FAQs and 1st Q&A
Start here if you're new
This will be my intro post for new users moving forwards from here with links to relevant posts and a guide to understanding the information I am sharing here. This post will be updated semi-regularly and serves as a landing page for new readers that are coming here after the initial month of content.
For the time being, you can use this post as a Q&A. Any question you have about anything, even if you are asking specific questions about your own economic outlook, you can use this post to ask it. On 1/16/2022, I will close this post to additional questions (meaning I will stop answering the comments). A later Q&A will be opened at some point and I will maintain a regular schedule of such if there is demand.
A reminder, the paywall will go up on 1/16/2022. There will still be some free posts after the paywall, but most content will be behind the paywall.
Spotify Playlist for The Substack, as requested.
Guide to the Substack Content
If you are looking for a guide to all existing content on this substack. Please refer to this post.
There is a lot of content that I intend to be sharing here, and even now, barely 1 month in, there is already a lot of content. Please use the search bar to narrow down the results here to see if you can find what you may be looking for. If you use the search bar first and ask a more focused question, it is far more likely that you will get a relevant answer than if you ask a generic or vague question.
Anyways, here are the questions that I think people most likely want to know the answers to.
Table of Contents
Why am I here doing this?
Why am I charging money for this?
What is my overall strategy and why did I choose that?
What is my basic financial advice for almost everyone?
So how do you buy your freedom?
What do I think is most mis-understood by the lay-public about crypto?
How should people starting at Square 1 behave?
Why do I believe in anonymity?
I live in a country that won’t allow me to subscribe, how can I gain access?
I want to share a paywalled post
Why am I here doing this?
Simply put, I get too many repetitive questions on Instagram and my answers and the topics are very difficult to search for people who might otherwise have a question that has been previously answered. This is of course compounded by questions entering my DMs, which no one else ever sees an answer to. I also often want to speak on a topic or the markets in a much longer form than the character limits on IG allow for. And I believe that links and images in time with the words facilitate peoples understanding much better than IG.
Why am I charging money for this?
Several reasons, but the largest reason from my standpoint is to understand if there is actual demand for this and to tailor the information that I am sharing here. If you are paying for this substack, you have agency. Is there something you want me to cover? Tell me. Is there something you want to see or you would like me to expand on further? Tell me. Consider your $10 a voting share in this substack. It’s not an oligarchy, nor is it a monarchy. You are very much paying for access to me. You should feel empowered to maximize that access to your advantage. You should also start viewing any expenditure or ownership you have in this same way. If you spend money, and you don’t get what you want, you should make your grievances known. If no one addresses your grievances, take your money and go elsewhere.
The secondary reason I am doing this is, for income. Duh. Everybody likes money, and if you are good at something you should find a reasonable fee for it, and charge it. Capitalism pushes for the most ideal form of a free exchange to be a win-win. This is the kind of transaction where both parties feel as if they are better off for the transaction. I don’t need to turn any money from Substack, and it is a long way away from being my main source of income. Currently my main source of income is my job, with a close second being an investment in a crypto hedge fund, and a close 3rd being my own crypto activities, and a 4th being a commercial downline, with the 5th being this substack. I have 3 more existing streams of income that are fairly small and inconsequential. I intend to add 3 more streams of income this year (2022), and will be documenting that process here for your benefit, and you can copy me on one of them if you wanted to with less than $500. It would be nice if this substack blew up, but if it doesn’t? I’ll still be chugging along just fine. My current crypto income alone is enough to cover my living expenses as things currently stand. Over time I hope to share some of the basics of my crypto income with real examples here so that you all can copy it if you choose.
What is my overall strategy and why did I choose that?
My over-all strategy is to maintain my freedom by keeping my income streams higher than my monthly expenses. In the crypto space, my goal is to increase my net worth in terms of Satoshi’s and gWei. Yes, net worth measured in BTC and in ETH. That is the only way to know that you are moving upwards in the crypto space. If you aren’t increasing your holdings when priced in these two assets, you are better off just holding those two assets.
