One of the primary reasons I got involved with markets is my interest in psychology. Humans are a fickle bunch, and it's fascinating to observe the human condition in such a clear, mathematical way.
Over the years, I've noticed (and fell into myself) a few common psychological biases that many Bitcoiners can develop.
Maybe this short list can help uncover some biases in our own thinking, or help prevent newcomers from falling victim to them as well.

Confirmation bias

The big obvious one here.
Given our wide range of backgrounds, we all tend to preconceive our own vision for Bitcoin, and thus tend to argue with one another over what Bitcoin is.
Take Jason Lowery, for example. Whether you agree with his marketing tactics or not, he sure knows how to get a discussion going. He can rile up a crowd and let them do all the talking for him. His "vision" for Bitcoin is a controversial one for some, but he's dead set on his "vision" in the same way everyone else is.
Confirmation bias leads to block size debates, splits in the "community," tribalism among bitcoiners, etc. etc..
It's also why trading and technical analysis is basically just astrology. You can find whatever data you need to support your own thesis on where the market is going next.

Hindsight bias

Decisions from the past become a lot more clear as time passes on. You think you could've foreseen a certain outcome after the fact.
You feel like an idiot buying at the lows, only to feel like a genius months later when the price springs back upwards. You feel like a genius buying at all time highs with euphoria in the air, only to feel like an idiot months later when the price collapses.
Then as a real bitcoiner, you learn to feel like a genius simply buying anywhere at all.
Hindsight bias is a dangerous one and a tricky one to kick. You experience it because you try to predict rather than react. The less you dilute the future with your own ideas, the more obvious the future becomes.
I think reaction is an impulse bitcoiners have trained very well, and is why bitcoiners tend to be more accurate about calling out crypto scams and the macroenvironment. Prediction is why crypto bros are always so vague imo. They have their own idea of the future, but it's not all that fleshed out in reality. Alex Mashinsky once saw a "vision" for 7% risk-free interest for whole globe.
Train yourself to react rather than predict so you won't be shocked when your lending platform goes bankrupt, or when your beloved staking platform fails to scale sustainably.

Recency bias

Speaking of the future, bitcoiners sure do love to predict it. No denying that. As a bitcoiner, the future really does excite me, and Bitcoin has framed an entirely different perspective on how I see things developing moving forward.
But of course, we're all extrapolating the future with a limited data set.
We assume things are they are today will be the same in the future. It's hard to see beyond the current paradigm we live within, and it's even harder to ideate what new systems look like within a different paradigm.
I like this Michael Saylor interview because it really crystallizes this idea for me.
You can't understand money until you understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first definition of what proper money should be. It just took thousands of years for humans to figure it out.
How that changes the future, given our brains' bias to fiatville, is probably quite more murky than most bitcoiners would like to admit.
This definitely isn't a comprehensive list, so please share any other common biases or weird psychological phenomena you've noticed among bitcoiners too!
Thank you for the post! The amount of recency bias in the Bitcoin bubble is extraordinary. I'm particularly think about people referencing everything to 2008 while actually the gfc being an extraordinary recession compared to rest of human history or even since ww2 or even since the 70s.
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Great article! Very well written and beautifully formatted. I have certainly experienced all of these biases at one time or another, often painfully. Thanks for posting.
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Thanks :) i think we all can relate to one or another or all
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You know today I heard Charlie Kirk say on the PBD podcast say you need to be able to charge interest in order to stimulate economic growth and it made me step back because while I'm not sure I agree it was something I had not thought much about. I bring it up because so many of the memes you shared are relevant to how easy it is to have a blind spot, or even something you just haven't considered before. So I guess I'll end this with Odell's good ole quote. "Stay humble and stack sats"
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Charlie Kirk lol. Jesus, we're literally sitting here talking about challenging biases
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The "Sanity" in my online handle marks my own interest in psychological health, especially now that our minds spend so much time floating around cyberspace.
I enjoyed the post. Looking forward to more 👍
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it will be interesting to read reports on how the internet in general changed our evolutionary psychology in the long run...
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Great work!
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Don't forget "In group vs. Out group." Tribalism amongst cryptoers runs deep. (And Bitcoiners may be the most tribal.)
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This post was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
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It's not just a problem of not being able to predict the future, it is at least as big a problem to interpret the present. Every understanding of the present is necessary just a point of view, taken from a certain perspective and based on a limited amount of data. So we all interpret. What makes bitcoin so incredibly strong is that it is basically a community of people who - at least with regard to money - follow the same hermeneutic rules, and since these kind of hermeneutic communities is the most close you can come to a truth claim, the undebatable nature of these are a really strong selling point!
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Yeah. Biggest one is a MASSIVE oversight of how people feel and view Bitcoin if they were the ones buying at the top of the last hype cycle - which was fuelled in part by FTX. So much nOiSe about "Price doesn't matter!" Because "1 BTC = 1 BTC"!
This doesn't apply blanketly.
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