Since my DM's are packed with @DeGodsNFT/@y00tsNFT brethren looking for airdrop alpha, let's do a🧵
Links come last. "What to do" means nothing without WHY we're doing it + top-level plan for HOW to do it.
Context is key, and I want you to fucking win.
https://t.co/SjXcf8LDiW
5 months ago my computer got hacked and I lost $150,000
At the moment it was the worst day of my life
I lost a tremendous amount of money and was embarrassed on a public stage.
Looking back now, I couldn't be more grateful
Let me explain:
On January 13th of this year, a group of Russian hackers (shout out the internet sleuths for figuring that out) broke into my computer and took everything.
Hijacked my Twitter, Substack, Gmail, Discord, and broke into all of my crypto wallets.
Heck, even to this day I'm getting alerts from accounts I reporting I have suspicious activity.
I still remember where I was. Sitting on my couch about to eat dinner with my partner. I started getting texts that my assets were being moved.
I look at my digital wallets. All empty.
Tweets being sent out with malicious links from my account. Emails with malicious links being sent out from my Substack.
I was in shock. Didn't even move for hours from that spot. I knew my entire life just got turned upside down.
What made it worse was I was a public figure. Everyone knew about it instantly. All I could read online was about how I lost it all.
I wish you could see my DMs from that month. The most vile, toxic, putrid individuals in the darkest corners of the internet were attacking me.
It was brutally difficult. Not only because of the negative attention, but because it felt like my goals were torn away from me.
I'm not rich. I come from 0 money. I was saving everything I could so I could chase my dreams.
My dream was to quit my job and build this account and my business full time.
The money I lost was my ticket to achieving those dreams.
All of a sudden, it felt like those dreams were destroyed.
It felt like my purpose was taken away from me.
So I disappeared for 3 weeks.
I can still remember what my partner said to me on that night. That somehow, some way, things would be better after this than they ever were before.
Turns out she was right.
It's funny what being in the trenches does to you. Being at rock bottom. It changes you.
It changes the way you think. It changes the way you operate.
I don't mean to offend anyone, but I don't think people who are handed everything, who have never faced a true challenge, can ever truly experience the hardening that comes from hitting rock bottom.
There's a mental toughness you can't create through meditation and saunas that you can only get from being punched squarely in the face.
That punch in January changed me.
When I came back from that long break I was a different man.
I completely transformed emotionally.
The small things that bothered me before, have almost no impact on me now.
I came back with my singular goal in mind, building a business and working for myself.
I doubled down on effort. I doubled down on eliminating distractions.
3 months after the hack, I quit my job
My newsletter and socials were growing faster than I ever could imagine.
My community was at an all time high.
Never did I think within 12 months would I be making enough to support myself with this account. I accomplished it in 3 months.
It's hard to say what life would be like if I didn't get almost everything taken away from me.
I can very confidently say, I wouldn't be here.
If you've gone through something similar or are going through tough times now, just remember that as long as you have your health, you have everything you need.
Everything else is just noise.
Let all that sh*t and all those people that try to tear you down go.
They don't matter, they're just deeply insecure.
Keep fighting.
Keep pushing.
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having worked in the blockchain space for ~2.5 years I've formed some unpopular opinions that I'd like to share.
1. the problems with security are laughably underestimated by almost everyone here.
most people act as if losing your identity and all of your money because you clicked the wrong button is not a massively huge, unacceptable, gaping problem. this still happens all the time, even to "veterans". this is such a problem that I find it tough to recommend to people who are not tech savvy to even try using most of this stuff.
2. the large majority of companies are absurdly overvalued.
at peak euphoria there was software that barely worked and with hardly any actual users valued at multiple billions of $, there are still protocols valued a billion $ or more who have yet to launch a working product and if launched, the majority of these projects will no where even close to live up to their marketing or self-imposed hype and often have critical issues they have yet to actually figure out that are part of what they promised, and are often just overly complex ponzi schemes who have successfully overpromised and confused investors enough to give them money.
3. I love most of the people I've met and have worked with.
that being said, there is a massive variance of people working in this space, more-so than anywhere else I've worked and by a long shot. this means being bombarded by a countless stream of grifters and people who want to simply use you as a financial instrument or a stepladder of some sort. when you reach a somewhat high profile this becomes unmanageable and will affect your mental health.
my dms and many of my tweets are bombarded by airdrop farmers or scammers. people will go to almost any length to get your attention only to often just be trying to get something out of you once you actually talk with them.
4. there are few use cases that actually make sense today.
finance / payments, digital ownership, data archival, recently our infrastructure is beginning to be able to handle the scale of things like gaming and social.
but as a developer building an app outside of these domains, it's extremely tough to find a use case that's valuable to the *average* person in the world, especially with the limitations of wallet UX and security.
instead everyone keeps building for the exact same set of users over and over. these are *extremely* talented builders, this isn't their fault, it just isn't possible today with the current state of the technology.
5. almost everyone you meet is founding a company of some sort, often competing with a hundred other similar products that do or are hoping to do the same thing, instead of collaborating. almost all with the hopes of launching a token and striking it rich.
yes, this happens in the traditional software world, but it is at an extreme in the blockchain world. innovation is great though, so this could be looked at as a good thing if you take into consideration that a percentage of these people are actual geniuses with good intentions who deserve to be successful, which is the case IME.
6. business models are fucked.
there are very few protocols or apps generating actual revenue, most are just hoping to launch a token. this is because it is very tough to build a product, get users, and monetize with the current state of the technology. there are a few outliers of course, but they are just that.
7. hype as a measure of integrity. it's all a blur.
the more hype a team, company, person, etc... tries to gather around themselves the less I can trust them. every day there are countless announcements all claiming to be revolutionary or game changing. there are teams who have raised hundreds of millions simply from tweeting out the right things.
instead the teams and people I've learned to trust are the ones who ship then shout, and who are pragmatic about their updates. @paradigm is a great example of this, only talking and gaining excitement once a big thing is ready, and usually it is of very high quality.
an announcement of an announcement or an announcement of a pre-announcement is not unheard of in this space and is a huge red flag.
>> conclusion
I have more I could go into but I'll stop for now.
the point of this isn't to be negative, I am one of the biggest believers of this technology.
instead it's to be a realistic view of how things are in hopes that we can improve the entire space.
again I will underscore that most of the people I've actually had the chance to work with, meet at conferences, or meet through acquaintances have been some of the most exceptionally smart, kind, and socially conscious people i've ever met.
even with all of the negatives, things have come a long way in the 2.5 years that I've been here. some of the issues i've outlined are things that we're working on at @AaveAave and @LensProtocol which is fulfilling work.
To celebrate our intro, we're happy to hold special giveaway for our community🎉
Win a prize pool of $500!
How to enter:
🔸Follow @GalahadFinance
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Don't miss out on this opportunity to be a part of our celebration!🙌
T-6 hours until our flight to Bali 🏝️
The @SurgenceNFT team would love to connect with other builders as well as community members!
Tag someone for us to meet below 👇
The best alpha I gave on the auditing session is definitely: https://t.co/TXzOYkAhLr
It scans all the source code from any ethereum smart contract to the point where you can search whatever piece of code you want. Hidden Gem.🤠 Specially useful for bug bounties