Why You Should Exit Cryptocurrency

Author: hitesh.eth Source: X, @hmalviya9 Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Why did you initially get into cryptocurrency? Most people enter cryptocurrency because it offers a greater possibility for improving their lives. You believe you can make a considerable amount of money in cryptocurrency and positively change your life.

When you first entered cryptocurrency, it felt like entering a new world, promising a shortcut, allowing you to arrive earlier in life that you once thought would require decades of hard work. You saw it not only as an investment but also as a chance to rewrite your life story. You imagined you could escape the common hardships your family once faced, breaking the cycle of "waiting for a promotion" or "saving for twenty years" to buy a car or a house.

You saw cryptocurrency as a time machine. If used correctly, it could compress ten years into two, and two years into two. That was its initial appeal. You enter crypto not just for the numbers, but for freedom, for defying time, for the chance to live without waiting. You believe you can achieve your dreams, buy the luxury car and mansion you desire, and in some cases, even help your parents retire early. This is primarily about generating additional income to pursue the mundane desires that bombard you with daily social media scrolling. This ultimately leads to feelings of inferiority, yet it also ignites a fleeting passion to change the status quo. The metaphor of "flame" is more like a spark, too fragile to withstand even a drop of water. Yet, you naively believe you can transform this spark into a flame, unaffected by the gathering rain clouds that attempt to devour it. But this is the cruel reality. That passion is more than just a fire; it's a deep-seated drive to prove yourself worthy. Every Instagram notification, every comparison, every person flaunting their success only fuels that spark. However, a spark on its own is fragile, weak, and unable to sustain. The gathering rain clouds aren't just market crashes or red candlesticks. They're the whispers of doubt from family, the rejection from friends who think you're wasting your time, the exhaustion of staring at charts at 3 a.m. These gathering rain clouds will always come to test whether the flame you've ignited is strong enough. The intensity of the flame will depend on two things: The amount of effort you put into transforming that initial spark into flame, which represents your dedication to the process. The quality of the foundation you choose to build the flame on. This foundation determines everything. If it's weak, no amount of sparks will help. This foundation is your discipline, emotional stamina, and ability to stay focused even when the market plays tricks on you. If the foundation is shaky, even a small storm can drown the flame. If the foundation is solid, even a long blizzard season will test you, not break you. Your actions during those blizzard seasons will determine how long you can sustain the flame. Once you've achieved all the desires you initially longed for, the flame may begin to lose its spark. And when the flame loses its spark, what will keep you going? If you can't maintain discipline when the desire fades, you will fall apart. Whether you can hold on in that moment determines how far you can go in your career. The Crypto Market Illusion Cryptocurrencies always offer the illusion of early success, an easy path. It can fulfill more wishes than you can imagine. With your mediocre education, you might not even be able to find a job outside paying $500 a month, and the effort required to earn that $500 is unimaginable. But in the world of cryptocurrency, that's not the case. Although you end up spending more time in front of your screen, your hopes are so strong, your dreams so grand, your desires so amplified that you almost forget you might have a life outside of crypto. But that's precisely the illusion. Crypto creates a mental simulation around you that feels like reality, but isn't. Every victory feels like a stroke of genius, every failure like bad luck. You scroll through Twitter, read charts, chase "alpha," and every time your wallet balance rises, you feel like you've cracked the code to life. Your brain is flooded with dopamine. You forget this is a closed loop, not the real world. The market convinces you that you're in control, but in reality, you're just reacting, always reacting. You're not the driver; you're strapped to the back seat, the road bending to the will of the market makers. With this simulation running 24/7, you've forgotten to breathe outside of it. You stop eating and sleeping properly, stop dreaming beyond the charts. Your reality has shrunk to numbers. Self-doubt never arrives, but the real you isn't that smart. It's just another illusion you've fallen into. You feel in control, but you're not. When you truly realize you're not in control, unable to achieve great success through relative perspective, something inside you begins to shift. If that shift takes the form of self-doubt, it can be a significant transformation. But in the world of cryptocurrency, self-doubt is rare. Hope is like a drug, and the market keeps giving you more. A single green candlestick can erase a month