Should you exit cryptocurrency?
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Should you exit cryptocurrency?
The cryptocurrency market trades on sentiment, with market makers exploiting retail investors' emotions.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: hitesh.eth
Translation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
The main reason you initially entered the cryptocurrency space was because it offered you a better chance to improve your life.
You believed you could make some substantial money in crypto, and that this would positively impact your life.
At first, stepping into crypto felt like entering a new world—one that promised a shortcut to the kind of life you once thought would take decades of hard work. You didn’t see it just as an investment, but as an opportunity to rewrite your own story. You imagined escaping the ordinary struggles your family had endured, breaking free from the cycle of “waiting for a promotion” or “saving for twenty years” just to afford a car or a house.
You saw crypto as a time machine. If handled correctly, it could compress ten years into two, or two years into two months—that was the original allure. You didn’t enter crypto just for numbers; you entered for freedom, for revenge against time, for a chance at success without delay.
You would be able to fulfill your dreams—buying the car you wanted, the house you dreamed of, and in some cases, even help your parents retire. It was primarily about gaining an additional income stream to pursue worldly desires, desires that bombard you daily every time you scroll through social media. Each time, you’d feel momentarily inadequate, followed by a fleeting passion to do something about it.
Moths to the Flame
That fleeting passion is more like a spark too weak to withstand even a drop of water, yet you believe you can turn it into a fire—and remain unaffected when rain tries to douse it.
But here’s where reality turns cruel. This fire isn’t just fire—it’s the inner drive to prove you’re not insignificant. Every get-rich-quick story on Twitter, every person flaunting their success, feeds that tiny spark. But the spark itself is fragile, faint, unsustainable.
The rain isn’t just market crashes or red candles (downward price movements). It’s the quiet doubt in your family’s voice, friends dismissing you as wasting time, the exhaustion of staring at charts at 3 a.m. The dark rains always come to test the strength of the flame you’ve lit.
The strength of the flame depends on two things:
How much it cost you to turn that initial spark into fire—meaning your focus on the process.
The quality of the foundation upon which you chose to let the flame burn.
The foundation is everything. If it’s weak, no amount of sparks can save it. The foundation is your discipline, your emotional endurance, your ability to stay focused when the market plays with your mind. If the foundation is shaky, even a small storm will extinguish the flame. If it’s solid, even a harsh winter will only test you, not destroy you.
Your behavior during those harsh winters determines how long you can keep the flame alive. Once you achieve all those initial desires, the flame may start losing its appeal. And when the flame loses its charm, what keeps you going? If you can’t maintain discipline when desire fades, you’ll collapse. Whether you can endure at that moment decides how far you’ll go in your journey.
The Illusion of the Crypto Market
Crypto always offers a glimpse of early success, a path that seems easy. It gives you more than you expected. With an ordinary degree, you might not even land a $500 job in countries like India, yet in crypto you earn more than what’s available outside. And the effort required to earn that $500 externally is immense. But the “grunt work” in crypto doesn’t feel that way.
Even though you ultimately spend more time in front of screens, hope is too strong, dreams too big, desires so amplified that you almost forget there’s a life beyond crypto.
But the illusion lies here. Crypto creates around you a psychological simulation that feels like reality but isn’t. Every win feels like genius, every loss feels like bad luck. You scroll CT, read charts, chase alpha, and every time your wallet balance ticks up, you feel like you’ve cracked life’s code.
Your brain floods with dopamine. You forget it’s a closed loop, not the real world. The market convinces you that you’re in control, but in truth, you’re reacting—always reacting. You’re not driving; you’re strapped to the back seat while the road bends according to market makers’ will. Because this simulated world runs 24/7, you forget to breathe outside. You stop eating normally, stop sleeping properly, stop dreaming beyond charts—your reality shrinks to numbers.
When Self-Doubt Never Comes
But in reality, you’re not that smart—this is just another illusion you’ve fallen into. You feel in control, but you’re not.
When you finally realize you’re not in control, not achieving significant success relative to others, something inside begins to shift. If that shift comes in the form of self-doubt, it could be transformative. But in crypto, self-doubt rarely arrives.
