Thomas on Warpcast

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Thomas pfp

@aviationdoctor.eth

If the last ten years have taught me anything, it’s the importance of patience and thoughtfulness in decision making. I used to hold a double-digit stack of BTC, and sold them all in 2015 in protest of both the project’s technical direction (small blocks, Segwit, Lightning, etc.) and abusive straying from its cypherpunk roots (censorship, Blockstream’s capture, etc). In hindsight, it was an expensive mistake, because the upside of hodling (now I the millions of dollars) was at least two orders of magnitudes greater than the downside (tens of thousands). I wish I had read Antifragile and learned to navigate asymmetrical bets sooner. Not long after, I also resigned in protest of being passed for Partner promotion at a Big Four, against the advice of my peers. I eventually made it at a different firm, but I took a needlessly circuitous route to get there. 1/3

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Thomas pfp

@aviationdoctor.eth

Last year, I nuked an 11-year Reddit account with tens of thousands in karma, in protest of the killing of the API and the Apollo client. I ostracized myself from some beloved communities there (incl. /r/ethfinance), and of course Reddit kept chugging along just fine, just like BTC and my old firm. I still miss Reddit but I still mentally resist going back. Farcaster became my proxy; and while it’s a pleasant online abode, it’s just not the same. In retrospect, I accept that I have not been the wisest at decision making, and it stings. I always thought being principled and standing for one’s beliefs was paramount. I still believe that, but I understand that making important decisions requires more nuance than my ego was prepared to make room for. Those might be small and relatively trivial examples, but extrapolating from them, it’s a tough line to navigate between remaining true to oneself and cutting one’s nose to spite the face. 2/3

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TheModestThief🎩 pfp

TheModestThief🎩

Hindsight is 2020. Probably enjoyed and learned a lot based on your decisions. My personal philosophy is always to take the route that makes for a better story. It’s a really privileged thinking, I’d admit that.

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thugkitten 🎩 🍖

@thugkitten.eth

This is chocked full of life learning, though it would be hard to just comprehend the lesson learnt without fully going through the experience. That saying I admire the principles you held steadfast to.

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kk pfp

if it makes you feel better, most of us must have missed many could-have-been life changing opportunities, not just bitcoin. it's interesting how people mainly focus on bitcoin in regards to missing out on opportunities

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frdysk.framedl.eth pfp

frdysk.framedl.eth

@fufuprophet.eth

I wouldn't say expensive mistake, you wouldn't be here with said wisdom. The experiences guided you here today.

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KMac🍌 ⏩ pfp

Thank you for sharing this. Tuition is expensive & sharing brings it down for others.

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nomash 🍪 pfp

Personally I hold more respect for someone making decisions based on their morals and philosophy rather than material gain (assuming the latter isn’t your philosophy). Probably because you are actively choosing to forsake something that benefits you in order to advocate what you believe in. But I wouldn’t ever look down on someone making decisions that improve their state of living. If you’ve decided that walking a middle ground is the best way to live life, then you probably needed to walk the path you have to shift that priority.

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Tokenized Human

@tokenizedhuman

You will never do anything at the right time if you change the framework for appraisal.

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Tom Beck pfp

Standing for your beliefs is paramount. Your mistakes were not that you followed your principles, it’s that you expected your principles to have a meaningful effect on entities much, much larger than you. You wanted to stand for your principles, and you wanted that action to change things. But it wouldn’t be a principle if you didn’t have to give something up for it.

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Dinesh Raju pfp

Would love to chat more with you about this but social media isn't the right medium, so made a note of it for the next time we meet! Since you mention Taleb, I'll leave you with a couple of thoughts till then: I personally would be very hesitant to evaluate the robustness of my decision making based on what I remember about the past. Taleb calls this the "triplet of opacity": https://dinesh.eth.link/notes/the-black-swan/#the-human-mind I wouldn't yet consider BTC and Elon a success because of the deviation between the sample mean and shadow mean caused by the hidden generator. For a quick intro, can start at 1:23:10 here: https://youtu.be/cP5tQGWagKc?t=4990

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links 🏴 pfp

Standing for your values is always expensive when you stand for something other than the ordinary. There are other paths I could have taken to be more wealthy, but doing so wouldn’t have brought me to where I am now. I’m sure that for everything you lost, there is something you gained, even if it’s hard to see sometimes.

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Nico🦊 pfp

I love that you share this, it's unusual to have people talk about their mistakes when they can show how great they did instead. We are on the same journey and I also have taken very bad decisions that made me lose a lot of potential money. But I do not regret walking these side paths and I consider this money is what I paid for learning. It's not wasted money, imagine it as money paid for a course or a training on life.

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Ramsey 🎩🤝 pfp

Ramsey 🎩🤝

Reddit is too big to be destroyed by bad decisions. Or so it would appear. But yeah, the API thing, sunsetting of r/cc moons and general bot prevalence. I rarely go there anymore

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PhiMarHal pfp

In fairness, all your decisions have been principled and correct. They were the right choice on a longterm scale, even if it led to missing out in shortterm benefits. In the case of bitcoin, this hurts. The numba go up ponzi part of this once interesting experiment went higher than anyone could reasonably think. But still, how likely are we to retain our own character when we adopt the hyperrational self-serving outlook? I think there's always a price to pay. Maybe the price is ok sometimes. But we can also win "enough" to not have to pay the price at all. And, once winning enough is a binary state, then the principled man gave up nothing to have everything.

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Tempe.degen 🎩

@tempetechie.eth

Two things: 1) What were some of your good calls? (People tend to mostly think of mistakes they made and much less about the wins they had) 2) I would love to hear about your thoughts and learnings from the Antifragile book 😎 1000 $DEGEN

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