Freshoffjet

Lots of new people joining CT (Crypto Twitter), so it feels like a good time to explain some common terms that sounded like a different language when I was first starting out. In no particular order, after gm: gm = good morning = the de facto way to say good morning or hello to someone in our space. Can be said at any hour of the day. It is always a gm in crypto. gm is also always lower case. I don't make the rules, but that is the rule. Alpha = Basically sharp/clever/early information that if acted upon is likely to make you money. Example: someone saying that you should buy the "I Choose Rich" meme coin a few days ago before it did a 10x was sharing alpha. There's a LOT of "bad" alpha out there, so you gotta filter through it, but that's the gist of it. Your job if you're looking for alpha on CT is to find the best accounts to follow, and when several of them are all saying the same thing, that's a good indication that it's worth paying attention to. Degen = degenerate = someone with a high risk tolerance and a propensity to ape into random projects, as well as someone who spends 15hrs a day in discord servers and telegram chats chopping it up with the homies. The more things you ape into, the higher the risks you take, the more of a degen you are. Ape (verb) = to spend money on something without thinking about it much, ie "i saw this meme trending on twitter so I just aped into it". Ape (noun) = basically a synonym for a degen, though now also associated with the NFT project "Bored Ape Yacht Club". The term predates the project though, with a rare (and very expensive) Crypto Punk trait being the "ape" trait. Alien = generally the rarest trait in an NFT collection, made popular by Crypto Punks where there are only 9 Alien punks (there are 24 ape and 88 zombie punks as the other special types). Liquidity = basically money. USD, Bitcoin, Ether, stablecoins. If you buy an NFT or Ordinal or car or house or invest in a company, the funds are no longer "liquid" (aka they are illiquid) since you require extra steps to buy something with the funds (you would usually need to sell the thing you bought first to get USD/BTC/ETH back). There's various stages of being illiquid -- holding something like DOGE is very liquid because you can always sell it for crypto; holding a rare Autoglyph NFT is very illiquid because there aren't many people willing to pay 200+ ETH for your NFT and it might take weeks or months to sell at a reasonable price. LP = Liquidity Provider = Someone who provides liquidity to a *thing*. It could be a Liquidity Pool which is something used in DeFi to help people trustlessly swap between tokens, or it could be someone providing money to an investment fund, or many other things. DeFi = Decentralized Finance = the future of finance. A way to transact with people without relying on a centralized entity (which usually takes fees, and requires trust, and time). Can be used for swapping tokens, earning a yield like a savings account, providing liquidity to earn fees, or many other things. Left Curve / Mid Curve / Right Curve = terms based on this meme. The idea is that if you want to make money or find success, you're generally better off being left curve OR right curve. Left curve = someone who doesn't think much, and is just like "hehe i like that meme, that's funny, i'm gonna buy it" Right curve = someone who doesn't overthink things, and understands that if the left curve is gonna like the thing, it's probably worth doing, ie "the meme is funny, funny means popular, left curvers will love it, that bodes well for price, let's buy it". Mid curve = the perpetual over-thinker. They break things down to their core pieces then put them back together again and analyze everything 10 ways to sunday, ie "well is the meme really that funny? will it still be popular a week from now? it's a little offensive, maybe that will turn people off, right? And wow it's already done a 5x in the last 24hrs, i probably shouldn't buy now huh. Maybe i'll ask some friends what they think, and spend a few days putting together a financial analysis of the token, then write a dissertation on it, and then i'll decide not to buy because i've found 100 reasons why it doesn't make sense." Most people are naturally inclined to be mid curve. Most money in crypto is made by being left curve and right curve. Ok that's enough for now, might do another one later since there's so many more other wonderfully weird terms in our wacky space.