I have chosen to view my net worth and income in this manner because I genuinely believe that all financial functions will be replaced by crypto in the next 10 years. In much the same way that the internet replaced many functions in the work place. I even believe that crypto will expand pretty far outside of financial functions. Verifications and the transfer of information will also be replaced by crypto as well. I view this as the most significant investment opportunity of my lifetime, and am doing my best to be present and dedicating enough of my time and capability to it so that I will have no regrets about how I lived in this time period.
I actually disdain a lot of forms of interaction through technology, and while I am investing in the success of this sphere, I am actually doing it to be sure that I will have the control and disposable income in such a future to choose whether such a decentralized digital overlord will consume me or not. I choose not to be consumed, but that means that I must do the work now in order to maintain my freedom in that future. I’m not going in the pod, nor will I be eating the bugs. Yes, every hero that survives their great struggle finds themselves the villain in the story of the future. Digital spaces, and digitized finance will eventually become our enemies. This is a foregone conclusion, as is the conclusion of all righteous struggle. We wrest control from oppressive overlords only to become overlords ourselves, only slightly less oppressive. This is how society marches forward. It is important to be mindful of this and never be so consumed by your struggle as to believe yourself infallible. I am Legend is a hopeful tale about learning to age with grace.
What is my basic financial advice for almost everyone?
First, calm your mind. Forget about luxury goods, cool cars, nice watches, expensive vacations. Forget it all. You must first internalize one truth. Modern Employment is Ancient Slavery in the current form that most people participate in it. Great Book on the subject. So long as you are dependent on your job to cover your expenses, you are essentially a slave for all but 4 hours of your day. A slave in ancient times strove for nothing but to buy their own freedom. Your masters in modern times instead have pulled wool over the eyes of the working class and have distracted them with luxuries; golden handcuffs we call them. The truth has always remained the same, the goal of a slave is to buy their freedom.
It is the rare person who is doing exactly what it is they want to be doing with their time as an employee. We have a contractor at my current place of employment. He loves sea birds, but finds it hard to go bird watching because its expensive to take a boat out into the more interesting waters to bird watch. We need someone to explicitly document how often and how many different endangered and rare sea birds appear in specific areas during their breeding and migratory patterns. This man happily accepts every contract, and goes above and beyond (he even provides high quality action photos despite us never asking for them), because we are paying for him to enjoy his hobby. Jobs like this exist, but they are rare and far between.
For most of us, our goal is to buy our freedom first. This means keeping the operational cost of; You LLC, low while you increase its income. Your employers set traps everywhere for you, and this is a problem all the way up the income scale. I have a coworker that wanted a Nissan GTR, he lives in a shitty apartment and barely has any furniture so that he can make the payments on his Nissan GTR (over $1,900/month with his insurance).
When he finally makes it to the end of his 8 year payment plan. He will be down nearly $200,000, what will he have to show for it? Financially he will be in the same place as a fresh college graduate with a paid off car. As an asset, it will be worth maybe $50,000, but other than that he will not have advanced at all. People that have not had money, and suddenly get enough of it to feel as if they can fulfill some of their more materialistic dreams will often fall into the kind of purchases that will lock them into employment for years at a time. If you do this poorly enough, you will reach 65 and have a questionable retirement (or none at all). Maybe you will have accumulated a home that does not have significant carrying costs (like a condo with a high HOA that can’t be avoided).
Every luxury good that is aggressively advertised to you, especially by People trying to sell a Lifestyle to you (section 1 of this post), is reserved for the free class of people only. They can absolutely tell if you are a slave or not when you are flexing luxury goods. Avoid. The types of choices you make and the way you carry yourself after you have bought your freedom are completely different than when you haven’t. The movie “In Time” does a very on the nose interpretation of this, by equating money with time and showing how the poor in this world run everywhere and generally do things fast to avoid wasting their money.
The same phenomenon can be identified when people are flexing money but similarly showing they still covet it. An example is a man who has bought nice shoes, and is overly concerned about scuffing them or wearing them too thin. His behavior is incongruent with the cost of his shoes. Shoes are a wear item. They are designed to degrade as you wear them. A slave who has purchased beyond their means would treat their shoes like they were an investment they planned to re-sell, because the slave genuinely views luxury goods as an investment.
