batcat (BTC)

The Story Of Taxicabs & Why People In Crypto Stay Broke

Taxicabs were well-established.

Licensed. Regulated. Battle-tested. For decades, they were the default way to get from point A to point B if you did not want to drive yourself.

But then society changed.

Smartphones changed consumer behavior. Amazon changed expectations. People became trained to believe they should be able to pull out their phone, press a button, get what they want, and track it all the way to their front door.

Meanwhile, taxis mostly stayed analog.

They failed to understand or act on what the mass market was demanding.

People no longer wanted to call a dispatcher. They no longer wanted to stand in the rain wondering if every yellow car turning the corner was finally their ride. They wanted simplicity. Certainty. Convenience. A map. A timer. A button.

Then Uber came along.

Uber did not invent for-hire transportation. It simply iterated on the experience.

And that distinction matters.

You can love and respect taxis. You can even be invested in taxi companies.

But if you become so emotionally married to taxis that you mock every iteration built for mass-market demand, you are not thinking like an investor.

At that point you're @PeterSchiff fudding BTC because you're invested in Gold.

You are thinking like a monogamous spouse.

This is crypto’s disease.

People do not invest in things anymore. They marry them.

They build identities around them. They put the ticker in their bio. They defend the bags like family honor. They confuse criticism with betrayal and diversification with treason.

I was going to leave this topic alone today. Truly. I had other things I wanted to write about.

But waking up to a pile of attacks in my notifications from people with pickaxes in their profile made me change my mind.

So let me speak plainly.

I have publicly supported @ORE. I still do.

I think @HardhatChad is one of the most reputable developers in this entire space. I am an investor in ORE. I understand the thesis. I respect the design. I respect the grind.

But I am also here to make money.

That is my obligation to myself. To my family. To the life I am trying to build.

This is not cosplay for me. This is not a fan club. This is my job.

So when I see something like @zinc_cash come along and iterate on the ORE category in a way that I believe better matches what the broader market wants, of course I am going to pay attention. And yes, of course I am going to invest.

ORE is steady.

It is stable. It is slow. It is patient. With well-understood strategies, discipline, and enough time, almost anyone can remain profitable over the long term, assuming the price of ORE itself does not collapse.

That is valuable and there is a demand for that.

But it is also boring.

And whether people like admitting it or not, the broader crypto market does not wake up every morning looking for boring.

The broader market wants the chaos gods to smile upon them.

They want a grind, yes. But they also want the possibility of outsized returns. They want to feel like there is a reason to keep pressing the button. They want the chance that today is the day something absurd happens.

Zinc understood that.

The Bonanza and Stockpile features are product-level acknowledgments of what the market actually wants.

Is that good? Is that bad?

Irrelevant.

It is what is.

One of the most expensive mistakes people make in crypto is confusing what they wish the market wanted with what the market actually wants.

The market does not care about your emotional attachment.

The market rewards what captures attention, liquidity, and behavior.

That does not mean ORE is dead. It does not mean Zinc wins. It does not mean one must destroy the other.

It means an investor is allowed to own shares of a taxi company and invest in early-stage Uber.

If anything, it's a hedge.

It's understanding that if a new iteration starts stealing attention, users, or liquidity from something you already own, the answer is not to scream on the side of the road cursing the cars passing you.

The answer is to ask whether you should own some of those cars too.

Crypto keeps people broke because they fall in love with bags that were only ever supposed to be investments.

And then they watch the market move on without them, still standing in the rain, waiting for the taxi they swore would always be there.

🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