Hope is a drug, and the market constantly administers fresh doses. One green candle (price increase) can erase a month of red. A single tweet from a founder can reignite your belief. You keep telling yourself “next cycle, next pump, next trade.” Self-doubt doesn’t knock because hope whispers louder in your ear.
When they see fools making millions—or at least pretending to—they don’t truly question their own skills. Who cares about verifying any of it?
A second might make us miss a bigger trade. So in the end, it becomes more like bluffing, pretending to understand technical analysis, reading articles and posts to convince yourself your decisions are informed. But most of the time you’re selectively filtering information, deceiving yourself daily.
The Moment You Feel Left Behind
Then comes the darkest moment—when you truly reach a point where you feel behind in the game.
You feel everyone else is moving forward, accumulating wealth, building connections, while you’re stuck. That’s when the expiration date of hope hits your mind daily—a lingering sensation.
Your heart races every time you refresh the chart, you wake up with regret, fall asleep with anxiety. You face ongoing financial strain, and crypto, instead of being an escape, has become your crutch. You now see no other opportunities. Even if one appears, you end up losing more than winning. Then you may reach a point where the same crypto that once gave you dreams turns you into a prisoner of pain.
The Role of Leverage
You lose money every day, but you genuinely can’t help yourself. You surrender to crypto, letting it consume you alive.
So in this sense, what is crypto? It’s the collective running the markets, the collective trading sentiment, and market makers exploiting retail traders’ emotions. Your economic value is generated by sacrificing the value of others on-chain.
You simply switch between being the victim or the one being sacrificed, depending on how much leverage you have in skills, knowledge, and connections.
This is where leverage truly matters—not market leverage, not 10x longs or shorts, but real leverage: skills, knowledge, and networks. If you lack these, if you rely only on borrowed market leverage, you’re walking blindfolded into a slaughterhouse. Without building your edge, deepening your understanding, surrounding yourself with more knowledgeable people, you’re destined to be sacrificed into the very fire you first decided to ignite—even before any harsh winter arrives, even before any rain approaches.
Burning
In that state, as you burn alive in crypto’s inferno, you scream for help. It’s not a whisper—it’s a cry only you can hear.
You also see an exit—perhaps a job offer, a new skill to learn, or a friend telling you to take a break. But your body won’t move. You can’t act, because by then you’ve become so delusional that you believe the fire will extinguish itself.
You believe the bull market will return tomorrow, losses will heal by accident, patience will save you. But the truth is, it won’t. The fire won’t stop. And you will be burned alive.
Should You Exit Crypto?
Yes, you should exit—if you feel you’re burning, if you’re losing every day, if you’ve been losing money for years, if you can no longer focus on your work or career.
At that point, exiting isn’t weakness—it’s survival.
But you shouldn’t exit if crypto is the only place where you can earn and make a living. If this is your industry, if this is where your bread comes from, then exiting isn’t an option.
In that case, build leverage—the real leverage. Build knowledge, skills, and connections. Learn new things, adjust your strategy, learn to use tools, talk to people, understand more about how crypto works, attend events, build relationships, farm airdrops, think deeply about how you can master everything in crypto.
The more you focus on learning rather than earning, the more likely you are to bounce back.
Saying Goodbye to the Past
But to do this, you must completely free yourself from the memory of loss. You can’t cling to old memories of how much you once had and how much you lost. That memory is a ghost. If you keep feeding it, it will keep haunting you.
You can’t change your past, but you can shape your future. Saying goodbye to the past is your only remedy. Even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it feels like tearing off your skin, you must redirect your mind and energy toward letting go, so you can think clearly about what better things you can do in this space with your time and money.
Believe me, if you can truly overcome those psychological barriers and leave the past behind in the market, the market will reward you all the more.
Sometimes, like me, even after my crypto wealth dropped 99% from its Bitcoin peak, I can still find greater meaning in life—happily and wisely.
When the time comes, stepping away from crypto may seem easy—at least psychologically—through genuine detachment. Detachment becomes the ultimate leverage. Once you have it, you’re no longer the one burning in the fire. You’re the one observing it, calm, knowing exactly when to enter and when to exit.
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hitesh.eth