Collecting is a parallel behavior to this slave mindset. It is fearful purchasing. Buying a car to sequester it in a virgin cave and never drive it in the hopes that it appreciates and can be sold to the sort of person who will drive it is this sort of behavior as well. Conspicuous non-consumption. This is purely a middle-class pursuit. The wealthy conspicuously consume. A Veblen Good is only valuable if you consume it in public. If you are constantly trying to keep it pristine and in a bubble, all you are showing is that you cannot actually afford the good you have purchased. The middle class bug-man takes quite a considerable risk when attempting to shuffle a high value luxury good from one wealthy patron to another for a profit. Avoid.
The wealthy conspicuously consume. The middle class conspicuously non-consumes. The poor do neither. Far better for the middle class to ignore such goods, and focus on buying their freedom. Once you have bought your freedom, you can dabble in such Veblen Goods and do so genuinely, for you have already bought the primary luxury good, which is time.
So, how do you buy your freedom?
You increase your income streams, and you minimize expansions to your fixed monthly expenses. At some point, the lines cross and you are making more outside of work, than you are spending to keep yourself alive and in shelter of some sort. Maybe even more outside of work than in work. Even better if you built a business or income stream that can be sold. This is the sort of good that the wealthy actually treat in the way that the middle class treats luxury goods. Protect and maximize an income stream, and you can sell it for a multiple of its yearly income. You are essentially creating a financial valuation of freedom when you set a price for a recurring income stream.
Say you have an income stream of $1,000/month net. And your expenses are $3,000/month. The price you are willing to pay for this asset, is the same price at which you value 33% of your freedom. In this sense, most assets seem to be significantly undervalued when asking how much your time is worth. Someone that is unwilling to undertake financial risk to buy their own time, is telling you something about themselves. They either do not understand their time, or far worse, they do not value their own time. The second group should be avoided, as they will constantly try to convince you to similarly not value your own time as well. A portion of the population is not only amenable to their own slavery, but are slowly being bred to prefer their slavery. As America settles in to the oligarchy of an established nation and away from the meritocracy of a frontier, these instincts will become rarer among the population that remains here. At least, among the kind of the people you will meet when in common spaces.
These last two sections may sound harsh. They are.
What do I think is most mis-understood by the lay-public about crypto?
The Lay-public is still focused on catching a 1000x investment like BTC and ETH have both done. There are probably still a few such opportunities available. But the chance of you hitting on one with good timing are very low. The Lay-Public still has not picked up on crypto as an income stream just yet, which is what it really is. As it replaces all financial functions, we find that as the middlemen are replaced, the opportunity currently exists to become the new decentralized middle-men charging a fraction of what the financial institutions are shaving off the top.
For instance, this is a link to a decentralized exchange that charges 0.3% on all transactions that occur on the platform. Of that 0.075% is distributed to the token holders of the governance token. Right now each governance token costs around $1 to buy (only available on the DEx and one small centralized exchange that I can’t remember). Stats available here.
The marketcap is still tiny at $18m, and in less than a year has earned $4.2m in fees so far. At the current rate that would be about $6M a year in fees. Roughly 25% of those fees are distributed to token holders. So a current return on investment of ~8%. But of course, not all tokens are staked, and the real return on staking at the current valuation is closer to 40%. If the bet on decentralized exchanges is correct, and if this one does not implode and continues to appreciate and increase transaction volumes, then owning something like this can provide an appreciating income stream and as more eyes are pulled into this space, people will be willing to pay more and drag the real returns down for a new marginal investment. There are many such examples within crypto and these are the kinds of projects that people should be looking for right now. You buy in, secure the income stream, and then watch to see if the income streams increase or if the projects crash and burn. Not every project will survive, and so diversified investments rather than piling into a single moon-bag is the proper plan of attack here. If you own enough protocols like this, one of them will moon significantly. Its a numbers game, you simply need to be able to have the conviction to hold for years, even through some doldrums.
