Why I Agree With BANNING Crypto and ICO Ads
The past couple months I've been hanging out on Twitter (@lumbridgecity) - likely spending too much time.
I've learned a pile.
But Not about trading - 99.9% of the TA and crypto opinion tweets are time wasters - or worse.
What I learned was news about the dramatic change in perception surrounding cryptos in the past THREE months.
- Google is banning ads,
- Facebook has banned ads,
- Twitter has banned some ads,
- Mailchimp is cancelling long standing business email accounts
- Canadian banks are limiting customers choices,
- News is flooded with SEC crackdown on illegal scams
I'm sure you can add more to this list.
But I gotta say - I kind of agree with the trend. You see, I belief in Law and Order, and I'll tell you why:
I'm a Canadian. I grew up in a remote town of a few thousand people. Kids play in the street. People don't lock the doors in their house at night. In complete naivety, I had no idea life was not so idealistic in other countries.
Only after I was pasted 48 years old, did I travel for an extended time to Brazil.
I love Brazil. It is an amazing wonder land, and the people are close, generous and fun. Canadian culture could learn from some of the social customs in Brazil.
But they don't have the same level of Policing as Canada - and as a result, every house is surrounded by a 7 foot concrete wall, and they have barbed wire and/or a three foot electric fence on the top. All the windows have bars. Few children learn to ride a bike and they do not play in the streets.
WHAT does this have to do with banning crypto ads??
Even before cryptocurrency exchanges were invented, 80% of beginner Stock or Commodity traders lose money and quit trading withing 18 months to 3 years.
Only 20% of those who start trading, keep at it at a small scale until they learn the skills.
Imagine if 80% of new pilots crashed and died in the first 3 years??
Thankfully, we don't have these catastrophic stats in aviation. But why not? Flying a plane is complicated and many unexpected weather conditions may come up... The reason is, pilots know the risk in advance - and they DRILL FOR SKILL so they know what to do - automatically, reflexively.
They don't follow 'learn to fly' advice on Twitter from someone who bought 10k followers and tweets about flight training with 2 months experience reading books about flying, and includes 'not pilot advice' in their profile.
Trading IS as difficult as flying an airplane.
And just like going to an accredited flight school, learning from seasoned commercial and military pilots with 1000's of logged hours, learning with a co-pilot, passing many, many tests before their first solo flight - and close performance review for every commercial flight they complete...
Trading should have a higher standard required BEFORE new traders take their first solo trade.
It really is for safety.
I Learned The Hard Way
I lost my money. All of it. More than once. I had a close friend take his life as a direct result of losing money trading commodities.
And then it took me more than ten years before I traded again.
So, you see, I'm OK with all the banning of ads, and some measure of increasing difficulty for entry into crypto trading.
It really is for safety.
Very Few Airplanes Crash
The training process for pilots really works. We see unthinkably large jets fly across the country so routinely, we take it for granted. Think for a minute about how long and straight the commercial airliners approach is to the runway... they start decent some 100 miles from the airport, and carefully touch down with precision.
And so it can be with trading. With the correct approach. With the proper preparation.
Sharing my Trading Journey Since 2009
Now in 2018, I'm still doing the same thing. Sharing my Trading Journal as a way to learn, and as a way to make myself stay on course with my trading plan.
But I think trading is not for beginners.
Before I was successful at trading, I needed to LEARN what to expect and LEARN options to handle any eventuality. I had to change the way I was thinking about the money I put into my trading account. I had to start out with micro-steps and build confidence based on successfully using the correct option in the right situation.
While I was learning these things over the past twenty years - I was writing in my journal, sharing my journal.
That journal has been boiled down. All the hard-learned-lessons were reorganized into the order I wish I would have learned them - and organized into two different courses.
In the past couple years I've trained thousands of people from more than 70 countries around the world.
And the next run of the courses is coming soon!
May 15 2018
I'll send out more details soon.
With gratitude,
Doug
I am also glad for the ban of crypto ads because I was tired to see them all the time. There need to be some regulations for ICOs so investors know which ones are good and which one are scams. It's too difficult right now to research each of them and it's to easy to create an ICO.
I actually removed a slew of ads from my youtube videos back in the last few months of bitconnect. The pre-roll ads that people were running, were too annoying to put my viewers through, for the tiny bit of income I was getting.
The more recent slew of ICO ads were getting too me on the google content network, but I don't spend a lot of time consuming content. I don't have, or don't take the time? To watch other people's videos unless I go searching for something and I'm looking for the answer. Only more recently have I been trolling twitter.
Over time, the conglomerate waves of conversation on Twitter will be mapped in a 3D visual representation of emotion within any one topic stream. Say we want to view the sentiment of people who follow the teams for the world cup! It would show all ranges of the human emotion spectrum, and precisely map it to events like goals and penalties.
And so we have seen in just the past four or five months in the crypto sphere. Imagine the spectrum of joy and enthusiasm just before Christmas, all the way to the emotion of the conversation now.
I can be philosophical about the events, so far, because I was 'lucky' and cashed out on price breaks of key technical levels back in June and July and again in December and January - and I'm on holidays in Brazil...
I'm lucky, in the way that 'luck is where opportunity meets preparedness.'
You see, it took almost twenty years of of studying the range of trading tactics in a given situation - for my trading plan, and then almost a decade of practicing and journalling about these trading rules in order to experience all the stages of market emotions.
Perhaps, where I lack in intelligence, I make up for with determination. I knew I could make these simple rules work for me - and I just would not give up.
I practiced everywhere - I kept a casual eye on the daily stock and commodity market charts ever since 1995. And skimmed the headlines in the news through the years. And I'll write more about this, but trading on the open markets within the game of Runescape was a more valuable education that I gave it credit for at the time. A video game can 'accelerate' your experience of the cycles of life - and the outright public, organized pump and dumps were very professional and conducted by teams of paid employees.
I wrote a book 'The Five Stages of The Merch Clan Rip Off' as a way to teach unsuspecting gamers how to avoid the scam.
And so, getting back the point of banning the ads of ICO's - the pump and dump groups (merch clans) within the game of Runescape, accelerated my experience with the full range of the market cycle. Over and over again, I witnessed this same fervor, euphoria, denial and surrender as the scammed gamer held the little-used items in their game account hoping for a time to unload them... which eventually came, and they sold out too early...
The ICO's were looking a LOT like these scammers within the game of Runescape.
I'm glad they are getting 'filtered from the game'.
Thank you for the long reply that could be a post in itself.
Ya - those first couple cups of coffee in the morning - a quiet house... and a good question about a topic I have passion for - often leads to some inspired thinking! I love questions!