Everybody is Having Hilarious Fun and You're Not

The seminal top signal of the 2017 crypto bull market was an article in the NY Times titled "Everybody is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not." I remember that time well. Everybody I knew was in every coin I could think of. We were one more leg up in Litecoin before I had to start worrying if most of the engineering team at Stocktwits was going to just retire, because they were so rich.  I was getting texts from people I haven't talked to in years about whether or not Ripple was about to go wild as it was going to get added to Coinbase. It was an absolutely wild time.

As jpeg summer roars on and I see more of my Twitter feed turn into penguins, ducks, apes, ENS domains, and Squiggles it's natural to wonder if something similar is happening with NFT's. On one hand the excitement is infectious, on the other hand the participation in absolute terms is nowhere even close to what we saw in 2017.

I came across a tweet yesterday that helped put it in perspective for me:

This tweet doesn't come from some crypto newbie or Degen, and while I have no idea who Fiskantes is, I do know that they have been around, is highly respected in DeFi and is a very sophisticated investor. It mirrors almost to the word a similar tweet I sent during the NFT wave earlier this year:

Obviously bull markets are fun, and people have fun when they're making money. I'm not naive enough to ignore such a fact and that feeling can be infectious. Yet when liquidity dried up in markets in April, May and early June it was still fun. It may not have been as fun, and not nearly as loud, and some people did temporarily churn, but the discords were still rocking and it was still a fun daily habit for most.

This feels like something different is happening. The same light bulb that went off with me, went off with Fiskantes, and I've seen go off with nearly everyone who finds their first good NFT project and community. It's new and fun and weird. The genuine delight of owning a part of internet culture you help create, where the memes can make you money, where communities can build both off and on-chain monetizable digital franchises/IP, and where you grow to not want to sell these weird digital things you bought with magic internet money.

I have seen these light bulb go off before. It's called product market fit. I don't know how you short fun + PMF + network effects, or even remain skeptical of it long term.

Maybe we're all stupid to be using this magic internet money to buy jpegs, or maybe it's what the money was actually for all along.