Not all cryptocurrency investors fit the cliché. Many of them are those who are trying to somehow escape from a life of constant struggle.

I can't explain exactly how I became immersed in crypto Twitter (known as CT in crypto circles) and crypto-focused Telegram and Discord groups since late last summer. As a writer, I do not have a regular schedule of activities. Sometimes I write about novels or films. I have written about the overlap between the health care system and the criminal legal system. Crypto would not be an obvious story for me to tackle. And every time the value of cryptocurrencies soars, the corporate media is like a kettle of raptors, writing headlines about an improbable fortune. This mother quit her job to focus on crypto full time and build "generational wealth." Today, she earns about $80,000 a month." This 33-year-old "dogecoin billionaire" is being rewarded with a meme-inspired cryptocurrency. The topic was inescapable, and my longstanding, albeit hitherto private, geeky interest in the workings of the mysterious financial markets drove me to it.

At first I felt a little dirty and embarrassed. Everyone is in these spaces for one reason: to make money. It's a subject that I am still afraid to speak about in my profession and in the wider society. But eventually I began to take an interest in that shame. I stayed a little longer, watching channels on the subway and in bed late at night. It's the kind of rubbernecking that only the Internet can provide, with almost complete access to subcultures to which I don't belong.And I loved this aspect of it—I found myself drawn in by the curiosity and the opportunity to explore worlds that were previously unfamiliar to me.

Gold Bitcoin Cryptocurrency (Sao Paulo, Brazil) - March 13, 2022<br>Mandatory Credit: Photo by Paulo Lopes/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock (12849794e)

Cryptocurrency Gold Bitcoin with chart diagram background.

Gold Bitcoin cryptocurrency, Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 13, 2022.

'Lured by the Casino': a journey inside the cryptosphere - podcast

Eventually I became familiar with the way crypto-obsessed people describe themselves, the phrases and abbreviations they use. I learned to distinguish swing traders and scalpers from hodlers (clinging for dear life) and digens (degenerates, speculative addicts) by the way they spoke and posted. Bitcoin maxi (Bitcoin is the one and only crypto) vs. Ethereal maxi (Bitcoin is for boomers) vs. Ethereal maxi (Ethereal is NGMI), and how they show their loyalty through avatars (Bitcoin maxi often have lasers shooting from their eyes) or, in a smaller subset, their self-care habits (some bitcoin maxis only eat meat; some don't use seed oil, apply sunscreen, ice injuries, and don't touch receipts). Across the entire forum, no unifying politics could be found other than a common conviction that the government and wealthy elites there enlignecasinos.net.

An advertisement for Coinbase, a NASDAQ-listed cryptocurrency exchange in New York.

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An ad for Coinbase, a NASDAQ-listed cryptocurrency exchange in New York. Photo Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Financial market coverage tends to be extreme. Some describe market movements with hopeless mystique, compressing puzzling concepts into tiny units of abstract language, while others are individual stories. In reports on the crypto market, these stories typically focus on people who got rich through bad luck during a bull market or who lost everything after getting rich. There is a third angle that lurks in these groups. Here are people with complex lives and definite needs and desires who, through buying and selling, are fighting their emotions - their fears, which are as important as their greed. They are not, for the most part, wealthy people seeking to acquire more wealth. They are people trying to teach themselves how to get ahead in ways they believe never stood in their way before. They call each other "fam" and cheer for those who make winning trades and pity those who make "losing" trades.

The more time I spent in the cryptosphere, the more I began to see it as a place where our economic ills refract.

When I began thinking about crypto in the late summer of 2021, I approached the discourse with a series of preconceptions about what I would find. The lofty vision of a transparent and fair financial system had almost given way to the worship of popular appetite. Talk about the "radical potential" of crypto, political or otherwise, had been replaced by caricatures of Silicon Valley publicists and gymnastic rats who like to pose in front of luxury Italian sports cars and post close-ups of their Rolexes. (A good day in crypto is equivalent to a year's return on the stock market). Most of what I gleaned about this crypto society was vaguely absorbed from the Internet and the news.

I quickly realized that the term cryptocurrency was no longer accurate enough to describe the various projects under its umbrella. It is more than just bitcoin, ether, and the occasional meme coin. There are thousands of projects and their corresponding tokens, most of which have nothing to do with the ambition of replacing the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Simply put, each project is built on the blockchain and is referred to in crypto circles as the "settlement layer" or "layer 1." Ethereum is layer 1, as are Terra, Avalanche, Solana, Cosmos, and others. Each Layer 1 has a unique currency or token that is used for transactions within the ecosystem. There are two main ways to access these tokens. One is to access the blockchain itself, either through a centralized exchange such as those used by day traders in forex and stocks, or through a decentralized exchange.

Every token has its own "community" of loyal holders, who gather on project-specific Discord or Telegram channels to talk about the roadmap, ask questions, and, as is often the case, complain about the price ("Why is the price dropping? and is there any news?"). The administrator acts as a bridge between the project team and the community, sharing updates. For some projects, community support can resemble a religious faith. Imagine a Telegram channel run by Amazon where thousands of Amazon shareholders gather to make friends, support the launch of a new service, and get angry when company representatives are not responsive enough. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. But it happens in crypto.

As I looked around these online spaces, I found that every token, every project was at the mercy of the hype cycle. Usage value was only incidental; the hype in the last third of 2021 was mainly on NFT, a project that has even a passing association with the words "metaverse" and "gaming," Layer 1, and a series of community-owned decentralized financial applications known as DeFi 2.0 It was all about. Trading aside, the main strategy people rely on to make money is to identify the latest hype, get in early, and pivot to the next one ahead of the crowd. If you study the charts, you can almost see how money moves en masse from one speculative focus to the next.

Screen showing cryptocurrency trends and prices at a cafe in Thailand.

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Screen showing cryptocurrency trends and prices at a cafe in Thailand. Photo Saw Zeya Tun/Reuters

Influencers (who else. ) are running the hype. Some of them have real skills and knowledge, or at least "OGs" who have traded through past bull markets and have developed a following by taking the time to share their wisdom on how to grow a portfolio and chart trading. Some even produce free educational content and preach the gospel of risk management (e.g., never take more than 1% of your portfolio at risk). However, a small number of marketers seem to be paid to push certain tokens to their followers. They purchase tokens at a low price, or receive an allocation in exchange, and then promote the tokens when the price rises. As their followers buy tokens, they have the opportunity to exit their positions at a higher price (every seller needs a buyer). They use Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and some have private channels on Telegram and Discord. For the uninitiated, it is not always easy to tell the well-meaning from the shameless. However, scammers tend to reveal themselves by posting many "hopioms" ("#Bitcoin rewards the patient," "I hope over 950,000 of my Twitter followers will be #crypto millionaires in 2022").

Some legitimate projects are outright scams. It is commonplace for developers to be anonymous, and anyone can easily launch a token and corresponding liquidity pool and make it available on decentralized exchanges. The creators of the play-to-earn game "Squid Game" borrowed its name, design, and winner-takes-all ending from the hit Netflix series; buyers of SQUID tokens found it nearly impossible to sell, and the price soared to 110,000 in about a week After soaring to %, the creators ran out of liquidity for their project and walked away with about $3.36 million. Tweeting anything containing the words MetaMask or Trust Wallet, the names of two widely used crypto wallets, invariably brings up phishing bots posing as support staff.

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