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Song of the Week - Lost Dog Street Band - War Inside of Me
Table of Contents
In Love with an Illusion
Economic Calendar
Irrelevant Inflation
English Interest Rates
Crypto Macro
Conclusion
Internal References
1. In Love With an Illusion
“What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?” - W Somerset Maugham
This is Bitboy yesterday, asking for help on Twitter to use a DEx. The first time you use a DEx, metamask will ask you to authorize the site to access your wallet, and the first time you use a token, metamask will also ask you to authorize the token contract. He’s here being asked to authorize the token contract but is posting that screenshot on Twitter asking why the DEx transaction isn’t going through. He does mention that he tried several times, which implies he may have gotten past this screen and his trade was exceeding the slippage limits of the DEx. Either way, he’s exposing his unfamiliarity with DeFi.
There’s a lot to dig into this, but I want to start by reminding you all of something from one of my first posts.
I would also like to add, that probably 90% of all social media crypto content is paid for. We are still very much in the wild west, below is the media kit for BitBoy Crypto. A popular crypto youtuber. Nearly all content you see in this sphere has been paid for.
And the same is true for social media. Below is data that was collected by a marketing team for a L1 crypto protocol of different twitter/youtube influencers to pay to create what seems to be grassroots support for crypto. There are very few genuine influencers that aren’t making money through fabricated opinions and assessments. When I review protocols here, I will not accept money for it. I also will be showing you, all forms of revenue that I create from this substack. When I use affiliate links, I will tell you, and I will even have a post about Amazon Affiliate sites, how to make them, and how to make money from seemingly reviewing items for sale so that you can copy this if you choose to do so. (Insert - Lol, life whacked me on the head and I never got around to this - it’s still in my drafts.)
That youtube ad revenue isn’t paying the bills anymore. Looking at these prices, I’m sure quite a few of you are thinking about career changes. I’m also sure that some of you that are more analytical (who am I kidding, thats everyone here) are probably realizing how much each follower is worth (almost nothing).
If you’re good at anything, never do it for free.
Bitboy is a marketer. He’s not a degen, he never was. I think a lot of people are angry because there are many people who make money off of a group or industry without actually having authentically participated in it. That anger comes from the illusions we harbor about the things we see.
I’m not mad at Bitboy, it’s almost not even worth talking about. We harbor illusions about things that we interact with every day. Many people might even say that one’s spouse, girlfriend, etc. is a very different person from the concept that one has in their head about who they are. Your parents might see you as their child still, while you are in fact a functioning, independent adult. Your longtime friends might still see who you were in high school, without really conceiving that you are an adult in a position of authority.
So too do we often look at media figures and assume they are someone else than they actually are. What we see and hear interacts with our own priors and we create our own meaning.
This video is a great example of how we can create our own illusions. The video explains the entirety of the illusion. And you can’t overcome it so long as you are looking at the video. Your brain prioritizes what you see over what you hear, and if the two are in disagreement, your brain will interpret sound to line up with what you see.
Similarly, when it comes to marketing, if someone can present the illusion of expertise, authenticity, and competence, our brain will fill in the lines of such with the expectations that come along with those illusions.
I don’t think any of the degens ripping BitBoy on Twitter have bought into these illusions, but they have bought into another illusion. That illusion is that crypto marketers shouldn’t exist who are not authentic to the space itself. Whether that sentence is true or not, is irrelevant. Crypto-marketing is a market in and of itself, whoever exists at any given time is whoever manages to win the fight for attention. It’s a competitive market. Influencers are mad that by some metrics they might be losing to BitBoy, who in some ways could be said to be preying on his audience.
If we want crypto-marketing to be better, then we have to rise up and legitimately outcompete BitBoy. We won’t have authentic people in these spaces just because we deserve it. To deserve it, we have to earn it.
There are a lot of different ways we can earn it. You can see BitBoy’s media kit (from 2021, prices have probably changed) above. VCs and project dev’s seeking effective marketing spend are going to be comparing him to whatever you’re offering. We (authentic degens) have to offer them a better return than what he’s offering. We have to convince them that marketing to degens and bringing legitimate usage to their platform is of more value than marketing to users to pump prices on a CEx so they can dump their allocations onto retail.
But even that is a deeper concept in and of itself. The bigger question is who are you marketing to? BitBoy’s primary target is not crypto native users, but just users looking to buy things on a CEx, ride a wave, and sell for profit. If you market to Degen’s you will never capture and take BitBoy’s market share. Maybe the answer that we legitimately have to live with is that BitBoy is here to stay, and we have to accept that non-technical marketing to users who are not DeFi native is likely going to be dominated by individuals who are not DeFi natives themselves. We’ll have to dominate the rest.
Is there anything wrong with that?
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