#1 Crypto Market Talks - Redphonecrypto
The journey from the very first $BTC to leading Ordinals narrative
Welcome fellow investooors! It’s crypto time so let’s dive right in. To access more content find us here on Twitter and here on Spotify. Enjoy!
The world of crypto is teeming with opinions, yet often lacks quality. Today, we are privileged to welcome a guest who is regarded as one of the most quality-driven voices in the entire crypto sphere -
If you haven’t heard of redphonecrypto before, we strongly recommend delving into his in-depth thoughts on ordinals where he discusses the core concept of the recent Bitcoin revolution and what it means for the future of both the ecosystem and social layer of Bitcoin. Also, if you strive for evergreen thoughts, you should definitely study his 69 Crypto Thesis that are as valid today as they were at the time of publishing, nearly one year ago.
The words of wisdom are said to be evergreen, and redphone’s Crypto Thesis are the perfect example of this. Enjoy!
The list of 69 Crypto Thesis for 2023
Ordgies, The "Slurpening," and why Bitcoin Ordinals may be the greatest collectibles ever created
The Backstory
What initially drew you to crypto, and what aspects made you stick around? Also, how long has your crypto journey been so far and have you had any periods of withdrawals from the market or not?
I fell in love with bitcoin in 2013… mainly because of the Silk Road. I didn’t use it, but the concept opened my mind up to the realities of financial censorship. Most societies still have cash, so it’s easy to sweep financial censorship under the rug. A generation from now, when all cash is gone, financial censorship could become a matter of life and death.
I don’t view Bitcoin so much an innovation as a response to the growing threat of that censorship. We need it in the world. And when humans see a need, we’re pretty good at engineering solutions to meet it.
I’ve been active in the space ever since reading about the Silk Road, but I did stop paying attention as closely around the time of the Ethereum ICO (the absolute worst time to stop paying attention). Ethereum rekindled my fascination with crypto, and I haven’t gone a day since without thinking about it in some way. Sometimes, I think that’s sad. Other times, I think I’m one of the luckiest humans on the planet.
How do you typically navigate the market? Are you more of an investor or a trader?
I consider myself an investor, though I just looked at my trade log and saw I’ve done 542 trades this year. Ultimately, I think of trading as a full-time pursuit where you need ready access to charts almost 24/7. Investing can be far more passive and it’s – in my mind – more of an intellectual pursuit. I look at myself as a participant in a global strategy-based game. All players can lose or accumulate assets. The goal is identifying assets other players will want before they’ve identified them themselves. Then, you buy those assets, and you put your final tool to work: time.
I look at myself as a participant in a global strategy-based game. All players can lose or accumulate assets. The goal is identifying assets other players will want before they’ve identified them themselves.
It takes time for other investors to learn about and analyze the merits of any given project. It takes time to ship code, time to get more followers on Twitter to integrate with more partners, to land on more exchanges, to spin up arb bots, etc. Assuming you’ve correctly identified something that others will value in the future, you merely have to let time do its inexorable work.
What skillset did you enter crypto with and how did it help you along the way?
I studied literature and creative writing at university. In my mind, literature is a gritty form of psychology or philosophy. It’s learning how others view the world through the vehicle of story. You uncover the motivations, hopes, and fears of others. You see their madness. You see their nobility. All that’s invaluable as an investor because it helps you put yourself in the shoes of other investors. More importantly, it helps you see the story underlying any investment opportunity. The more powerful that story, the better the investment opportunity. Outside of literature, I’ve probably worked about 40 different jobs over the years – from dishwasher to production assistant on film shoots to web dev. Web dev work was probably the most valuable for crypto. I don’t write smart contract code, but I can at least conceptualize how it works. I’d highly recommend some form of coding for everyone.
Finding the Edge
What were the key moments/milestones during your crypto journey so far?
Good god, not even sure where to start. Some biggies that jump to mind:
2013: Buying my first bitcoin with a “red phone” at a local pharmacy. It took weeks for me to get my first coins via BitInstant. I had to download a full node to set up a wallet. Then, I had to wait for the MoneyGram transfer to go through. Then, I had to wait for BitInstant to send me my BTC. That moment when it finally showed up in my wallet gave me a true sense of wonder.