of red. A tweet from a founder can rekindle your faith. You keep telling yourself, "Next cycle, next pullback, next trade." Self-doubt doesn't knock because hope always whispers louder in your ear. When they see foolish people making millions, or at least pretending to, they don't truly question their own abilities. Who has the time to verify all this? Who has the time? A single second can cause us to miss a bigger trade. So, ultimately, it's more of a game of bluffing, pretending to understand technical analysis (TA), reading articles and studying posts to convince ourselves of our decisions. But most of the time, you're only selectively accepting information. You're deceiving yourself every day. The feeling of being left behind. Then, the darkest moment arrives. You reach a point where you truly feel left behind in the game. It feels like everyone else is moving forward, amassing wealth and building connections, while you're stuck. The thought of the expiration date of hope looms large over your mind daily. It's a lingering shadow. Your heart races every time you refresh the charts, you wake up with regret and fall asleep with anxiety. You face ongoing financial hardship, and cryptocurrency, far from being your salvation, has become a crutch. You no longer see any other opportunities. Even if you stumble upon one, you'll end up losing more than you gain. You might reach a point where the cryptocurrency that once gave you your dreams now holds you captive to misery. The Power of Leverage You're losing money every day, yet you can't help yourself. You've decided to surrender yourself completely to cryptocurrency, letting it consume you alive. In this sense, what is cryptocurrency? It's a market run by the collective, a market trading on sentiment, with a few market makers exploiting the emotions of retail investors. Your economic value is generated at the expense of the value of others in the chain. You simply switch back and forth between victim and victim, depending on the leverage you possess through your skills, knowledge, and connections. This is where leverage truly comes into play. It's not leverage in the market, not a 10x long or short position. The real leverage is skills, knowledge, and connections. If you lack these, if you rely solely on borrowed market leverage, you're walking blindly to the slaughter. If you don't build your own advantages, sharpen your understanding, and surround yourself with those who know more than you, you're destined to be sacrificed to the fire you first ignited, even before any blizzard arrives, before any dark clouds approach. The Burning State: In that state, as you're being burned alive by the flames of cryptocurrency, you scream for help. It's not just a whisper, but a cry that only you can hear. You see a way out—perhaps a job offer, a new skill to learn, or a friend telling you to take a break. But your body won't budge. You can't take any action because, in that moment, you've become so obsessed, you assume the flames will die out on their own. You believe the bull market will return tomorrow, your losses will miraculously heal, and your patience will save you. But the truth is, it won't. The flames won't stop. And you'll be burned alive. Should You Quit Crypto? Yes, if you feel like you're burning in flames, if you find yourself losing money every day, if you find yourself losing money consistently for the past few years, if you find yourself unable to focus on your job or business, then you should exit. Exiting at this point is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of survival. But if you can't exit, if crypto is the only place you can make money and earn a living, then exiting isn't an option. In this case, you build leverage. Real leverage. You build knowledge, skills, and connections. You learn new things, tweak your strategy, learn to use tools, talk to people, learn more about how crypto works, attend events, build relationships, take advantage of airdrops, and think about how you can learn everything there is to know about crypto. The more you focus on learning, rather than making money, the better you'll be at bouncing back. Let go of the past. But to do that, you need to completely rid yourself of the memory of your losses. You can't dwell on how much money you had in the past and how much you lost. That memory is a ghost. If you keep feeding it, it will haunt you. You can't change the past, but you can change the future. Moving on from the past is your only antidote. Even if it makes you uncomfortable, even if it feels like you're tearing yourself apart, you need to devote your energy and thoughts to freeing yourself from it so you can think about how to do better with your time and money in this area. Believe me, if you can truly overcome these psychological barriers and move on from the market's past, the market will reward you more.

Sometimes, like me, even if my crypto holdings are down 99% from their peak, I still feel happy and wise enough to find greater meaning in life.

On a spiritual level, it feels so easy to truly detach from crypto. Detachment becomes the ultimate leverage. Once you have it, you're no longer the one burning in the flames. You're the one calmly watching from the sidelines, knowing when to enter and when to exit.