The Breakdown - The 11 Archetypes Of People You Need To Follow On Bitcoin/Crypto Twitter

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Bitcoin and Crypto Twitter are wild, weird places. On this special "sorry I'm traveling, can't give you the news" edition of 3@3, I provide a guide to 11 key types of people that you should be following for your well-rounded Twitter experience.  The evangelist  The skeptic The maximalist  The builder  The buyer  The creator  The curator  The outsider The philosopher  The researcher The independent      Watch: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto

Welcome back to another Crypto Daily 3 at 3. All right, what's going on, guys? So today I am actually on the road as you're watching this. And through the miracle of modern technology, I was able to pre-record it and I'm now streaming it live to you. But because I wasn't going to be there up at the time of the stream and have the chance to see everything that was going on on Friday, I decided that I'd take advantage of a cool tradition on Twitter called Follow Friday

where you shout out people who you think others should follow. This is a great way for you to learn about new people and give a shout out to people who provide value for you. And I thought I'd actually do something fun with it, right? So instead of just calling out specific people, I'm calling out instead the 11 types of people that you should follow on Bitcoin or crypto Twitter. So I think that this is a really fascinating, weird mix of people in this community.

And these are some archetypes that I think are important for anyone's follower set, right? So I'm going to do just a few seconds on each one. We'll rip through it pretty quickly. And hopefully this is a fun time. For those of you who are listening along, if this isn't your cup of tea, I will catch you soon. And for those of you who do want to hang out, let's dive in. So number one, the evangelist, right? You know who these people are. They're the people who wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night because they just came up with the perfect pithy tweet to really hype people up and get them excited about the industry that they're in and the space and the movement, right?

These people are important because ultimately we're trying to do something that's very difficult. It's no one gave us permission to go out and try to reinvent money or to try to disrupt the way that networks are organized or business models are organized. These things are hugely, almost nearly hubristic, right, in their ambition.

And you need those evangelists, you need those hype people to keep you in it. So I think the evangelists are an essential type of follow. Number two, the skeptic, just as important, if not more important than the evangelists are the skeptics. These are the folks who, especially the ones that I care about are the people who are interested in the potential of this industry, of Bitcoin, of other cryptocurrencies, of blockchains, but who aren't buying the hype, right? They are the natural enemy in some ways of the evangelist. But they're incredibly important as well because without these folks, we get lost. in our own hyperbole, right? We get high on our own supply way too much. And it helps us or it creates

a scenario where we're not necessarily seeing things clearly, right? We're too caught up in our own narratives. Skeptics help us pop those bubbles that we live in. It's incredibly important to follow these people. And there are, I think, one of the things that's great is there's the skeptics who make their business model out of hating on Bitcoin or hating on crypto. But there's a hell of a lot of skeptics who really just want this space, this industry, this new disruptive force to be all that it can be. And they want to ignore the crap out there. And they want us to wade through the muck to find the really good stuff. And those skeptics, I think of, if I had to pick just one category maybe to follow, it would be those folks. But with that, let's move on

to number three. Number three, the maximalist. Yes, I am saying that you should, no matter what your proclivities and predispositions, follow maximalists. Obviously, Bitcoin maximalists are the best known, the rib eye of maximalism, the ones so named by Vitalik a couple years ago, and they decided to wear that name like a shield and a coat of armor. But there are other types of maximalists, too, people who are passionate about their chains. Maybe you can ignore some, right? I'm not telling you have to follow everyone in the Link Army or the, you know, Lingam Marines or the XRP Army. But I do think that people who have extreme views are incredibly valuable for you to follow on Twitter. And here's why. Your job if you're on Twitter is to learn, to absorb, to get all these

perspectives is not just to live in your own filter bubble, right? Maximilists do an amazing thing for you, even if you're not another maximalist, which is that they provide this really kind of purest sense of how one group of people is looking at the news, right? They're almost like the bumper, the guardrails in like a bowling alley, where they really kind of help you get a sense of what the end extreme perspectives are on any given topic of conversation. I think that there's a huge amount to learn, both from kind of the, just what's actually being said in the perspective, but also how those communities self-organize, how they engage themselves, right? There's the reason that this whole idea of an intolerant minority

