I used to do degen DeFi farming, whereby you farm or stake tokens and earn a yield. Sometimes a very high yield, like 20000% APY, and that's possible because they print those tokens into oblivion. So within a short space of time you end up with let's 10x the amount of the token, but it's worth 1/100 of what you put in, due to inflation, because the people behind it are the ones making money and everybody else loses. Occasionally you win if you get in early and / or are lucky, but in any case it's hard not to notice the inflation, the relationship between supply and demand, and all the shenanigans and the privilege of the 'printing class'.

Now, that is exactly how fiat works, but in fiat it happens in slow motion. When people's fiat shipcoin is debased at a single digit inflation rate, they don't notice it, because wealth melts away at the timescale of decades or generations, not weeks, days or hours. So they don't take inflation into account and think a dollar is a dollar, some kind of fixed, immutable unit of value. The idea that if you put $100 into a bank account yielding 3% and took out $103 a year later, you lost money, is foreign to them. They think they made money and "it's only the prices that went up".

The crazy, exaggerated timeframes in degen farming make everything obvious. They make you realize value is subjective, nothing is fixed. They make you realize real estate goes down in value, not up, because houses don't grow bigger, they only get older and more worn (the growing fiat valuation says more about fiat than the house). The high, unlimited inflation rates in DeFi makes you think in terms of exponential progressions and compounding (e.g. the higher the rate, the greater the difference between APR and APY), and they make you generalize. They make you consider terms and factors you thought were negligible, and put it in formulas.

I sold my last shipcoin months ago (better late than never) and have been a Bitcoin maxi ever since. It was a blissful, ecstatic moment, a spark in my eye and an outburst of joy; a sense of a purge / cleanse and a shift in consciousness. Now my eyes are laser; I ignore the noise and focus on the signal. I DCA every single day. On Christmas, corn is the only thing I can buy, and buy it I do. I've also found a new meaning in work, because now, for the first time in my life, I have something to work for.

Shipcoins and fiat are the same thing qualitatively: a scam, designed to rob you, in the hope that you're dumb enough to let yourself be robbed - a hope that is still well-founded in the case of most people. The only difference is quantitative - different market caps, rates, timeframes etc. My shipcoin adventure was a crash course in fiat. Now I have more conviction in Bitcoin than ever. I've lost money to DeFi and shipcoins, but the conviction in Bitcoin I've earned is priceless. It will give me wealth I would never build without it.

I'm already wealthy - by owning more corn than 99% of the world's population, I'm among the 1% wealthiest people in the world. The world just needs to learn the same lessons before it appreciates Bitcoin for it to become apparent. And given where traditional finance and nation states are now we may not even need DeFi to teach people those lessons; they may learn them from the dollar, euro etc. soon.