Any other classics that haven't been mentioned on this trip down memory lane?
So you think you're going to start a Bitcoin business, right?
Okay, it's not a crime. It's just the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year. So, here are some simple easy steps for your convenience.
0.
Starting a bitcoin business is a liability. The first thing you need to understand, and you need to understand it well. At sixteen hundred hours while you were sitting around your living room scratching your ear you were worth X. Your life, your ideas, your business, the shit around your house that you own, all that which makes up your life, added together, worth X. At sixteen fifteen, eight minutes after you had started your Bitcoin business you were worth X-k, where k is always positive and SIGNIFICANT. Starting a Bitcoin business is a liability, it makes you worth less. In fact, all the rest of your life in Bitcoinland will be attempts, more or less successful, to limit and reduce that liability. This is the outlook you must have not in order to be successful, but in order to have a shot at it. This is the outlook you must have in order to not guarantee failure.
1.
Identify yourself to the community. This means, at the very least, creating a WOT account.
If you do not have a WOT account you are not part of Bitcoin business. This is the criteria, no matter what you might think. That's where
everyone looks, no matter what social media might be telling you. If you aren't in the WOT you aren't in Bitcoin.
This might also mean making a few social media profiles. The difference between an account on StumbleUpon called MyBTCBiz, a reddit account called BtcBlaBla, a myspace, tumblr, whatever and a forum account called MyBizPr is nil. They're all the same thing: social media profiles. Sure, they may be useful. You wouldn't think to substitute a forum registration for a company registration IRL, now would you? Same thing here.
2.
After completing step 1 spend at the very least six months learning. This attitude whereby you think you're great and valuable, so great and valuable in fact that you had the business idea first, then you ran into Bitcoin and then in the heat of the moment saw to that formality of a forum account so now you're ready for "investment" five hours later after dealing with the pesky minimum posts rules is bullshit. Pure bullshit. This isn't how it works, if you've not been in the WOT for six months you are not ready to start a Bitcoin business for reason of intellectual incapacity, irrespective of what you might think. (And yes, of course you will think you're the exception to this rule. You are not the exception, you are just
unskilled and unwarare of it. The rule is exactly about you.)
Yes, maybe if Warren Buffett decided to go into Bitcoin he'd just put a notice on his Berkshire Hathaway website identifying his WOT handle and be ready in five minutes. The reason Warren Buffett can do that and you can't is that you're not Warren Buffett. Yes, one day you might become the next WB. That doesn't mean you're it today, consumer credit does not work in this field.
So, what you do during your six months is that
2.1. You buy some Bitcoins. Get a good idea of what the options for doing that are, how the exchanges work, how the OTC market works (if by now you do not know what OTC or WOT stand for add two months to your lockdown as punishment for being the sort of idiot who, when he encounters words he does not know, instead of investigating their meaning brushes them off to "get on with the reading").
2.2. You sell some Bitcoins. Get a good idea of how that works, how you get your money back out,
what the limits are, so on and so forth. You wouldn't want to discover later that you have a billion dollars in Bitcoins you can never spend in any way, other than by donating to the Bitcoin Gates Foundation now would you? What sort of WB would that be?
These are not a waste of time. They are here to give you an idea of how
your future customers will be seeing life. You want to buy some Bitcoins even if you don't need them, and sell them even if you don't need to and buy back just on general principle. You are unit testing the currency. Boring? Fuck you.
2.3. You read, on this forum, and you discuss with the market participants. You get your pecking order straight. Who are the movers and shakers? Whose word is worth 10k Bitcoins no questions asked and from whom? Why? You get the history straight. Who were the scammers, historically? How did they do it ? What are the patterns? How did the people who matter react, and why? What does that say about them, how does that color their relationships among each other?
If you don't have the list and don't comprehend how the interactions work, if you look at DeathandTaxes and have no fucking idea who he is, if you think we're buddies cause I mention him by name and so forth you're not done with this. Must lurk moar.