wins struck such a chord when Talib wrote about it is on display in these communities. So whether it's Ethereum maximalists or Bitcoin maximalists, get yourself some maximalists to follow. No, no lie. Just because there are a lot of you who are going to, even if you take my advice and follow the maximalists, I have to hold your nose while doing it. Cleanse your palate with the builders, right? So when I say the builders, I mean the people who are building companies in this space, who are heads down grinding, maybe they're coders, maybe they're working on some other part of

the stack of any given company or project. Maybe they're thinking about how to how to make organizations work better and inside these kind of new dynamic organizational models. But there are so many builders and they're building out in the open. That's an amazing thing to see. And just as, you know, the perspective of kind of maximalist and purest thinkers is really important, so too are the people who are getting their hands dirty with things and seeing what's possible and experimenting and iterating, right? And there's so many out there to follow. Now, I think this is a good point at which to be clear about something, which is that these categories are not mutually exclusive. You can be a maximalist, evangelist, builder who's also a skeptic, right? You can be a skeptic maximalist, right? Like,

these things are not mutually exclusive and I don't want to make it seem like that. I'm just kind of archetyping for the sake of your follow list. But builders, number four, let's move on to number five now. Number five, the buyers. If first we were talking about the builders, let's also talk about the buyers. Ultimately, this is and functions as a financial ecosystem, a financial industry. And the buyers are the folks, whether they're VCs or hedge fund folks or their traders, whether those who have been in it for a long time and who are coming in from other industries, or people who are just coming up and crypto is their first space or they're actively trading. The buyer mentality is different fundamentally in a lot of ways from the builder mentality.

In fact, it can even be contrasting, right? Like, buyers may not have the same sort of purest feelings that maximalists or builders have. They might just care about what's going to make them money next. It's incredibly important to understand that, though, because it is, I believe, the alliance between kind of the purest ideologue and people who care about the vision for what this might turn into, alongside the capital that's coming in, that's flooding into this space, that's providing liquidity, that's creating the mechanism for security.

These things work together in tandem. So understanding the buyers, be they traders, investors, and ideally a group of all of them, incredibly, incredibly important. Let's talk about one of my favorite categories, which will surprise you not at all, the creators. I think in every industry around the world, the media landscape is being totally reinvented by independent media creators who make podcasts, make videos, really give their own opinion, their own take,

do interviews, get their friends who don't like creating media as much as them to come on and talk. The distribution or the power of media has been broken in front of our eyes. And it's not just because of fake news or anything like that. It's that the tools for creating

incredibly high value content are everywhere. And I would say that the creators in this case also includes the journalists who are working incredibly hard to provide that. that perspective that's actually journalistic and that's trying to root itself in fact. So I don't want to leave them out. But I am excited about how in crypto, the creator class of podcasters and other types of content producers is so vibrant, so full of energy.

And it's just for every category of person that I'm arguing or arguing that you should follow, there are creators who are speaking specifically to that type of person. So that's an amazing gift and it's an incredible resource and something that I'm I think that everyone should be taking advantage of. Of course, the challenge with that is that there are a ton of, there's a ton of content out there to follow, right? And if you start following all these content creators, it can get pretty overwhelming.

There leads to this next role, which is the curator. This is obviously something that I spent a ton of time thinking about, what's the best way to filter through the crap and the noise and all the stupid stuff to get you the highest signal. That's what I do, or what's what I try to do every single day. But there are others out there who are doing it in different ways, right? Like, curation doesn't mean that you have a curated newsletter like Long Read Sunday necessarily. It could also mean that you're just the person where everything that you retweet and add your little comment on is so high value that it's just, you know, you're one of my best follows.