Currently the Lay-public is too busy watching dog coins because they don’t understand market-cap, they have not figured out that utility will win the day in the long run (5-10 years), they are impatient and will not buy, hold and forget, and are often trying to trade with leverage to make quick money rather than investing slow and sitting back.
How should people starting at square 1 behave?
Forget about quick money. Forget about buying nice things. Spend time doing as much research and reading as you possibly can. Until you feel you have a decent understanding of the sector, your only investment should be BTC and ETH. Consider these inflation secured deposits into the crypto sphere. From which you can then make investments into the crypto sphere once you feel you have a nest egg and an understanding of the sector to start making riskier plays. I cannot repeat this enough. Just buying ETH on a recurring schedule and forgetting about it, is a very difficult investment strategy for any investor to beat. Seriously, you will struggle to outperform ETH. There is no rush to pile into random alt-coins and speculative plays for a quick 1000x. You very likely are not going to find that 1000x. Most alt-coins degenerate and lose value over time when priced in BTC and when priced in ETH. From that perspective, it is very clear what the winning strategy is. Do not forget this.
Step 1: Create savings in crypto through BTC and ETH while learning more about the sector.
Step 2: DO NOT SKIP STEP 1
Step 3: Speculate on protocols that can outgrow BTC or ETH
Step 4: SERIOUSLY, DO NOT SKIP STEP 1
Step 5: Speculate on protocols that create regular income streams
Step 6: YOU DIDNT SKIP STEP 1, DID YOU?
Step 7: Cycle a portion of earnings back into BTC or ETH
Step 8: If you skipped step 1, you will very likely be poor, bite the bullet, yes it seems like ETH and BTC are already expensive, THEY AREN’T.
Why do I believe in Anonymity?
There are several reasons why I have abandoned my name and identity. The first is that wallet naming inherently creates a modicum of pressure for people to self-censor and restrict what they say out of a sense of fear. I am fairly honest in real life as well, so I’m not worried about people that know me in person finding this and believing I have lied to them. If they were to read this, they would likely be able to identify my voice within it unless they do not know me or do not pay much attention to me (most friends and family are not paying much attention to you). The truth is that I believe most people do not deserve to hear what I have to say, so in conversation I try to find what they want to talk about and talk to them about that instead. None of my opinions are hidden if the conversation turns to such. People that know me in real life and are here would agree with that sentence. But, the pressure to conform in some ways or another still exist when you are wallet naming on the internet. Even when it comes to small tokens of conformity, like people saying “This is not financial advice.” That is a cucked statement. This absolutely is financial advice. Such a phrase is one of many little white lies that society makes you tell when you are trying to manage how you come across.
One thing I would like to speak on here as well, is that “namefagging” in itself is a form of wallet naming. It is attachment to your online persona and personality. It causes the same sort of attachment as wallet naming. I am fully prepared for and expecting an eventual ban from online space. Guess what, everything dies and moves on. We are constantly making space for youth and the new and vibrant. In a coherent way, one could say that the death of the media and financial media has made space for me. And so too in time I will make space for another. Maybe that person is even here, reading right now. I have much to do in life and many things to accomplish, and some of those things will require me to stop making content online. That day is coming friends. Mourn it now. Envision that day, you will type “flirtcheap” into google and everything you find will be old. And it will always be old, forever from that point onwards. I have had the same experience many times in my life. One great such account was called “The Last Psychiatrist,” One day they disappeared and stopped posting everywhere, forever. But the web domain is still being paid for and kept online. Clearly, this person is still alive, they have simply moved on to another identity, or are maybe not anywhere on the internet at all. Anonymity retains this freedom and this right. The right to disappear. People too attached to fame and identity have not yet realized how valuable it is to be able to go places and not be recognized or known. I have that now. I can go basically anywhere, do basically anything and I am never recognized or known. I am not so egocentric as to believe one day I would have the reach where that would be a problem. I instead am saying that this preservation of the right to disappear is under-rated by most people.
I maintain anonymity as well as I can because I value my candor, my privacy, and my future privacy. How could I, or anyone else online be free if they felt attached to an online identity? They can not.
