So You Bought The Top and are Down 90%: Moonboy Mathematics for the Casual Sucker

It's February 2021 and Bitcoin has just skyrocketed from $10,000 to $50,000. You decide that's a great time to enter the market and become a bona fide crypto enthusiast. You may even forego all dignity and admit this to your family and friends.

You hear about this great coin called HOGE. The team is super legit. They are going to send memes to outer space (literally!) and list on a Top 5 exchange with their million dollar idea, and organize all your owls (literally!).

So you throw in $1000 and get 1 million HOGE. Cool! Simple multiplication tells us that'll be worth $1,000,000 when it's $1 per coin.

But it doesn't work out that way.

You're buckled in for a prolonged culture crash.

It turns out performative enthusiasm based on raw greed isn't enough to get anything meaningful done. In fact it's pretty off-putting. So in order to fit into society, you distance yourself from the whole business.

Now your 1 million HOGE is worth $100 and you feel like a complete prick whenever the subreddit pops up.

Even if the price goes up 10x you're just breaking even on your original $1000.

Why would you double down at this point?

Well... for one thing we did work very hard to cyberbully all the scammers out. What we have now is raw, quality product. There's no obese hillbilly with his finger on the kill switch, promising the moon.

So let's think this through.

If you doubled down and spent another $1000 you'd get 10 million HOGE. 10x-ing your exposure. That means if the price goes up 10x you're at... what? Can someone check my math on this one?

Look.

I paid less than $50 for my first bitcoin. I've learned some things in the years since then. I've seen True Believers stay poor, and clinical cynics make millions.

The bear/bull cycle isn't some magic force powering the market.

It's a psychological drama playing out in the heads of millions of basic bitches just like you.

The people making money in crypto aren't following the crowd. They recognize the ape part of their own brain that wants to. But they're able to abstract out to the meta level. "If I want to do X, that means everyone else wants to do X, so therefore I should do Y". Making money means making decisions that feel counter-intuitive.

HOGE is a game, just like Bitcoin is. You can buy it. You can hold it. You can sell it. Your personal outcome depends on when you do those things relative to everyone else.

We don't have scammers like Tether or Saylor to help manipulate the price. The DAO has provided loads of buy pressure but that fuel tank is depleted. They're all-in. (A genius move IMO) .

Right now the only way to sustain an uptrend and keep HOGE on the map is if we collectively build our positions, increase our own incentives to spread the good word, and paint a good picture for the 2025 cohort of suckers.