Are Crypto OGs Plumbers?

[Chicken46sw]

Popular Crypto Streamer Threadguy says crypto OGs were trading against plumbers and wouldn’t last a day in today’s market.

“Alt season, bro? The fabled alt season where every altcoin goes up 20x and it just has to happen that way? 2017 ICOs?

Some of the best traders were genuinely the best, don’t get me wrong. But wake up, unc. Gainzy owns 60% of the supply and is dumping on your headtop. Every new narrative is controlled. The game has evolved.

The new game isn’t going to happen on Twitter. Gone are the days where you have influence just because you’ve been here for ten years and you’re a funny poster.”

Do you guys think he’s right? Were the OGs actually playing an easier game and basically trading against plumbers, or was the competition still tough and their success mainly came down to skill?

- Twitter video link - https://x.com/dnapway/status/2086860816851325238?s=46

[Chicken46sw]

And yes I’m a real human being i eat food i get boners and I feel love

[sergiorus]

Of course it was different back then. Not only the industry wasn't big or liquid enough for all the insiders and big sharks to commit the shameless extractions we see today, but many entities were actually interested in growing the industry and as a result their businesses (we now see many of them trading as public companies).

Nowadays it is a big and legitimate market with ETFs, very liquid futures and options and huge DAT companies. It won't be killed by extractions on memecoins or even causing mass liquidation events like 10/10/2025 so of course for a normal folk trying to make money in it it's gotten harder.

[Chicken46sw]

I do agree with what you’re saying. There’s a whole discussion over Twitter about this. I asked over there and got this response. He basically said that we Crypto OG “Plumbers” had our own share of problems.

Here’s exactly what he said:

“2017 ICOs were NOT like the fabled alt szn, brother.

We would read a 1-page white paper with an address at the bottom, and you would send 1 ETH and pray.

It would be some retarded-ass use case, like a coin to pay for hotel stays, or a coin designed to be sent on mobile to third-world countries (Telcoin), coins used for home-sharing networks (Bee Token), a decentralized P2P video coin (Theta), Korean Ethereum (ICX).

It sounds stupid now, but back then, this shit was groundbreaking technology, and we would throw money at it.

Stay with me now.

To transact online, you would need to go to MyEtherWallet and paste in your private key (actually) or plug in your Ledger, manually set gas—there were no dApp connections, everything was manual. No Rabby or Phantom.

We would follow Ian Balina’s lists like the fuckin’ Bible. Any ICO he shilled would instantly get 10x oversubscribed. Bro was the original shitcoin KOL.

It was so Wild West, and there was so much opportunity that we would see Binance Coin at $2 and think it was a waste of time because, why should an exchange need a token?

Most of your ICOs would rug, and you would never get your tokens or your ETH back. Others would send you the tokens, and they’d be worth almost nothing.

But if you just held (or forgot about that Ledger for a few years, in my case), sometimes you’d come back to a surprise, like half a Bitcoin in that stupid hotel coin, or a couple of Bitcoin worth of Theta or Telcoin in 2021.

So no, we weren’t trading against plumbers. We were cowboys in the Wild West, and there was no sheriff in town.”

[sergiorus]

“2017 ICOs were NOT like the fabled alt szn, brother.

We would read a 1-page white paper with an address at the bottom, and you would send 1 ETH and pray.

That's some wild stuff mostly from 2016 and very early 2017. Second half of 2017 was already the era of KYC's token sales.

Most of your ICOs would rug, and you would never get your tokens or your ETH back. Others would send you the tokens, and they’d be worth almost nothing.

Yea, exactly. But you could almost instantly tell which will be a rug.

Now we are in the era where a project backed by the likes of A16Z, Sequoia or Paradigm can speedrun TGE to zero in a few months, where the President of the U.S. or a worldwide known celebrity can blatantly rug everyone with their memecoins.

It's not that OGs traded against plumbers. It's that everyone was vigiland for scammers and bad actors and people with the name and the reputation couldn't allow themselves to be a scammer.

It may sound absurd nowadays, but back then public people were simply afraid of commiting onchain crimes and it really was making a favour to all the market participants.

[Josefjix]

The industry is no longer new, where every project seems to be the best then, investors had suffered from many failed projects and now looking for the real deal, the token are uncountable in the market, so figuring out the best one is the real deal. Nobody wanna gets dumped in the ass anymore.