2017: The first time I took some crypto gains out of the market. Crypto helped me pay to fix our air conditioner. Not sure how I would have managed it if it weren’t for my beloved coinage.
2017: Selling some XRP in December. I’d literally been holding it for four years at that point. Selling it felt like wounding myself, and I remember staring at the button for what felt like an eternity. I almost couldn’t press Sell.
2020: Writing a thread on the Sushiswap vampire attack on Uniswap. I think it changed my destiny tbh. Degenspartan retweeted it and my account blew tf up overnight. I even had someone reach out to me for permission to translate it into Italian for a book. I eventually ended up on a call w a Sushiswap contributor who offered me a multisig spot. I seriously considered it but don’t like taking on regulatory risk.
2021: Joining the big brains at Delphi Labs to help build out some of the core DeFi primitives on Terra – and later suffering through the UST depeg alongside them.
2021: Flying out to Cali and renting a car to drive to an isolated cabin in the woods. The plan was to spend the weekend with some crypto anons I'd met online. I show up at night and there's a bunch of gentlemen in bathrobes sitting around a table drinking in the dark. I immediately wondered what the hell I'd gotten myself into. Turned out to be a joke lol. We didn’t use our real names the whole weekend, and I still don’t know most of their names, but we're all great friends to this day.
2021: Gobbling up some shrooms and listening to the Wu Tang 1 of 1 album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, on Caribbean mountaintop with my PleasrDAO frens.
2023: Discovering ordinals and collabing with @DrProcrast to mint a mini sub10k collection.
2023: Throwing the idea for BRC-20s out into the world and watching them turn into a multi-billion-dollar asset class (not to mention getting propagated onto numerous other blockchains).
How would you define your market edge, and what is the story behind discovering your true edge? Is there any advice you’d give those who’re still trying to find their edge?
If I have an edge, it’s in identifying the story at the heart of any crypto project. Most cryptos have terrible stories because their projects are just money grabs. Every now and then, though, there’s a story that’s so powerful and true that I know it has the potential to change the world. Bitcoin has that sort of story… it’s non-sovereign money for the Internet Age. Ethereum has a story. It’s an unstoppable, global computer. Solana has a story. It’s scaling for the tsunami of finance that’s we’re witnessing move on-chain. Thorchain has a story. It’s permissionless cross-chain swaps that could render CEXes obsolete. Bittensor might have a story. It’s decentralizing AI… and that might be one of the most important battles we face in the coming decades.
If you’re searching for an edge, I recommend creating an alt account on X and starting to tweet about projects you find intriguing. Use it as a venue to be yourself and test out learning in public. Over time, you’ll start to make connections and eventually get invites into TG and Discord groups that could change your destiny.
If I have an edge, it’s in identifying the story at the heart of any crypto project. […] Every now and then, though, there’s a story that’s so powerful and true that I know it has the potential to change the world.
Reflecting on your experiences, what's been your most memorable win and loss? What lessons did you pull from these moments?
I already mentioned the difficulty I had selling XRP. Taking massive gains on a coin should have been the highest moment of my life. But instead, I felt like shit. Those tokens had all my hopes and dreams locked inside them. I didn’t want to give them up for filthy fiat. But in the end I had to. It was a reminder that crypto is merely a tool to enable us to live better lives. And we’re not taking any of it with us when we die. It also reminded me that the act of investing is a game. And in every game, there comes a moment when you have to stand up from the table and get back to the business of living.
My most memorable loss was watching Terra implode. Not only was I actively contributing to projects in the ecosystem, I had some stables in Anchor. I’d set those stables aside to pay taxes. When the depeg began, I couldn’t get out quickly because of bridging issues with Orion. I ended up losing most of the money I’d set aside to pay taxes. That meant I had to sell other tokens. My main takeaway was the importance of diversification. I thought I was diversified because I was holding lots of different tokens, but I was overweight a single ecosystem. Now I look at and consider ALL my exposure to a given ecosystem – from unvested tokens to stables running on that network to native tokens and even bridging risk. All that said, I don’t blame anyone for Terra’s collapse. And I still look up to Do Kwon in a lot of ways. He was actively changing the backing for UST. What would the world be like if that had gone through without incident? I also think a truly decentralized stablecoin is an urgent need for humanity. I hope we get one at some point.
