The man who kept clicking is the man who won it all

when i started building echo 2 years ago, i knew it had 95% chance of failing. to be honest, i couldnt really imagine any other outcome, but i thought at least it may be a noble failure worth attempting. i certainly didn't think echo would be sold to coinbase, but, here we are: today coinbase bought echo for ~$375m. echo will remain a standalone platform under its current brand for now, but we will integrate sonar's public sale product into coinbase, and likely introduce new ways for founders to access investors, and for investors to access opportunities into coinbase itself. over the years i have chatted to brian a handful of times, and mostly to complain at him honestly. i have always respected how brian would listen to an outsider chat shit at him on the phone and take the feedback seriously. now, instead of complaining, i will have the opportunity try to do the work to make things better. crypto itself has moved on a long way since we started working on echo. i guess partially this is because of the election result. but, i feel energised by a lot of the cool things being built in crypto again: hyperliquid, zcash, stablecoin supercyle, and so on. feels like a good time to be on the field instead of an idiot with a twitter account yapping nonsense. well, i guess i still will be that. anyway, job's not finished. onwards. oh fuck yeah, before i go, the final season of up only (now "unc only" due to our severe old age) will commence when we figure out who the guests should be lol cobber

When ppl claim this I always wonder how they think it happens, or have unrealistic expectations on how much $1bn actually is. I joined crypto with $200. If I held my initial bitcoin since then and never traded, I would have ~$300k. If, instead, from that moment I sold the top and bought the bottom of every crypto cycle on Bitcoin, and never paid any taxes, I would have ~$6m USD. If I put my entire net worth into the Ethereum ICO and never touched it, today I would have ~$150m pre-tax. While it was definitely possible to have made >$1bn with the opportunities in the market, these versions of reality would also require me to make no mistakes, and have no need to spend $ in real life, or take excessive risk via leverage. In reality, I grew up in a working class family. I didn’t have a trust fund and I had to pay off my student loan myself. I had a job at Tescos while at high school. After university, I needed to pay rent and fund cost of living and eventually buy a place to live. I worked at startups for relatively little $ salary, and while a couple have done okay, they still are illiquid and worth nothing until some exit. Perhaps if I erase a couple of dumb mistakes and drawdowns, or if I had a lil more grind, then my answer would be different today. But it is easy to say this with perfect hindsight vision. It’s easy to see where you could have optimised better, and decisions you made look dumb when the past makes things so obvious. The truth is I have always optimised for enjoying my life and not going to 0. I never felt like I had a safety net, so it was never possible for me to do anything in any other way. I would probably have less money if I had tried to add more risk or chased $ harder, because being all-in with your entire livelihood is a mental battle and I feel I only win that battle when the stakes are lower. In writing this, maybe I do understand why CT folks believe this, because modern CT sees crypto as a late-stage lottery ticket farm, where the optimal strategy is to 5x leverage up your portfolio in a hope of catching a good 20% move and then leaving. Or, literally going all-in on the next coin they heard Ansem is buying. So perhaps to them, looking back at the charts, of course that’s what successful folks did. In reality, I use leverage close to never (and typically to reduce risk rather than add risk — have used it to add risk maybe 3 times in the last 5 years, and maybe 15 times ever). I never go all-in on anything, have only ever done that on BTC and ETH before in the last decade. When I buy other things, I limit risk to tiny amounts, because I treat it as a 0 until proven otherwise (so, always <1% liquid portfolio). Liquid portfolio is also a smaller % of overall portfolio to future-proof against my own fuckups. Obviously I made a lot of money, I have been here 12 years! CT doesn’t want to hear about “getting rich in a decade” though. I am happy with where I am and have never really cared or optimised for maximising $ earnings, but instead having a nice life that lets me enjoy the game we play together.