How Do You Conquer Your ADA Fears?

As our beloved ADA has stumbled by ~60% over the past month, it might be interesting and enlightening to learn from newbies and veterans alike about how we all deal with the emotional roller-coaster. Of course, anybody can say “HODL!” but that may not be enough for many smart and important people to appreciate why we hold during the roller-coaster.

How Do You Evangelize During the Roller-Coaster? For example, I’m in the process of educating several people in my investment network about Cardano and the recent price collapse certainly is not helping. On one level, I appreciate the opportunity to buy on the dips, but my personal desires must be balanced with the task of evangelizing to others. If we don’t expand the pool of ADA stakeholders, the ADA market will be too vulnerable to manipulation over the long-run. That means the evangelism process is critical to Cardano’s long-run success as a relatively stable currency.

How Specifically Do You Conquer Your ADA Fears? How do you explain to others why they should buy/hold despite such severe volatility? Do you get any interesting responses? I think we can all learn a lot from this exercise; so, I’m looking forward to seeing all your comments.

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I conquer my ADA fears by only investing money that I consider to be lost and that I can afford to lose.

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Hello ADALove.
Short personal message. A genuine and heartfelt thank you for the enjoyable, informative, inspirational posts. I’m sure most of the readers will appreciate such an unselfish attitude in donating the time it will so obviously take to pen your thoughts to this community. Long may it continue. I own a small company and although semi retired (eyes fixed firmly on the prize of a permanent move to our holiday home in the south of France next year) I’m now having to set off to work and climb back onto the hamster wheel to keep it turning. Looking forward to reading more from you and thank I you once again.

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From the roadmap point of view nothing has changed. We can expect big steps forward towards many improvements, then (finally and hopefully) allowing real-world use cases.

The general questions should be:
How much weight do you put on such steps compared to speculative possibilities?
Do you believe price-gains are realistic without such intensive development and solid background?
Is it really the traditional finance industry cutting down crypto, or is it more about all these things that happened inside crypto (endless forks, hacks, frauds, a massive invasion by traders, recriminations, airy whitepapers and ICOs, …)
Last but not least: Hopefully it was always absolutely clear to everyone that Crypto will not just make everyone rich with speculative profits. What we see now is the second part of the story: invested money is not lost, it just belongs to someone else.
Hopefully, this brings thoughts and forces focused back to where it matters: work. really hard work. It’s till a very long way to go. What happened in December wasn’t a stroke of luck, it’s a serious (ongoing) test.

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By only using investment money for one … and secondly by knowing that there is no upper bound on the value case . There is indeed never a good time to sell the coin . My friend who bought in at $1 is comfortable because I told her to view cardano as like the "value player /bond of the future… I think it is reasonable to compare cardano to “way beyond” something like Google or the personal computer … it is just not distributed linearly.

I also thank the devs and the team for limiting the price explosion and speculation to the extent they can , for democracy benefit :slight_smile:

I only hold a few cryptos.

Cardano is one that I don’t really care much what the price is. If it goes down, it makes me want to buy more not sell. I think that if a price drop makes you want to bolt for the door then you’re either not playing long term, you’re overinvested, or both.

This is how I invest in regards to crypto:

  1. Only invest what you can afford to lose.
  2. If you don’t believe, don’t invest.

Research.

A lot!

Evangelizing crypto in general, and Cardano in particular, requires a ton of research to understand the purpose, technology and goals of the movement and its projects.

People want to feel somewhat secure in their investment choices. Most of them don’t have the tools or the time to develop more than a rudimentary understanding of the technology and a few of the projects.

They check coinmarketcap.com a few times per day, and occasionally see NXT, BAT, MCO, or what have you make a huge run up over a few weeks, and think “Why didn’t I get in on this?” Only to see those coins shed most of their gains over the next few months.

We have to be there to provide the sort of expert advice they can rely on, and point them to forums, blogs, and sites where they can get expert advice and opinions to help them make the right decisions. When they need reassurance that their investments are secure and will grow in the future, we have to provide that.

I have quite a few friends and family members who have invested in cryptos over the past several months. Whenever they are in doubt, or the market is in turmoil, or the media dogs of the elite are casting shade on cryptos, they come to me for reassurance. I calmly explain the situation as I understand it, and let them know that all will be well soon enough, and they just need to be patient. Since I’m the “crypto expert” to them, they feel better, and the situation usually resolves, as I’ve broadly generalized to them, within a few weeks.

I suppose what I’m saying is, we really need to get a lot more “techie crypto gurus” distributed throughout society to provide comfort and advice to the “average” members of society. If all of the expertise is concentrated at the university or corporate level, “average” society will likely feel no better about us than they do about the plutocrats and their tools. :smiley:

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Something just hit me.

Young people have always been at the forefront of fundamental change. Jobs (Wozniak), Gates and a few others understood this and provided many schools with technology, which encouraged adoption, early on in the evolution of modern computing.

What would a high school level blockchain initiative look like?

Imagine a semester or year long program, at the high school level, that embraces aspects of economics, computer science, and political science, with fun (and maybe even profitable) outcomes for the kids and the schools. HUGE WIN in the war for the hearts and minds of the public. The versatility of the Cardano platform makes it the perfect environment for such a project.

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Dear @tknowny,

What would a high school level blockchain initiative look like?

GREAT IDEA! To avoid getting too off-topic in this thread, I created a new thread for this concept and I gave you credit so people recognize you for it, too.

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I conquer my ADA fears by doubling down on ADA and shots of Johnny Walker.

I also do a quick sanity-check by scanning the news on gut-wrenching days like today to make sure there’s nothing systemically catastrophic causing these massive double-digit drops.

Today’s buzz-killing news is all about regulators cracking down on scammers. That’s generally a good thing.

lol, have a shot for me. I conquer my Ada fears by checking on the political news coming out Washington and then clinging to my Ada as if it is a life raft saving me from the stormy seas of greed and corruption.

Thanks again for the chance to interact @ADALove.
(1) I remind myself that it is investment money I can afford to lose.
(2) I think back to the all I know and love about about Cardano, the massive team of world class experts, the outstanding vision and leadership, the process they are following which I believe in 100%.
(3) I remember why I got in to crypto in the first place and how nothing has changed there.
(4) I remind myself of the many previous times I have been through this same thing in crypto and the emotions I went through then and the joy that followed.
(5) I think of Charles’ beard and how thick and full it will be in 3 months.

Then, I buy more ADA and take a shot of whiskey.

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Here’s an excellent snapshot of all the major Bitcoin market corrections since 2012.

That should help to keep everything in perspective for our community when everybody else is panicking.