For me, the group that I think of in this context is those who when, if I've had a busy week and I haven't maybe tagged as much as I wanted to for Long Read Sunday, I can go back and just go through their feed for the week. and I'm going to catch a huge amount of the stuff that I have. Follow those curators. They'll save your life, I swear. The outsider. This is another incredibly important category. And so when I say outsider, I don't mean some weird contrarian thing or, you know, clout contrarians or whatever. I mean really the people who are not necessarily spending all of their time in the crypto industry,

but who are looking in from other orthogonal spaces and saying, hey, there's something interesting here. There's something about this Bitcoin thing that might matter. for my space in some way, right? So just recently we've seen a ton of the kind of global macro community looking over into the Bitcoin community again, connecting their narratives about what might happen next with what it might mean to have a hedge like Bitcoin in the space. So the outsiders are incredibly important just for making sure that we're not just talking to ourselves and that we're kind of connecting the dots back to other industries and other people who don't have to, frankly, care about what we're building with Bitcoin or with crypto,

but who have an interest for whatever reason. Understanding where those Venn diagrams of those outsiders and of our community intersect, incredibly, incredibly valuable. This is a fun one, right? The philosophers, and you know who these people are. These are the folks who are making sure that we understand the larger context of what we're participating in from a philosophical level, from a long, long-term vision level from a historical level, right?

These are folks, sometimes they've been around for a long time. Sometimes they're just the type of people who like watching the big patterns from 40,000 feet. But the philosophers help ground the idea that the start with why, right? They help us remember what the whole larger point is, even when the markets aren't cooperating with us, even when the buying signals suck or whatever it is that's frustrated at that time, when the latest hack has happened or there's been some scam or scandal. The philosophers, you know, they're different than evangelists. Evangelists, their job is to hype and to always find the good.

Philosophers, their job is to contextualize. I think it's incredibly, incredibly important role. Of course, you can only have so much philosophy, right? Ultimately, you could float off into just the ether, no pun intended, on the wings of the philosophers. So I'd like to pair that with the researchers, right? One of the most amazing things about the crypto industry is the fact that there is data for days, chains themselves create an incredible amount of information.

And there's so many amazing teams who are out there crunching the numbers, synthesizing that data to provide really interesting insights. The thing that I like about following researchers, and there's, again, like so many good teams out there who are doing it and it just keeps growing, is that they're really focused on what the data story is telling, not necessarily what the narrative story is, what the philosophy is, even what the long-term potential is. What they're interested in is what's observable, what's fact.

And that is an incredibly important grounding for anything that we do. Finally, I want to talk about a category that I think may be the most important of all. And that's something that I think all of us can strive to. This is kind of an embrace Christmas and have it in you all year round, the way that Scrooge did at the end of a Christmas carol. Everyone can be an independent. and I think everyone should strive to be an independent. The idea of the independent is that person who is constantly open to changing their mind based on new fact and new information, right?

They might be maximalist now, but they're maximalist because all of the evidence points them in that direction. They're still open to different possibilities, right? That's what I look for in my favorite, favorite follows is people who recognize just how much more there is to learn, how much more there is to know, how much new information is going to come, how much data there is to seek through. And they're seeking that, they're seeking truth, ultimately, over just adherence to any one narrative, right? They're independent, not in the sense that they don't belong to any of these other categories or any one tribe. They're independent because their mind is not trapped by anyone tribe. Their mind is not trapped by any one category of being. Independence are my absolute favorite.

I love them. I think that they're incredibly valuable. They're the ones who push us the most in some ways. When you find yourself an independent, you smash follow, and then you tell the world on Follow Friday. So anyways, guys, that's it for my fun little Follow Friday, Crypto Daily 3 at 3. Hope you liked it. For those of you are listening, hope you had fun listening along. I'll probably recommend some examples of different folks who I think fall into these categories. But seriously, each of them has so many different people and tons of people fall into many of them. So anyways, guys, thanks for hanging out. And I will see you back here on Monday. Peace.