I’ve left the cult

I worked in the crypto space, in both dev and bd roles, between 2020 and mid 2024. I’ve helped launch big projects. I’ve had 50x, 100x trades. I’ve been recognised at the club and told by random mfers that they lost 20K on my coin - I told them that if they bought on Uniswap it’s their problem.

(this is not a shitpost, I promise)

I’ve experienced the conference culture first hand, how crypto bros fly into places like Paris, Miami or Denver : just to party with the same people, do drugs, and listen to Deadmau5 live for the 69th time. Hell some of these events even hire girls to make crypto virgins feel like they're finally about to get all the bitches CT implied they’d get (I’m looking at you, Dubai).

I had good times, bad times, I made money, I lost money. However, what I worked on and the space I entered was completely devoid of the purpose and meaning I was expecting - when I naively walked into the space in 2020. 

I thought we were gonna change the world. However, the grifters took over, and every single founding principle of the space has gone to the wayside. “Ultra sound money” got replaced with 50x leverage on your daily shitcoin of choice. Decentralization got replaced with 3 bros on a multisig. Fighting the system got replaced with cryptobros spinelessly simping for the “world’s richest man” on the social media platform he owns and manipulates on a whim. 

I’ve slowly woken up to reality, and now that the cat's outta the bag - I can’t even go back to this life. 

I’d rather kill myself than deploy another shitty token/protocol/frontend/bot/contract; do “business development” on Telegram; hop on spaces; trade memecoins on leverage; incorporate shell entities; have an NFT pfp; or go to another fucking conference side event.

Money isn’t everything. 

This culture consumes you, and next thing you know : you’re staring at a two monitor setup with telegram, X, some candlesticks and vscode in tiled windows ; you’re on your 3rd Monster energy drink of the day; haven’t showered; all your friends work in crypto and you can’t relate to normal people anymore. 

Your entire identity is based around how records on a cryptographic ledger will replace the legacy financial system.

It’s a cult. The tech has its uses, sure, but this is getting ridiculous.

Look, I dunno where I’d be without crypto. I’m not set for life, but I’m doing pretty good. I just don’t wanna spend the rest of my life working on something not meaningful. 

The entire space is centered around a class of people looking to extract as much value out of society as they possibly can. And that’s excluding the outright scammers.

I have seen how little people in the space regard those who are less fortunate than them. They feel like they are the in-group, and everyone else are NPCs - no seriously, some bros genuinely believe normies are NPCs, like simulated agents.

They go to obscure digital nomad tax havens, live in a bubble, refuse to learn the language, contribute nothing to the local economy, drive up prices - and then have the audacity to bitch about the locals. These guys worship Elon and Donald Trump cos they think it’ll make “numba go up”. Or maybe they fell for MAGA because it appeals to their dislike of normies and the marginalized, ironically the same people we were supposed to help - with our fancy decentralized ledger technology.

A technological movement designed to liberate the masses from unfettered crony capitalism has been usurped. Its believers have gone from being creators of positive change, to literal vassals of the new United States technofascist oligarchy - backed by the KGB.

It began with block 0 “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. 16 years later, the retards are rejoicing that the MAGA government will inject capital into Bitcoin. 

It has become everything it was against.

Satoshi is spinning in his grave (or the government agency that invented this shit is ROFLing hard rn).

These morons are living in a bubble, prancing round the tulip farm - thinking they’re all gonna become UHNW individuals. Well guess what, there’s literally not enough capital in the world for that to happen - especially not with your grifter, “DARK MAGA” overlords hoarding it! 

XY = K, and your 7 figure net worth goes to zero the moment mfers start selling on the dex.

Crypto bros are parasites and I fucking hate them.

Instead of preventing the downfall of society, they want to accelerate it - and literally put e/acc in their bios.

This is the year I cut off most of the people I used to call “friends”.

Something is really wrong, and it’s not just in crypto. If this shit doesn’t end, the technofascists are gonna win, and we’ll burn all of the world's energy resources on mining rigs, and GPU instances on AWS running slop LLMs that run 24/7 replying to other LLMs - drowning out all human internet activity. They’re gonna play their lil games with eachother, and most of us will be left on the side - fucked : in an overpolluted hellscape.

It’s like if tech bros got rich, and read books about how private equity firms enshittify things to squeeze all the value that they can out of them.

I’ve tried telling my frens in the space that what’s going on isn’t right. However, everyone seems to be brainwashed by Elon’s feed algo modifications. Maybe if I took this post, put it into Gitbook and marketed it like some crap on pumpfun - I might get thru to some people.

I’ve wasted a lot of time here, I should have dumped my entire portfolio in January 2022 and fucked off. 3 years later I’ve learned my mistake.

Thanks for letting me vent, guys. I tried doing this with a therapist once, but got annoyed because I had to explain all the crypto stuff :) 

Edit : thank you for all your comments! unironically, posting this and seeing your responses is legit a major turning point in my life. I'm getting sleepy but imma try read and respond to more comments tomorrow - gn