DYOR.
It's the first phrase any new crypto investor should learn and take to heart. Spend more than a few days in the space, and you'll hear it enough to brand it into your psyche. Avoid its sage wisdom, and you'll learn it the hard way.
Do Your Own Research.
Seems like common sense in an unregulated market, but it can be seriously difficult to invoke. Crypto moves at lightspeed — that few minutes you step away from the computer can make or lose you thousands. There are around 6,000 coins to research at any given time, each with a thick whitepaper full of math and buzzwords you don't know. Unless you're in this full time, there's no way to keep up. As a matter of course, you'll likely find yourself accepting guidance from one or more of the various YouTube personalities who have already built an audience and seem likable and knowledgeable.
As you learn more about the industry (and take a few huge paper losses), you'll learn to recognize the art of the shill. Fully outed shills like Bitboy and Chico Crypto are well known hawksters who nonetheless seem to onboard most crypto rookies. These guys got in crypto early, made their money from early pumps and are now playing with house money. They speak with confidence because they literally can't lose. And they are talking up a different coin every single day.
It's ok if you find yourself taken in by these Lvl. 1 Shills. Everyone has. It's a rite of passage to start your altcoin experience through Bitboy. You'll wake up once you realize that you have a portfolio of 75 coins all sitting at a 40% loss. You'll begin to recognize the true pattern of the market. These shills get paid to hawk coins, and your best chance at profitability is to follow the YouTube channel of the presenter. When Bitboy or Chico mentions a coin, that coin will pump for a few hours. It will sell off just as quickly. The market will then forget about that coin until the next shill pump, and its price will slowly decay. If you're a rookie, you'll be holding more than a few of these bags until you figure out the game.
This article isn't about the obvious Lvl. 1 shills you'll quickly recognize. There's another, more advanced level of shill that is much more dangerous, and you'll save yourself a great deal of money if you learn their ways quickly.
The Lvl. 2 Mage Shill utilizes a less energetic and more earnest personality. While Bitboy excites you into pump and dumps with a bright personality, shills like Elliotrades and others hide their true intentions behind a faux-analytical presentation and more subtle camera manipulations. The pattern is the same. They are shilling countless coins, and any price action on those coins is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The audience already watching Elliotrades pumps the coin, and smart money gets out at the top. The coin then fades into obscurity until Ellio decides to pump it again.
If you watch the channels of these Lvl. 2 Shills often enough, you'll actually hear them admit that they've been partnered into many of the projects they shill. If you don't have the time to follow them like a mother duck, however, you may miss this information.
The moral of the story? DYOR. The Lvl. 2 Earnest Mage Shill will repeat this advice often, but only to cover themselves legally. Right after they say it, they will proceed to market their various projects to you. The result is daftly worded legal dodges ("I will be buying more of this coin" rather than "You should buy this coin today") that reap the same result. There's no reason to follow channels like this unless folks with experience are giving profitable advice. You'll hear no shortage of these shills bragging about the coins being discussed in their Telegram groups that have supposedly made people tons of money. So the message is don't follow my advice, but people who do make tons of profit somehow?
Unless you're full time crypto, there is no way to DYOR to the level you need to make fully informed decisions. You will be relying on advisors for at least some of your direction.
Understand the game, however. In crypto, everyone's getting something under the table. Profitability at this stage of the game comes from reading technicals, not fundamentals. No one has delivered on their use cases, and pumps are based on speculation. That will change as time goes on, but that's down the road. Realize that everyone right now is a speculator, especially these YouTube shills who seem to have it all together.
