Have been thru so many "existential threat" moments in crypto, every time the ride is getting less existential - First shock: Mt Gox. I was so stunned didnt even feel it. My net worth in crypto wasnt huge in absolute terms, still massive for a fresh grad - Second grill: the Bitfinex hack. Thought it was the end. Instead, the redemption token + creditor unity became an epic kind of birth story for Tether - Post-ICO annihilation: the worst pain. Net worth down bad. Learned the hard lesson on alts, and started Primitive Ventures deep in the 2018 bear - March 2020: the most intense. If BitMEX hadn’t unplugged, we might’ve been cooked as an industry. But mentally it hurt less because the 2018- 2019 grind and later global Covid escape exp trained my brain for the new baseline of chaos - 2022 FTX collapse: insane, cinematic. We pulled funds when we started smelling smoke around SBF so dodged that bullet. and it reinforced a lesson I keep re-learning: founders leak signal constantly if you know how to read behavior Every cycle leaves scar tissue. And in crypto, scar tissue becomes anti fragility: better priors, faster reflexes, cleaner counterparty rules. Crypto people have front run a lot of the big socioeconomic shifts: fighting bot farms before “AI” was mainstream; demanding data sovereignty before prompt injection and narrative manipulation by llms. become opsec paranoid and off the grid knowing the future of surveillance state. We also got a high potent dose of human incentive loopholes and behavioral bias injected into our vein so that we learned the hard way early There's no compression algorithm for experience. Time is the only leverage nobody can liquidate. See you on the other side of this one, fellow life soldiers.