If you look at the history of tax tokens, it all started with a 1% tax ,Hoge on ETH being one of the first. That token did a 1000x. Then came the Safemoon devs, who copied the model but cranked the tax up to 10%. At the time, everything on BNB Chain was pumping. People were printing money, so they aped hard into Safemoon without thinking twice. But now we’re in a bear market. If you’re launching a token with taxes above 1%, nobody’s going to buy it. It’s that simple. Start with 1% and gradually increase.

Lessons To My Future Bull Market Self: This is partly to keep me accountable during bull market euphoria and also serves as a guide for those coming into the markets for their first cycle. I’d be extremely impressed if you managed to “make it” the first time and even more impressed if you managed to keep it. The former isn’t even the hard part. It is very much the latter. A blind Bored Ape Yacht Club member could make money in a roaring bull market. This is why many enter the markets for the first time and throw money at something they saw on Twitter, hear from a colleague or (the best one) get shilled by their Uber driver and convince themselves they have cracked the markets. Stuff goes up because more money flows into the system. The opposite is also true. Hence the past 2 years of pain. Your mission, if you choose to accept it… is to bet on the fastest and fittest horses in the race. This way you don’t miss an opportunity of a lifetime sat holding some worthless piece of shit whilst the rest of the people around you are making serious dough. There are plenty of ways to get to that arbitrary number that you think will help you achieve eternal happiness. Whether it will or not is a different matter. The following are some of the most important points that I have sat and stewed over which I think were at times the parts I personally went wrong in the last cycle, primarily. 2017 was just a blur. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing if I am honest. If you check the residuals in my Coinbase account it would be very embarrassing indeed. The last cycle was infinitely better from a performance perspective. That being said, in hindsight, there were still so many stupid and silly mistakes that either stunted my portfolio growth or cost me a small fortune in losses. Let’s get to it. Disclaimer: If you are not mature enough to read this and take responsibility for your own actions in the markets please just stop reading. There are probs a few things I have missed that I will add on as time goes by and I get a brain zap and remember. This is not financial advice, I am extremely stupid. You will lose all your money listening to me Stay Curious and Try Shit - Funnily enough, I think this applies more to people who may be on their second or third cycle. Naturally, when you come into the markets for the first time, all you want to do is digest information and buy shit. The further down the rabbit hole you go the more likely you are to find something early. The reinforcement of making great returns from being early encourages you to continue your exploration of the crypto/on-chain world. Always maintain this edge of being one of the first to try shit out. You never know when you will stumble upon something great. As a bull cycle goes on the edge in the markets tends to erode due to increased competition both on a capital and skill front. People will outwork and outsmart you and there’s always someone with more capital around the corner. Edge can be reestablished by trying shit early and deciding for yourself whether it has something about it. There were many different times last cycle that you could have picked up assets before the masses just by trying the protocol and seeing for yourself. Never leave it down to someone else to tell you. They can’t and won’t do it for you. It has happened recently with Solana. The masses tell you one thing when in reality it is the other. This results in the majority of the market being offside on something that clearly has a lot going for it. Stay curious and try shit. Don’t Chase Yield - If you are new to this market, DO NOT try and chase yield. You do not need to earn 20% on a position less than $200,000 (minimum). There are going to be plenty of times when you are drawn in by a very tasty yield on stable assets. There are also going to be plenty of times when you are drawn in by ridiculous APRs. You’re probably going to provide liquidity on a DEX and get rekt there too. The long and short of it is this. You do not need to concern yourself with earning yield when you don’t have a worthwhile portfolio size. Why earn 20% on stable(ish) assets when you could have liquid capital and earn much more than that, oftentimes in one day (if you choose correctly)? The additional complexity, counterparty risk and smart contract risk are categorically not worth it at this stage. If you play the farm and dump game with new ponzis that come online, please do not even entertain for one second that you should purchase the token that everyone is farming. There are bigger fish with more capital and experience that know how to play these games to a tee. You will be bait. I’d even go as far as saying if this is your first or second time around just buy tokens and don’t do anything else with them (other than sell of course). Maybe there are a few exceptions: Holding an LST like stETH, rETH, swETH or pxETH over ETH if you have a long-term view (again, not really for everyone). Staking a token to match inflation i.e. SOL (in this case use the most lindy SOL LST stSOL or mSOL). If TIME makes a comeback and we go full ponzi season and run it back turbo Don’t chase yield, it doesn’t make sense until you make it. Let Others Drink the Kool-Aid - I was definitely caught sipping from the communal ponzi Kool-Aid fountain a few times last cycle. It’s quite funny because you know deep down that there is something cult-like about certain founders, communities and tokens but at the time everyone is printing money so nobody cares. It always ends up in tears, literally every time. That being said, when you see a ponzi cult that has a founder that people would jump off a bridge for, just buy it. These folks never tend to realise they’ve been dumped or that they in fact were in a cult until it’s too late. The beauty of this (for you; an awakened market participant) is that people tend to wrap their whole online personality up in, said cult and when you are selling they are writing 40 Tweet threads about why the recent fud is unjustified. Let them be the exit liquidity they desire to be. TLDR; Scams pump the hardest, Let others drink the Kool-Aid. Position Sizing - I was too small on the way up and too large on the way down at times. This ain’t good. Larger more concentrated bets on less volatile yet sure-fire wins whilst rotating proportions into higher-beta assets to make more of the underlying position is my typical play. Be wary of liquidity, particularly for on-chain assets. You may get away with poorly timed entries in a bull market but if liquidity thins out you get screwed entering a position and also screwed exiting a position. If they have a buy-and-sell tax which is more popular now, then you get screwed again. I don’t really have