While We Wait For The Bull Market
It’s been 6 months already since $BTC started to move from the 16-19k range.
I remember trading $BTC in December 2022 during the Christmas holiday, and the price was literally stuck at a $1 interval for like 9 minutes. Like $16,840 or something. And for those 9 min the price ranged from $16,840.1 to $16,840.9. Absolutely insane, really no volatility and it felt like it was so over.
Now we’re finished with the first half of the year, and the price of $BTC has doubled already. Michael Saylor bought the top once again and we’re waiting for retail to come back. DeFi on the other hand has been more or less dead for a year now. TVL is still at around $50b, a number we’ve seen since 3AC blew up last year.
So what have I been focusing on while I am waiting for the new bull market?
That’s the topic for this newsletter issue.
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While We Wait For The Bull Market
With DeFi yields more or less gone and NFT markets totally shit (Azuki’s Elemental flop or BAYC floor price reaching the low levels not seen in almost 2 years), it’s easy to think it’s all over.
What’s left is more or less crypto trading on CEX’es or buying coins on spot and holding them in hope of better times. My opinion of perp trading on DEX so far is that it isn’t competitive enough. In general slower, not good enough liquidity, and has higher fees. If you’re trading amounts over $10k I won’t say it’s good enough. I do think there are some good options though (eg. GMX and Kwenta), but for me, it’s hard to replace Binance/Bybit with them.
There are some coins that I think will perform well in the next bull ( $CFX, $JOE, $STX) + new coins that are about to launch/aren’t launched yet.
But there is something else I’ve spent my time on lately too in this slightly boring market: odds betting.
Long-term readers know that I have a history with sports betting.
I’ve done it now for over 20 years, and when I was around 20-23 years old I tried actively to live off of it.
I created a system to take advantage of bookmaker bonuses, eg. these “deposit $500, get $500 in bonus”. The problem with bonuses is that you have to meet certain criteria in order to cash out the bonus (usually you have to turnover your money 8x. And bookmakers know that most people lose their money before these 8 turnovers are done. So usually they don’t have to give out this bonus after all. The house always wins (in the end).
However, I found a way to hijack the system to make the turnover fast and without losing. What I did was basically this:
Deposit $500 to a bookmaker
Bet on a soccer player “not to score a goal”. Eg. Mbappe not to score. Could be any player really
The key was to bet on a player that did not start the match. 1 hour before the match the line-ups are revealed. So what I did was bet on a random player that I knew would not start the game. Okay, you might think this sounds too easy? But the bookmaker isn’t totally stupid, so what they did was they refunded the money.
The bookmaker voided (canceled) the bet which made me earn nothing, but the funny thing I discovered by chance was that the bet counted in the turnover calculation. So what I did was just repeat this over and over again until I unlocked the bonus.
So the $500 bonus was now mine and I withdrew the money. I repeated this on in total approx. 60 bookmakers.
Not something I got really rich on, but as a young student living on $750 a month this definitely helped. I was on top of the world and thought I could do this with every new bookmaker. Eventually, the bookmakers changed the rules for turnover bonuses, so that voided bets would not be included in the turnover calculations.
Too bad for me. I eventually tried out several sure-win strategies (basically this means to bet on all outcomes in a match at several bookies), but due to limitations, this put a max cap on the revenue.
Further, I was flat-betting, used the Kelly criterion, used a Greenwood strategy (a nuanced version of Martingale that is way less degen), etc. But in the end, I didn’t manage to scale it. You see, bookmakers are limiting winning customers. It was impossible to earn money consistently without being banned or reduced to a limit level that was ridiculous (max. $50 bet on a match).
Therefore I started treating odds betting more as a hobby and moved over to poker and eventually the stock market & crypto.
In the depth of the crypto bear in mid-2022 I started playing around with odds betting again, and ended up trying several of them.
My first impression of Rollbit was good tbh, but then I realized that it was in fact not a decentralized betting platform.
And this means that Rollbit can basically limit you, and or freeze your funds.
I did some more research and found other good options for decentralized betting. In the end, I ended up trying Bookmaker.xyz and SX.bet which both were good decentralized options.
Happy to announce that I’ve partnered up with SX Bet now, and with my referral you’ll be able to get bonuses, giveaway’s and some free money to try out the platform.
I just made a separate Telegram group for this where I will post my bets, bonuses, and giveaways called Betting Bro’s.
Join the group for free here: https://t.me/+VDxFVbidGA81NDQ0
So while we wait for the bull market, I will probably spend a little time doing degen sports bet gambling ;)
Some tweets I have enjoyed lately
Altcoins and why they eventually will die
Crypto altcoins are basically all P&D scams and the most popular ones all die at the same point.
Never buy into a crypto late. Buy ETH and BTC or get into quality altcoins early, before everyone is talking about them.
If you don't know which altcoins to buy, just buy ETH
Great thread on altcoins and why they eventually die 👇
https://vxtwitter.com/Nakamotolisk/status/1675696797291892736
Why you haven’t made it
Most people working in high-status jobs with high salaries ($200k+) spend a lot of money on expensive clothes, watches, cars, etc., and feel like they’re on top of the world. It’s not unnormal to have loads of debt while living this lifestyle. But have you really made it if you don’t own your time yet? Something to ponder for you.
What is your end goal in crypto?
Crypto trader/investor Rhino wants to quit after the next bull run in 2025.
As he says:
"I have an addictive personality, don’t want this to consume me forever. There’s more to life than this. I’m not chasing 9 figs or any crazy returns, I’m a simple man"
This got me thinking about my own journey because I also have this obsessive personality going all in, and right now crypto consumes my life 24/7. However I still love it and am motivated as hell.
But it's a great question to ponder and I'm passing the question forward to you that you should think of:
What is your end goal in crypto?
Not necessarily a net worth goal, but what will you spend your time on once you have enough? And what is enough for you?
https://twitter.com/lBattleRhino/status/1637711172643299329
Lots of good crypto podcasts in this thread
👇
https://twitter.com/conzimp/status/1633473286024642561?t=mLkggITvv-Q7BqGKpsUkfg&s=19
A collection of the 15 best threads about narrative trading
👇
https://twitter.com/Garid_Trades/status/1630261309387448322?s=20
All right. That’s it for this week.
Stay tuned for next week and hopefully $ETH over $2,000.
Up only!
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