The smartest crypto traders I know all quit. Not because they lost. Because they won and chose life over another cycle. They were early on everything. Privacy coins. AAVE when it was LEND. SNX before DeFi was a word. Early ETH. Early SOL. These weren't degens. They were smart. Reading whitepapers. Building conviction plays. They crushed it. Life changing money in 2017, 2020/2021. Then something shifted. They got careful. Started valuing family over another 10x. Turned down starting funds because they had high paying jobs they actually enjoyed. I kept saying: go full time, you're killing it in Web3. They'd just laugh and say they were good. Small chats used to be the alpha source before CT existed. LTC/BTC days. Then ETH reignited everything. Most fell off between 2019-2021. After that it became hyper gamed gambling. The mental health ROI stopped making sense. It used to be about building the future. Now it's catching the next 100x before it rugs. Accessibility changed everything. Solana being fast, cheap and easy to use. BNB and Tron in emerging markets. Global game theory at scale. People either made it or got blown up. New class now. Nobody remembers the old names. ETH maxis dunking on early Solana guys. Good memories. Now it's larp city. VCs killed the signal. Institutions control the game. I'm still bullish on specific tokens. Some will be the backend of the new world. But most will die from here. Cobie's right: The people who made it weren't going all in on leverage chasing every narrative. They enjoyed the game and survived long enough to win. My group chat figured that out early. Or maybe they figured it out exactly on time and just chose life over another cycle. Either way, I'm still here. I fell in love with this space and where it's going. I see all the problems, but I still believe there's something real being built. Not sure if that's conviction or just stubbornness.