10 February 2025
OK, the title isn’t strictly true in every sense. I’m not going to sell all my crypto or stop using it. I’m still an Ethereum nerd.
But it’s true in one important way: I’m no longer going to try to earn a sustainable living in crypto.
I’m a self-employed senior editor with over a decade of paid professional experience in writing and editing. My work consistently receives rave reviews.
In my 4+ years in crypto, I’ve managed to make a living as a writer/editor in DeFi for about half of that time. The rest of it has mostly consisted of:
The possibility of making this into my livelihood often seemed to loom “just around the corner,” and because I had previously successfully landed contract work for a DeFi media agency during a bull run, I had reason to believe I might be successful again eventually if I just kept at it.
But the hard lesson I’ve learned over and over is that despite all the lip service to “getting creators paid,” the majority of the space continues to reward extractive behavior — intentionally or not — and overlook the unmet needs of those who generously contribute their time and labor with little or no compensation. These are structural issues, not individual ones, and I believe it will take a critical mass of systems thinkers to solve them. Crypto doesn’t (yet?) have that critical mass.
The opportunity cost to my business is sobering. In order to stay in business, I have to make money. No economically rational actor who had other viable options would continue to contribute valuable time, attention, and “hope labor” to crypto under the conditions I describe.
I’m a terrible trader, so I’ve never kidded myself that crypto markets will deliver what I need for a livelihood. Also, I’m in the category crypto calls “retail,” which frequently means “exit liquidity.” So many ways to get rugged, so little recourse.
Thus I’m shifting into grant writing — a career that makes it much more straightforward, if not easy, to earn a sustainable livelihood.
This change will probably leave me with little to no bandwidth for my own creative work, which makes me sad. It would be lovely if I had the option to choose between the exchange-value and the use-value of my time. But I only have so many hours in a day to give to cognitive labor… and no matter how much people appreciate my intrinsically motivated creative work, that work still has little or no exchange-value. It earns me next to nothing.
That’s the deciding factor. (This is why I’ve given up music journalism, for example. I still love it as much as I always have. But I’m simply no longer able to pay the production costs out of pocket).
So don’t be surprised if you notice a drop in the time I spend casting publicly on Farcaster. I still love Farcaster and want to stay connected to all the incredible people I’ve befriended. All the same, I’m within 15 years of “official” retirement age now, and if I were to continue on the same trajectory I’ve been on, I’d never be in a position to retire at all. It’s high time for a change.
As a final note, I’ll keep attending to the Return On Attention group chat. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever been involved with on Farcaster, bar none.
I’ve been looking into starting a public branch for this amazing group, while keeping the core group invite-only. But I’ve run into the same problem: there’s no funding source for forum admin/channel moderator work that would enable me to pay my bills sustainably.
So it’s time to put on my own oxygen mask and go make a living elsewhere.