Domino 🛡️

People ask me why I'm always hating on a lot of new coins. Here's why: In graduate school, I had this friend, let's call him John. Got paired up with him for a group project in this cryptography class by sheer chance. All the Indian kids paired with the Indians, all the Chinese kids paired with the Chinese, so we kind of looked at each other and said "ok we're the only ones left ig". He was an interesting guy, white dude from Iowa, walked around barefoot, lived in this hippie co-op off campus. My black friend would call him "barefoot 🥷". One day while working with him, he turned around his laptop and showed me he had 600 BTC. At the time that was $600k. Not only that, but he got into the ETH ICO, got into XMR early too. He was legitimately a whale in all three. We were both 24. This dude had already won at life before either of us had even started our careers. Ironically, we were watching Zcash price action at the time. It was so cursed. We were both whaling on Monero back then, and we'd use Zcash as the punchline to jokes all the time. Whenever we felt downbad, we'd say shit like "at least we're not Zcash holders lmao". Insane to think that in 2026, I'm a Zcash maxi now. What a deranged future. Cryptocurrency is an exercise in open-mindedness, but you can't be too open-minded otherwise you get turned out. That's kind of how life is ig. Unfortunately, the same open-mindedness that made him a fortune ended up costing him everything. He got greedy, started chasing the next big thing, and eventually rotated his holdings into EOS and Tezos. Lost everything. Not only that, but he started microdosing acid, which was all the tech bro rage at the time. His story was basically that as a kid they put him on Ritalin, and he said that fried him. Then when he got to college he switched to weed and got addicted to that. He claimed acid was the final solution to his problems. I would still get messages from him from time to time on Signal. Literally just nonsensical garbage. Sometimes it was legitimately combinations of numbers and letters, like he was sending me some encrypted message. The cryptography class was late 2016 to early 2017. I saw him once more in late 2021, sitting on his laptop at a Chipotle. He still seemed fried from the acid. His cadence when speaking was very strange, lots of pauses in weird places. It was genuinely unsettling seeing him like that, almost five years later and he still seemed completely out of it. Super sad. I haven't heard from him in a long time now. No more garbled Signal messages, can't find any trace of him online. I'm genuinely worried he might be dead. The saddest part is that I owe this guy a lot. He's the reason I dumped my entire life savings at the time into ETH at the $4–$7 range. I genuinely have no idea where I'd be today if I hadn't met him. The same guy who helped change my life ended up losing everything chasing the next big thing. So when people ask why I'm so skeptical of new coins that I view as scams, this is why. I've legitimately seen them ruin lives. So much potential lost. Miss him.

Lmao Vitalik a real one!