All that remains of @BPD_GOD on twitter are a few threads that were preserved in text. When they were banned, they did not quickly reach out to their network of friends trying to restore their holdings in the pecking order of social media. Trying to re-enstate a new account. They simply melted away. This transience of true anonymity is a feature that improves the content shared because with every post and spread of information, we always know that the end is right around the corner. If you know the person’s real identity and how to find them the stakes within the town square of the internet are no longer there. The witch burnings of a twitter ban or IG ban, are meaningless when you know there is already a back-up account prepared. And as such the present we have with each other is under-valued and taken for granted. The truth is that every person you know and every identity you enjoy may disappear at any given moment.
People think that I am holding punches on IG or that I am being vague and cautious with my takes to avoid a ban. Trust me, I am not. I say exactly what I wish to say about which topics I wish to say them about. I am doing a “Permament Death” run of this game we call social media, and as such, I treat it with the reverence it deserves. Please consider your approach to the internet and think hard about how you wish to approach this present moment that we have together. Live fully and drink in each moment in full knowledge of your online identity’s impending death. Move forward and accept the constant present that you live in. The worst thing one can do is live in the past because they feel they have left something undone. In any given moment, I have left nothing undone, nothing unsaid, and as such I am free.
I live in a country that won’t allow me to subscribe, how can I gain access?
Not all countries can make payments to Stripe which is the service that supports payments on Substack. If you are in one of these countries, DM me on Instagram or on Gettr (@flirtcheap) and we can discuss crypto payments where I will comp your subscription after receiving crypto. If you do not have access to neither Instagram nor Gettr, please leave a comment here (or any other post) and I will reach out to you to discuss access.
I want to share a paywalled post
If the post is paywalled, I typically leave the first section available as a preview for readers. Beyond that I would suggest that you either do your best to put it into your own words, or find some way to show it to whoever it is you wish to share it with. I’m not going to tell you not to save it as a pdf and email it to your friend, you can always do that, but also consider that I make at minimum 8 paid posts a month, but typically closer to 10 or 12 paywalled posts. I’m essentially selling them around $0.70-$1 per post. When I do give away subs, tell your friend to come and comment on the giveaway post, they might win. Or simply invest and follow along with my charts in the price action section. I have no doubt that you can make money (or better yet, avoid losing money) if you follow along with my general thesis. The prices for all assets in USD will perpetually follow the fate of the bond markets. If you understand those, or at least understand where the bond markets are going, you can reasonably create expectations for all other asset prices.
The above sentence will only be true until this market cycle ends. I genuinely believe that the elite and political class in the US will utterly destroy the bond markets rather than running a balanced budget/budget surplus. Once that market is destroyed the crypto market will ultimately sever itself and eventually function as it’s own separate parallel economy with its own price action which we will have to discover together ourselves. The skills we gain now to move within the current market, will eventually only have moderate relevance towards the world we will live in. It’s important for us to recognize when that time comes and to pivot appropriately, otherwise we’ll be like the midwit King, Paul Krugman, trying to apply an outdated theory to a modern economy.
Please feel free to use the comments on this post as a general Q&A. There is no question so stupid that it should not be asked. I will expand this post in the future from time to time if I feel a very important or common question needs to be addressed in longer form, otherwise I will answer all questions in the comments.
My request would be a how to guide for investing in the speculative/yield farming/staking/Defi Sphere.
I have custody of my own coins in a cold wallet, my BTC and ETH are 60% of the portfolio with some "blue chip/Top 100" (DOT/MATIC/SOL/LUNA/SPELL) alt coins making up the other 40% (no dog coins, lol). I am automatic dollar cost averaging daily on all above protocols from a CEFI.
I have no idea where to start in the Defi space, other than buying the protocol coins themselves from a CeFi, but just buying a curve dao or uniswap isn't really the big picure of Defi, right?
You've said on many occasions that you're almost completely divested from USD. What would you do with a $50,000 emergency fund that needs to be relatively liquid in case of, well, an emergency? Hold USD? Lend USDC on a CEX?