dispense with the usual tired crypto self-help tips:
- Go outside to touch the grass
- Find a GF/BF
- Find a therapist
- Stop inviting deadmau5 to your crypto parties
- Stop flipping monkey JPEGs
- Don’t try to time the market
Jokes aside, every crypto OG will tell you that bear markets are for builders. If you are not a builder, you may feel left out. Fear not. Brother Bing will now provide you with unique guidance to take advantage of the times when the market is not it acting as volatile as an emotional teenager.
And without further adieu, I am proud to present… Brother Bing’s Guide to Surviving the Bear Market.
1. Sign up for an information diet
Crypto is an industry that serves up an all-you-can-eat banquet of information from everyone, everywhere, all the time. Sometimes this information contains nutritious insights. But all too often these are people’s junk food-like opinions disguised as official information. I’m talking about gossip, rumors and the giant circular intellectual masturbation arena that is Crypto Twitter.
During the bull market, people trade, invest and arbitrage based on “information”. Investors FOMO into a project’s $100 million seed round without doing any due diligence other than hearing rumors that competing VCs also want to write a check. Users stream into a new protocol and hear that there could be a potential airdrop. Developers participate in the protocol’s hackathon in hopes of gaining and giving and moving on to the next chain.
We were so inundated and consumed with information that it is difficult to distinguish substance from pure meme. And that is why a strict informational diet program is necessary.
Such a program should include these steps:
- Leave all chat groups (Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Signal) in which you have not participated in six months
- Unfollow influencers who you know are toxic and just flush their bags
- Unsubscribe from newsletters that you haven’t opened in six months
- Limit your Twitter usage – you don’t need to know everything all the time
- Print the articles you’ve wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to yet
- Learn what proto-danksharding is about!
2. Appreciate what Web2 built
Crypto people like to think we are recreating the world. Maybe that’s true in some use cases, but more often than not we’re just optimizing Web2 experiences.
And sometimes, as much as we don’t like to admit it, all we’re really doing is simply adding a “governance token” to that Web2 experience.
Instead of bashing Web2, we can all benefit from taking a detached view and understanding its pros and cons and what it has achieved. Ask yourself some questions.
- What are the real pain points when transferring money abroad?
- Does our bank offer us the best return? If not, where can we find better returns?
- How do we currently manage loyalty points?
- Does my training app cover all my needs?
This process will force us to really examine the Web2 user flow and ask the most important question: Do we need blockchain for this problem?
Very often the answer is no.
3. DYOR and questions everything
Every bull market produces a group of thought leaders and influencers. They like to come up with terminologies, memes and frameworks in esoteric areas that, frankly, no one cared about until it was a symbol.
As these influencers grow in influence, their voices begin to carry weight and their statements tend to feel like self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, music NFTs are an area that gained traction and buzz thanks to a few key influencers. They claimed that this new creative directive will completely disrupt the music industry. But what we have seen so far are just music NFT projects whose tokens went up and then inevitably went down to zero, with no liquidity and very little adoption.
Now that the market has calmed down, do yourself a favor and stop blindly agreeing with influencers with huge followings. Rather, dare to challenge them. Treat this as an intellectual exercise and see what conclusion you come to.
4. The only thing that isn’t a fork is your stem
As we say in Chinese, hard times bring out true friendship. If you want to build a network of colleagues, friends, mentors and teachers, you need to make sure that they stick with you through thick and thin, both in and of themselves.
Likewise, people who continue to grind and learn during a bear market are the ones who will remain long-term in this industry. Take notes on the few souls and be sure to include them in your tribe.
Crypto has seen generations of participants come and go. Many people who were influential in the old days became irrelevant when their ideology failed to evolve with the industry. Having the right community by your side is key to staying relevant.
You must build an unforkable trunk made of resilient human nodes.
What makes a community unequal?
- It’s your most reliable sounding board
- It will not judge you even if you are liquidated. Ooops!
- It participates in your thought experiments and your real-life experiments (hot pot dao!)
Good luck out there, bulls.