It was a reminder that crypto is merely a tool to enable us to live better lives. And we’re not taking any of it with us when we die. It also reminded me that the act of investing is a game. And in every game, there comes a moment when you have to stand up from the table and get back to the business of living.
How would you describe your process of discovering trends and narratives early? Are there any signs of future narratives we should pay closer attention to?
Discovering trends feels harder than it is. All you need to do is follow a web of smart people on X. Cream rises to the top and they all start mentioning the same tokens. Finding tokens before they’re talking about them requires tapping into a less public network of investors. Telegram and Discord groups are great. Best of all is joining an investing DAO that pools money to join private deals. I don’t even care about the deals so much as I care about hearing their opinions on the deals. I also think it’s important to stay in close touch w TradFi investors. You need to balance the crypto echo chamber against the broader world.
There are lots of future narratives I’m excited about but none have a shot at becoming as powerful as AI. In a lot of ways, humans are becoming less important to business processes. Robinhood has a couple thousand human employees. Uniswap v2 has zero. Crypto protocols like Aave and Maker do the work of thousands of humans. That trend away from human-run businesses to smart contract-run businesses is only going to grow. AI will accelerate that growth, and it will be processing transactions on behalf of humans in the background. A year ago, I wrote that AI will be the biggest end-user of crypto. That feels more true to me every day.
A year ago, I wrote that AI will be the biggest end-user of crypto. That feels more true to me every day.
Staying in the topic of narratives, you seem to enjoy thought exercises where you try to explore and predict what may be created following a certain trend; is it how you have found yourself in a leadership role within the ordinals narrative? What made you interested in it so early?
That’s the game of investing, right? You’re not looking for what’s true today. Your quest is discovering what will be true tomorrow then buying assets that will reflect that if you’re right. The only way to do that is by being perpetually malleable with your thinking, by projecting forward and thinking about how things might change. You also have to be forcefully optimistic. It’s easy to see all the reasons why something might fail, but it’s harder to see ways around those failure points.
When it comes to ordinals, I became obsessed with them simply because they made bitcoin feel cool again. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed that cypherpunk middle-fucking-finger to the establishment. The moment bitcoin exhibited it again, I was hooked. I hardly slept for weeks. In the early days, I didn’t even care that ordinals were singlehandedly salvaging bitcoin’s economics. Now, that people are realizing that, ordinals feel unstoppable. I’m convinced they’ll be a core part of bitcoin’s story in the years to come.
Ordinals hype was one of the few trends few people could have expected and the other was the trend of SocialFi with its well-known Friend.tech app. Do you think FT already established itself as a leader and will come back once Base chain gains traction once again? Is this how the future of SocialFi will look like?
I’m still on FT, but gotta admit it's lost some of its magic with the launch of public posts (which diminish the need to buy a key). What I do like about FT is they seem down to experiment, and that’s crucial because no one knows the right model yet. I’d say they have a shot at keeping a leadership position, but they need to reduce their fees and give up some control so that third parties can build on top of them. No one knows what the future of SocialFi will look like, but openness and composability is the key that could help web3 unseat the web2 goliaths.
Ultimately, I think we’ll have a multitude of SocialFi platforms, all interconnected with aggregators – much like what we’re seeing unfold with DeFi.
The Evolution of Crypto
Since entering the crypto scene, how have you seen it change, and how have you adapted as a market participant?
The wildest change has been the evolution of fundraising. Every epoch in crypto has had a different leading mechanism for distributing tokens and/or raising funds. In the early days, you mined. Then, you joined ICOs. Then, you had yield farming, airdrops, NFTs, whitelists, lockdrops, bonding curves, and BRC20 mints.