You could wake up and see your old token done 20x then, but token got no liquidity. Got so many back then where $50 investment will turn to $80k and then no market to execute the trade, no liquidity, just price pump and nothing to do about it. You see it falling back to $0, nothing has to be done, no liquidity.

The only solutions now is strong liquidity, once you can get this stable, strong and smart, you win.

[Alphakilo]

The industry is no longer new, where every project seems to be the best then, investors had suffered from many failed projects and now looking for the real deal, the token are uncountable in the market, so figuring out the best one is the real deal. Nobody wanna gets dumped in the ass anymore.

You could wake up and see your old token done 20x then, but token got no liquidity. Got so many back then where $50 investment will turn to $80k and then no market to execute the trade, no liquidity, just price pump and nothing to do about it. You see it falling back to $0, nothing has to be done, no liquidity.

The only solutions now is strong liquidity, once you can get this stable, strong and smart, you win.

I think 'plumbers' being used here refers to the retail traders of early days who got into cryptocurrency without fully understanding what liquidity or tokenomics was, but the market has changed to be more refined, very competitive and much more controlled by centralized systems which promises speed of execution of trades and much liquidity.
That's why there's much shift these days to assets that have deep capital benchmark, execution quality and exit liquidity.

[JeffBrad12]

Crypto OGs hold and don't trade. Crypto OG holding bitcoin through the decade generates generational wealth while trading is pretty meh. Even if it's true that Crypto OGs were trading against plumbers, the ROI is still higher with bitcoin holding.

Although yes, the game has changed, we are currently in pvp season, ruggers vs retailers who thinks they were able to exit before the ruggers with 60% supply dump their shitcoin on their back thinking they could outsmart the CABAL.

[cryptoaddictchie]

The new game isn’t going to happen on Twitter. Gone are the days where you have influence just because you’ve been here for ten years and you’re a funny poster.”

Well users and traders are now smart. Gone are those days where any influencers can hype their bags via ICO and make it jump like 100x qnd so on. Before this is possible when crypto adoption still at the verge of being built however with AI help today these can be narrowed to most legit alpha or trading techniques.

Though I miss the old days of bullrun and seasonal profits with altcoins.

[maydna]

The OG just hodl and waiting the timing to sell. They don't sell if the price not reach their target and will still hodl. They can do that for a long term and not trigger with the price moving. But I guess some OG who have large money playing an easier game and just trading for some.

We all missed the seasonal profits with altcoin so we can hope that will happen soon before the year end or after this year but if not, we can still hodl and not worry at all.

[slaman29]

I was an early alts trader and 2017, I have said many times, it was easy to be a buyer and make a lot of profit. Bull run, insane bull, everyone was winning. Every 50% dip was so attractive for alts you DIDN'T have. I bought and rebought, made painful mistake of even using up BTC I saved.

Yeah lost a lot. Gained a lot. I was lucky I didn't lose everything... except precious time and frustration and life and sleep etc.

That made me give up social media and trading all at once.

And I wasn't even an OG!!

[justdimin]

The OG just hodl and waiting the timing to sell. They don't sell if the price not reach their target and will still hodl. They can do that for a long term and not trigger with the price moving. But I guess some OG who have large money playing an easier game and just trading for some.

We all missed the seasonal profits with altcoin so we can hope that will happen soon before the year end or after this year but if not, we can still hodl and not worry at all.

I mean OG's weren't even traders, to be fair; you are right about that. People who were here in 2011 or before were people who were interested in a project, not something that they thought financially would make sense. A great example would be the dude who gave away 10 thousand bitcoins for 2 large pizzas, because he was interested in what was going on with bitcoin and how he could have value, and it was a project to them. Do not get me in the other way, not many people know this, but that dude had way more than what he gave. Sure, he paid 10 thousand bitcoins, but he had tens of thousands more on the side, because back in those days, a regular pc could mine bitcoin in dozens every single day; it wasn't really that hard.

In fact, I got in a lot later than them, and even I mined like half a bitcoin with a simple laptop, but things got a lot more difficult soon after. So we can safely assume that the OG's wouldn't survive in today's market, not because they were bad traders, but because they were not traders at all.