2.4. You ask questions. Only on step 2.4 do you ask questions, by the time you're here you have already done a lot of work! You have sunk into this upwards of a hundred hours of your spare time, whether you like it or not, you've filled half a notebook with dumbass scribblings, you have fucking hand-drawn maps hanging from your bedroom wall. This level of intensity is not an upper bound to aspire to, but a
minimum requirement.
Your questions will get a lot of stupid answers but also a complete set of correct answers. Pick the set, disregard the rest, you're on your way.
3.
Announce your business plan. If you think your business plan has to be kept secret because otherwise others will steal it you are probably too stupid to be in business (not just BTC, but in general).
Let me explain to you how business "stealing" works: at the time MPEx was created (Feb 2012) there existed GLBSE already, which sucked at that time. Nobody flailing around in a cloud of stupidity almost mould-like in consistency seemed to be aware of it, but GLBSE sucked. And so Mr. P decided to make a securities exchange that worked right and was run correctly.
So, pro tip #1: there's so much to do and so few people capable of doing it in Bitcoin that if your plan makes sense and you seem even remotely competent everyone else who is competent
will breathe a sigh of relief. They aren't going to "steal" your idea of doing the absolutely fucking obviously banal, cause so much is needed I couldn't begin to tell you.
Pro tip #2: if you are incompetent, the people who are competent aren't going to steal your business early. They are going to steal it late, just like MPEx demolished GLBSE. They don't need early mover advantage, they will come to your market six months or a year late, break off your arms and beat you over the head with them until you are reduced to a bloody mess.
So, forget about anyone "Stealing" your business. When S.DICE was announced, a bunch of forum muppets rambled on about how it's not worth its valuation because "everyone could do it". And
I laughed at them then and so to prove my point that they're laughable idiots they declared that they shall do it! It's been months, who has managed to steal the business? You can't steal any business from the competent, and if you're competent yourself you don't even try to, cause it makes no business sense.
Thus, at the very least, step 3 gives you this measure of protection, whereby other competent people know you're doing X and so don't start doing X too. It saves our time and effort, rather than doing something twice do two of the fifty billion things that still need doing.
Obviously your announcement will gather a bunch of crap from a bunch of nobodies. But lucky for you, you've been doing this by the numbers, and you have the list. You know why you don't care what Joel Katz says about anything: what people who don't run businesses say is irrelevant. You know why you care what piuk says about anything to do with the blockchain (do you?).
4.
Almost there.4.1. If you actually got no objections, just pats on the back you're golden. Go do your thing, try your best not to fuck up, when in doubt ask people you trust and that's that.
4.2. If you actually had some objections, do not proceed until the people who raised them declared themselves satisfied. The odds that they don't have a point are dismal, and more importantly, the odds that they wouldn't withdraw objections along the lines of the most favorable construction for you are nil. If someone's pointing things out to you that won't work with your model they're right. If nobody is that still is not proof your model can work.
Stick to this and I might be hearing your name in a year or two. Don't, you just fade into the background noise, yet another of the many who keep paying ten or fifty dollars a month to be part of a new and exciting MMORPG, sorta like the glassy eyed FB credits buyers.
Good luck in any event.
and
Personal responsiblity and the Ponzi scam.
Prosperity is in general the result of the working of free markets. The one caveat to this observation is that market participants have to be responsible. It doesn't matter so much if they are intelligent or not, it doesn't really matter if they're good christians or devout muslims or anything else, but they do have to be responsible.
When some people behave irresponsibly the result is that they lose their money, which flows, albeit indirectly and circumvolutedly but nevertheless unerringly, to more responsible participants.