Basically, regulators throw up walls, and the crypto industry figures out a way around them. I’ve adapted by always looking for interesting new token distributions models. We have at least one new model that unfolds during every cycle.
Are there any predictions you’d make on how crypto may change during the upcoming bull market? Is it a pivotal moment in the history of crypto or is it just another bull market we will witness?
I’m looking at this next cycle as the institutionalization cycle. By that, I mean we’re going to see crypto firmly embed itself in TradFi. The holy and unholy waters will fix. The first sign of that is obviously the bitcoin spot ETF. If and when it’s approved, we can finally silence people who call crypto a scam or ponzi. That’ll lead to more ETFs over time (ETH, SOL, XRP, altcoin indices, etc.), and more investment advisors will encourage normies to get at least a small amount of exposure to crypto. Beyond that, I expect all the big fintech players will integrate crypto. Maybe X leads the charge. Then, we see Apple Pay and Google Pay and potentially even banks supporting crypto directly within your bank account. I’m excited about RWAs, and I think things like Chainlink’s CCIP could start seeing some TradFi adoption.
It’s a big moment. With institutionalization, a whole new class of money (old money, I guess you could call it) will slowly move into the space. Market caps might not make sense to a lot of us who have been here a long time, so we’re going to need to adjust our mental models. In effect, I think crypto is exiting childhood and entering adolescence.
With institutionalization, a whole new class of money […] will slowly move into the space. Market caps might not make sense to a lot of us who have been here a long time, so we’re going to need to adjust our mental models.
With crypto becoming more and more solidified as a new asset class, do you think it will, at some point, find itself being fought over between the West and Asia? In other words, will crypto become a tool of geopolitical warfare as financial markets have become?
Things could head that direction, but I’m actually optimistic that the opposite happens. I think open financial networks are so powerful that the countries who block them will become financially isolated and be forced to relax their restrictions (China being a potential exception). In that way, I look at crypto as a tool for spreading peace and cooperation.
Real Alpha
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received, be it related to the market or life in general?
Once upon a time I asked one of my oldest friends about his hopes for his kids. He looked at me right in the eyes – like he’d thought about it a lot – and said, “honestly, I just hope they laugh a lot.” I’ll never forget it. It’s a reminder that we’re all just meat-covered skeletons who get a very brief window of time where we’ve healthy enough and capable enough to do whatever the fuck we want. It’s our job to find a way to enjoy it.
“honestly, I just hope they laugh a lot.”
Looking back on your crypto journey, what's the one lesson that stands out to you the most?
Just about everything about my anon journey on Twitter has been mindblowing to me. It’s led to me contributing to DAOs, gotten me jobs, made me lifelong friends and, perhaps, best of all, given me a chance to encourage others to quit their jobs and enter crypto full-time. I recommend that everyone do it. There’s a certain magic that comes with anonymity. It’s a feeling of release because you finally get to remove the mask, which you might not even realize you’re wearing.
Redphone’s Advice
Three steps for “making it” for people starting out in crypto:
Create an anonymous X/Twitter account and only follow crypto-related accounts.
Put in serious hours airdrop hunting. This will force you to use tons of different tools, wallets, protocols and chains. Simply by virtue of doing this, you’ll know more about how crypto works than most of the influencers you see online.
Start tweeting about what you’re doing and what you’re learning, and begin building a network. Your new frog frens will help you figure out the rest of your journey.
If you do make it, try to keep a low profile. The last thing you want to do is become anyone’s target. The volatility and opportunities crypto offers can bring success to those who are willing to use the chance they are given.
Bob Dylan once said that a man’s a success is getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, and doing whatever he wants in between.
That’s all for today, thank you all for reading this week’s edition and see you in the next one! May the profits be with you!
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~ Crypto o’Clock Team
This content is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. It is not intended as a solicitation to buy or sell any assets, and readers are strongly advised to conduct their own research and seek independent financial advice before making any investment decisions. The authors and publishers disclaim any liability for any direct or consequential loss arising from any use of the information contained herein.
Great job thanks 👍🙂
nice one - hope for more.
Keep it up