much more to say on this one other than pick your poison (which I already have) and don’t fuck up the remainder of your portfolio oversizing into lower conviction plays, undoing the great entry on the large position. If you can’t outperform BTC, ETH and maybe even SOL this cycle. Just buy those and forget about it until McDonald’s puts the minimum wage up to $50 an hour because all their workers got paper rich and left, again. I can’t reiterate the above enough, if you aren’t serious about this and you don’t have the time don’t bother. Just keep it simple. Shitcoins are Generally Good - First, we should define a shitcoin. In my opinion, anything that is purely created for speculation. The irony is that 99.99% of the market are shitcoins but some projects are more honest about it than others. You are gonna lose a fuck tonne of money playing the shitcoin markets. You also stand the chance of making large amounts of capital very quickly, which if you are smart, you can then play the games mentioned above. I can’t stress the fact that you can go completely flat-ass broke trading shitcoins not knowing what you are doing. These trenches are well-trodden by professionals who have more capital, more experience and more information than you. They haven’t stopped all bear market, they are fucking born ready for the next PEPE or SHIB. What is your edge? The chances of you buying a shitcoin out of pure luck that goes on to make you serious money is slim to fuck-all. There are thousands of complete rugs launched Every. Single. Day. Learn the trade if you must, sniff out the good accounts to follow and get ready to have sleepless nights and to start spamming the group family message with /wen_marketing, because this shit will take over your life. If this isn’t for you stick to the point above BTC, ETH and SOL. If you are a born fucking nugget degenerate then see “Position Sizing”. If you don’t get it, buy it - I am becoming a lot better at this next point but still struggle. A lot of the time because I struggle to think like an absolute fucking moron. But, you must be the idiot. Eat, sleep and think like an idiot, if you are to catch the almighty pump led by redacted coins. I know I would have missed the Stepn seed round. Move to earn, like what?! GTFO. I knew better, I was investing in the future of financial technologies. All the while it went 1000x and I had 0 position. Come to think of it move to earn was such an easy sell for the rest of the world outside of the echo chamber of CT. I just didn’t get it at the time and I paid the price. Never again. If you have a visceral reaction to something good or bad, investigate it more, there is probably something there. After all we are emotional beings and charts are just human emotions expressed in candle sticks… I think RT taught me that one. Write, write, write - This is simple. Writing is the fastest way to growthhack your understanding of anything. You have to check your own understanding of things before you publish them or you look like a tit. Just write and do it even if you aren’t going to publish, it helps clear your mind and structure your thoughts. Stay Healthy - I got fat as fuck during the bull market. More money, more time spent sitting at the desk. DO NOT DO IT. You need to train as you would for anything. Staying fit and healthy is a way to perform better. You Can’t Own Everything - There will be unlimited shiny objects during a bull market. You can own them all but you will not perform well. Do your research, get the best entry you can get and let the thesis play out. If you are wrong, you will know a lot sooner in a bull market. Over-diversification is terrible if you are looking to grow the portfolio quickly and well. You can’t physically manage all those positions as much as you would like to think so. There is also no way you know all the bull and bear cases for each token you hold too. If you do, then come work for us at blocmates because that is impressive. The crypto markets are so reflexive that it makes no sense to be over-allocated across too many assets. Winners can often move alone but the full market pulls back together. Get conviction and stop being a little bitch. Break your bags - This stems from the point above. You best know the bear argument for your position because if it begins to come true then you need to exit and move on. If there is no bear argument for your position then congrats you have joined a cult. Supply Dynamics are Everything - Tokenization is such a difficult dynamic to wrap your head around if you are just starting out. But, know this... You best be aware of large token unlocks, who is getting unlocked, the inflation schedule for the tokens you hold and what the supply of your token will be 12 months from now. If you do not know this, then you should not own a token. If you think you can simply beat the market because some 1920’s data said that HODL outperforms, then you are my exit liquidity, thank you. Token supply increases in crypto are absolutely brutal. Large unlocks and cliffs can increase a token supply by 2x overnight. Many tokens from the last cycle will not reach their previous ATH because of the drastic increase in supply. They might hit their market cap ATH but the price could still be lightyears away. Choose wisely. The flip side of this is that a lot of OG tokens from the early DeFi summer days are nearing complete unlocks so no additional supply is left to come onto the market. This is as close to fair pricing as you are going to get. I am not revealing what these are you will have to subscribe to The Meal Deal once it goes live. “Just One More 2x” - If you are in the fortunate position where you say to yourself “Just one more 2x” or if you begin to look at your dream home, just sell everything right that moment. A portfolio ATH is always a good time to take some of the more fruity positions off. If you are thinking it, others are too, you are not special and you are not a market outlier. Do yourself a favour, and secure the bag. Don’t Paperhand Bear Market Entries - If you have just been through the past two years and hated every minute of it but you stuck to the plan and bought as much of a specific asset as possible, the worst thing you can do is sell it early trying to chase other people’s winners. Put it in cold storage out of the way so you aren’t tempted to even “take a bit off and buy back lower”. If you are talented then yeah go for it, most aren’t. Other tips not worth writing a lot about: - Use a DEX and birdge aggregator to make sure you are getting the best price - Always use a Ledger - Check DeFi llama directory to find the correct URL of a site. If that faults go to their Twitter and verify. - Get authenticator 2FA. Get off of your phone number for security backup. - Find your crew, you can’t be everywhere. - Make your own decisions If you enjoyed this then please consider subscribing to The blocmates Newsletter which covers a lot of our thoughts on the market, every Friday! Link - https://t.co/B3KNx1TkNz We also talk to a lot of projects, founders, builders, traders and investors about this kind of thing on our podcast which is also linked below 📺 - https://t.co/QOqnROq9d9

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