When a small majority* of participants behave irresponsibly however the net result is not just pain to their own fortunes, but pain spread across the board. All of a sudden you have to be very intelligent, and very experienced, and very well informed to manage to keep your money safe, and often enough even that's not going to suffice.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot has the unpleasant effect of creating a high powered idiot. He can now wreak havoc on the exchange rate, which increases volatility and on the long term hurts everyone involved in bitcoins, because volatility is, much like inflation, an indirect tax on users.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot has the unpleasant effect of creating half a million bitcoins' worth of valueless receipts, which are pretty much indistinguishable to the naked eye from valid receipts. Thus, if you pay on anyone's credit you are basing your judgment not on actual fact, but on an unknown and pretty much unknowable mixture of fact and hogwash.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot is a bad idea. There are people whose personal responsibility in this matter is greater than that of most everyone else, people who have in effect acted as lieutenants for the random idiot. This thread is a convenient spot for all of them to avoid the indignity of being called out, and instead freely and willingly admit their mistake, and by admitting it learn from it. Specifically, learn that they aren't nearly as qualified as they thought to play the "banker", and by this make one step towards maybe one day actually being bankers.
The wanna-be bankers are not alone in their hour of humiliation. There are plenty of others who spend their entire day spouting nonsense on this forum, either under the guise of being "journalists" for some monthly magazine that does a couple issues a year or just as random internet experts in everything. Obviously they won't be learning anything on this opportunity as they haven't learned anything on any of the previous ones in their lives. That's after all fine, what would a mining town be without the drunks and general scum?
Aside from these practical considerations, there are some more general points to be taken home by anybody who wants to be a little smarter today than last month, and possibly have a little better shot at actually making money than before.
1. Learn the pecking order. All opinions are
not equal. Some people are to be respected. Learn who. Some people are irrelevant and easily ignored. Learn who. More importantly than the who, learn why. Is it just because "everyone else seems to think so"? That's no good, forget it. Is it because they were right when everyone else was wrong? That's perfect, especially if it occurs with any sort of consistency.
2. Business means something very specific. Only the permanently poor imagine business = "anything to do with money". There's no business without a business plan. If something purports to be a business but "it can't" or it just won't share its business plan
it is not a business. This means
you can't be investing in it. Sure, you can throw money at anything you wish, as for instance the toilet bowl, Ponzi scams or scantily clad girls. However, in order to invest you absolutely need a business first.
3. Learn how to deal with your own mental limitations. If you think you don't have any you find yourself most likely in the situation described
here:
If one skims through the psychological literature, one will find some evidence that the incompetent are less able than their more skilled peers to gauge their own level of competence. For example, Fagot and O'Brien (1994) found that socially incompetent boys were largely unaware of their lack of social graces (see Bem & Lord, 1979 , for a similar result involving college students). Mediocre students are less accurate than other students at evaluating their course performance ( Moreland, Miller, & Laucka, 1981 ). Unskilled readers are less able to assess their text comprehension than are more skilled readers ( Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994 ). Students doing poorly on tests less accurately predict which questions they will get right than do students doing well ( Shaughnessy, 1979 ; Sinkavich, 1995 ). Drivers involved in accidents or flunking a driving exam predict their performance on a reaction test less accurately than do more accomplished and experienced drivers ( Kunkel, 1971 ).
In short: if you're not aware that there's anything wrong with your judgment of "business", "finance", "investing", "money" and so forth that is almost certainly due to the fact that you are
very weak on all of these topics, likely significantly below average. You should spend a good deal of time reading and a greater deal of time testing things out methodically before you promote yourself mentally to "average", or even "crummy". This means years. Years.
The advantage of BTC is that it's a very cheap and very clean way to learn about finance. The disadvantage (if we can call it that) is that it's much akin to falling in love: very, very, very hard on the knees. Vitriolic to the ego.
4. Step outside of your ideology. You might have been brought up in a very repressive social milieu in which some particular ideological slant was drilled into you. This is working to your disadvantage, get rid of it. Are you sticking up for your friends because they're your friends rather than because they have a point? Great for facebook, horrible for BTC. You will lose money. Are you following the crowd like a welfare state lemming? Great for the white collar slave, horrible for BTC. You will lose money. Do you think form is above content and as such it's okay to invade foreign countries and slaughter civilians just as long as nobody says shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker or tits on TV? Great for being an American, horrible for the free world. You will lose money.
5. Re-read this entire post. It probably didn't fully sink in on the first pass. Seriously. Alternatively it is always easier to just not like me. You will lose money.
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* This term of... art, let's say, will go down in BTC history.
not least.
Actually everything she wrote.
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