I round tripped 8 figures last cycle. A few things I learned:
- It’s almost always better to sell too early and miss out on gains, then to hold too long and round trip the bag. This is because eventually, almost everything trends to zero, so even your “early sell” is likely going to make you look like a genius in a few months/years
- If you ever take a PnL screenshot of how much you’re up, sell. You don’t have to sell your entire position, but it’s usually an excellent time to at least trim 20-50% of it.
- Most people on this app have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Often the loudest and most confident voices know the least, while the quiet and self questioning ones are full of wisdom.
- You can’t borrow conviction. If you buy something because someone else did or told you it was “a hidden gem”, you’re almost guaranteed to fumble the bag. They’ll dump on your head while you’re still anxiously waiting for their next tweet or YouTube video to tell you what to do.
- Stop trying to impress people. This is just good general life advice, but it applies triply so to this space. Wanting to impress your friends and family is one thing, wanted to impress random anons on the internet? Insanity.
- There’s Bitcoin, and then there’s everything else. It took me too long to truly realize this. Yes alts can and will occasionally outperform - sometimes for long stretches of time - but basically everything bleeds to Bitcoin over the long run.
- Most people try to outperform Bitcoin by trading these alts; probably leas than 5% of people can actually accomplish this. It’s like trying to outperform the S&P 500. Most people are better off just buying the index.
- This place has a way of warping your perspective to a level that is literally bordering on mental illness. Many of us refused to sell jpegs of a list of words for $50,000 last cycle because we thought “it’s undervalued”. Many otherwise smart people. You are not immune. Herd mentality is real, it takes *a lot* to swim against the current around here. You should try.
- Extending from that point, try and zoom out and also spend time with non-crypto people. 1 SOL or 0.08 ETH can seem like not significant amounts of money (unit bias is real), but add up how much that is per day or year and think what you could do with that money IRL. Also, most people are thrilled to earn a 10% return on their investments in a YEAR, and rightfully so. That’s a great return, crypto just warps everything.
- Compound interest is mind boggling powerful. You don’t need to find a 100x, you’re usually way better off stringing together a bunch of 2x plays or even compounding at 10-50% a year (do the math, do you have any idea how insane compound interest is at high %s over a bunch of years?)
- Put another way: “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”
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Cheers
Crypto tax is broken in America.
The PENGU airdrop is a perfect example why.
And shows what we can do to fix it.
Yesterday I was tagged in a post by this user who got a $250k PENGU airdrop.
It's worth $90k today.
So they can just sell at a loss and not owe tax, right?
Wrong.
In the US airdrops are taxed as income at the fair value when you receive them.
This user owes income tax on the $250k value of their airdrop.
This pushes them into the 35% federal tax bracket meaning they will owe $87.5k in tax on this airdrop.
And since they claimed it in Dec. 2024 - they owe that on April 15th with their 2024 tax return.
Yikes.
Even if they sell today for a $160k loss, they can only use $3k of losses per year against income.
And if the price keeps dumping?
Double yikes.
Nobody should have to potentially pay more in tax than they have in their wallet.
In my opinion, taxing crypto airdrops, staking rewards, mining rewards, etc. as income at the value when received is ridiculous.
Crypto assets are extremely volatile - especially during their initial allocations.
If we wanted fair rules on crypto income tax?
At a minimum:
Any airdropped non-stablecoin tokens should be taxed when they're sold. Not when they're received.
I also think there are great arguments to be made that staking rewards + mined tokens should have the same tax treatment.
Tax them when they're sold.
But what do you think?
Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) didn’t sell drugs—he built an anonymous, free, and open platform on Tor called Silk Road.
Silk Road sold apparel, art, books, collectibles, computer equipment, electronics, herbs, and yeah—drugs. But according to friends who used it, Silk Road was arguably the safest way drugs were ever sold: no street violence, no shady deals, and zero fentanyl. Everything was tested and peer-reviewed, like an Amazon for substances.
For this, the government gave him two life sentences without parole for nonviolent charges, including money laundering—just for using Bitcoin. They relied on questionable evidence and made him an example. Two FBI agents who investigated Ross? Well, a few years went to jail themselves for fraud and stealing Bitcoin from the Silk Road investigation...
So, even if you think Silk Road was problematic, you have to admit that the punishment was wildly disproportionate. This isn’t just about Ross or a marketplace—it’s about government overreach and the state’s power to crush individuals with vague laws.
Today, I’m so happy to hear Ross is free. I’ve met his mom several times—her fight for Ross’s life is an incredible story of a mother’s love. Over the past few months, I’ve been emailing with his wife, Caroline, to ensure he was fairly represented in The Big Bitcoin Book and that they got a copy.
As a developer who has worked with Bitcoin for years, this always felt personal. I didn’t build a marketplace, but it could have been me—or any of my friends—targeted by the government. Ross’s case was a warning shot at innovation, and I’ve always felt connected to him because of that.
Justice came far too late, but today I’m grateful Ross is finally free.
@tatthang@0xCygaar Let’s not pretend they chose Solana because of the culture tho. They chose it because that’s where the majority of memecoins are traded and it provided the biggest probability of success.
Near the U.S.-Mexico border, special agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), working alongside Mexican authorities, uncovered an elaborate underground tunnel concealed within a residence in California.
The tunnel has no exit on the U.S. side of the border.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s being smuggled here.
It is frightening how unpredictable and unfair life can be. Hug your love ones, hug your kids and live in the moment because who the hell knows what tomorrow brings.
From Meredith Gaudreau💙💙…
1/ Recently a team reached out to me for assistance after $1.3M was stolen from the treasury after malicious code had been pushed.
Unbeknownst to the team they had hired multiple DPRK IT workers as devs who were using fake identities.
I then uncovered 25+ crypto projects with related devs that have been active since June 2024.
@CryptoTeluguO@zksync Seems like your family didn’t get included. As someone who is an only child and relatives not into crypto I’d like to keep my allocation as-is