I gave away a thousand dollars yesterday in Bitcoin, and the video absolutely bombed on my YouTube channel. I have to say, I really hate doing YouTube some days. This felt like such an incredible idea, to do a thousand dollar Bitcoin giveaway. And I am happy for all the people yesterday, everybody who got to receive some Bitcoin and was hyped up and excited about it. A thousand $1,000 Bitcoin giveaways claimed. I gave away $1,000 yesterday to make a nice video, and so far the video has absolutely tanked on YouTube. Not the good kind of tanking either. It was piss-poor performance on X as well.
And yet it was fun yesterday. I had a good time. What's nice is that I gave a bunch of people, a thousand people, a dollar's worth of Bitcoin, and that's cool. To me, that is a guaranteed win. Generosity and giving to other people is a guaranteed win. That's okay. That's what I've been through on all these days on YouTube. I've had so many ideas like this.
The ideas that go nuts, and the ones that quietly bomb
Ironically, the day I changed my race, I knew that was a great idea. I thought, man, this is going to go nuts. And it did go nuts. I got millions and millions of views on the day I changed my race. But there were a lot of nasty, insane comments, although a lot of people were also supportive. A lot of people rethought a concept like race, which is a valuable contribution to make to humanity, that people realize this is an arbitrary concept I've just listened to somebody else about. I've never once in my life considered how valid this is. I feel like I made a useful contribution to humanity, and I was glad. After that, though, I was demonetized on Facebook, but nowhere else. I'm glad that today I don't come online and find my YouTube account taken down because I gave a bunch of people Bitcoin. That's nice.
I've had so many ideas like this over the years on my YouTube channel, and I have to say most of them don't work out. What's crazy is that sometimes things I didn't think were going to be valuable take off. I did a little video that is now my top video on my crypto channel, with 112,000 views, on how to buy more crypto and pay less fees on Coinbase. 112,000 views, but only 500 comments. That video still performs, I did new versions of it, and it still gets more views.
What I love about YouTube is that, in my experience, all I need to do is make YouTube videos and my finances are totally taken care of. I'm grateful my views are up so much, my watch time is up so much, and doing three videos a day is working great. What's annoying, though, is that you often have to make clickbait crap. If I talk about XRP, the views tend to be higher. An XRP video I did a few days ago got more views than giving away $1,000 of Bitcoin.
Ironically, after seeing those results yesterday, what I really want to film for my crypto channel is a complete crypto course. So I'm going to start filming a complete crypto course. I did notice a lot of new followers on Twitch yesterday, which was awesome. Hundreds of new people joined my open chat, which was great.
Everywhere I've reached the top, it was full of cheaters
I was also thinking today, while I started building a patio in my backyard and cleaned out my garden, about something that's really depressing in the world: so many of the people at the top are cheaters. I ranted about this a bit in a video I filmed yesterday. I think it's called something like, ICP holders, I found the secret to the low crypto price. Most of the top crypto altcoins cheat. Most of the top crypto YouTube creators cheat. And it almost seems, to a certain degree, like the rules are there to stop honest people from getting ahead, to stop people who aren't really serious about getting to the top. Everywhere I've reached the top, I've seen that it's filled with cheaters.
On Udemy, I was one of the cheaters. I cheated the review system, because if you cheated the review system it was easy to get your course out there and sold. I was sloppy about cheating the review system, while others had very smooth review-cheating systems that you had to look at carefully to even notice. Udemy took down a bunch of my cheating reviews after people complained. Then I called out the number one instructor on the platform, who cheated the review system ten times harder than I did. He had ten times more fraudulent, incentivized reviews than I did, and they didn't take his reviews down. On Udemy, I eventually got banned, and one of the reasons was that I was calling them out for the top instructors on the platform cheating, and for the dumb decisions they were making that were screwing honest instructors over. They didn't like that.
On Facebook Gaming, most of the top streamers cheated. You'd see people blow up on Facebook Gaming, and there was a simple formula: cheat. It was disgusting. I realized, when I became one of the top Warzone solo streamers, that I was one of the only ones who did not cheat. The main way people cheated was that they would install hacks on their machines and then chroma key them out or use a separate second monitor. People would watch them and be amazed by their gameplay. They would do all this stuff, like slide canceling, to distract you from their cheating and make you think they were good. But they're cheating. They're using aimbots. They're using wall hacks.
I was thinking to myself, God, if what I've seen is any indication. I've seen inside of crypto, and I got to be one of the top 20 witnesses on Steem, and everybody's cheating there too. People are paying people to vote this way and that way. They got pissed at me because I exposed the cheating. I just straight up paid some of the top voters openly and blatantly on the blockchain and asked them to vote for me. But that's what other people were doing secretly. I did it openly, and they did it secretly, and they were pissed that I did it openly, so that the public could see it. Not that I did it, but that I did it openly.
Do we live in a world run by liars and cheaters?
This leads you to look at the bigger question: do we live in a world where most of the people in charge are liars, cheaters, and thieves? From what I've seen most of my life, yes. Most of the people in positions of power, how did they get there? Lying, cheating, stealing, disgusting levels of self-centeredness. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Do we, as the general public, have the ability to choose leaders who have our best interest in mind instead of ones who are simply servants of the system, trying to exploit others? Yes, we do have choices.
In crypto, it's so much easier to cheat harder than it is to build something really valuable. It's like Call of Duty Warzone, where it's so much easier to just cheat than it is to actually get good at the game. And if you're already pretty good at the game and you cheat, you can take your game to insane levels. What's nuts is that the Call of Duty team knew people were cheating. They knew most of the top pro players were cheating, and they refused to even block them for years. They knew, but they did nothing. It's nuts. If you want to see more of how I think about building wealth honestly in this space, I've put a lot of it together in my Money playlist.
So yesterday I was in a bit of euphoria. Today I'm in a bit of dysphoria, and that's okay. I spent lots of time with the family today. Here I am livestreaming while my family is at a movie. I spent the rest of the day around the house, cleaning, building my patio, and doing six batteries worth of edging. Even though I'm in a bit of dysphoria, I'm still really grateful. It's still a great day to me, and I'm really happy to be here.