First of all, apologies for the strong word “idiots”. I mean it. Probably a more accurate description would be “confused people”. It’s not like they are intending to be idiots, but, unfortunately, that’s the effect of their behavior: they get to be perceived and further identified as idiots.

Now that we all agree the word is not used in a derogatory way, and we’re talking about confused people, let’s see what I mean by “both sides of the spectrum”.

Every activity, every process in our lives can be perceived as either very, very good, or very, very bad. And I mean the exact same event, by different people. The quality of this perception is modulated by our upbringing, experience, penchants, current context, and so on. At one end of the spectrum is the magical, beautiful, serendipitous wonder, and at the other end is the doom and gloom of the unavoidable misfortune.

Of course, there’s no intrinsic meaning in anything, we create it with our minds and we tend to swing in both directions.

Enough with philosophy and abstract words. Let’s see a real world example.

The Crypto Currency Spectrum

For a 10 year old technology, Bitcoin is getting a lot of attention. Well, money in general is getting a lot of attention, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. Because it gets a lot of attention, it’s somehow easier to identify those “both ends of the spectrum”.

Here they are.

The “Moon And Lambo” Crowd

Every time there’s a bull run in the crypto world, which, based on the fundamentals of Bitcoin, happens roughly every 3 years, there’s this new cohort of fresh people expecting to get rich over night. Forget that, expecting to get rich over the next hour. It’s a highly speculative crowd, piggy backing on the natural wave of the appreciation, and behaving like all this was their own doing. The market is up because “they were right”. You start to see it? The confusion, I mean.

How confused can you be to believe that a one trillion USD market can move in the direction you hope it’ll move, just because you HODLed? Or just because you draw two intersecting lines on a chart you barely understand? And yet, this highly optimistic side of the spectrum goes on pretending they “know the markets”, instead of being humbled and honored that so many other people chose to pour their trust into the same asset (which, combined with the fundamentals, is the real reason of appreciation).

The “Down To Zero” Crowd

Every time there’s a bear market in the crypto world, which obviously happens in between bull runs, so it goes for around two and a half years, the opposed size of the spectrum comes up and pretend “they were right”. There is no intrinsic value in Bitcoin, they claim (as if any other asset would have any intrinsic value, lol), hence, it will crash to zero. It’s a bubble, they say, the digital equivalent of the tulip mania, and so on.

Just because they don’t trust the technology (which they have every right to), they assume nobody else should trust it, which, again, speaks of confusion. People tend to trust or distrust things based on their own unique history, preferences and expectations. Trust is a choice. And the down movement of a market is more often not not a healthy way to balance the extremes, to level up the field. A correction. As a matter of fact, it’s always a correction, not only “more often than not”. So the confusion here is to superimpose your own expectations, those of doom and gloom, onto a natural movement of a collective event.

There you have it, a simple and concise description of “both ends of the spectrum”.

Well, I guess I wrote all of this just to make you aware that, although we can’t really avoid the idiots at both sizes of the spectrum (and, in all honesty, we can’t always avoid to be one of those idiots) there’s still plenty of room in the middle.

Initially published on my blog.

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