After yesterday’s multibillion dollar leveraged crypto wipeout, traders are licking their wounds — but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Opinion
I’m not your mother, your priest, or Gary Gensler.
I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t use 50x leverage gambling on lower-liquidity altcoins on a centralized crypto exchange, because you are a human adult in the year 2025, and you can gamble whatever the hell you care to gamble.
But I do have one word of advice, and you can take it or leave it.
(I hope you take it.)
Gamble with your money. Don’t gamble with your future.
If you love to speculate on crypto, speculate with what you can afford to lose.
Because whether you believe it’s CZ hunting down Wintermute (prolly not) or Binance technical glitches (shrug, who knows) or some Trump associate shorting the market (your guess is as good as mine) or any one of a thousand psychological, structural, or deliberately evil accelerants that caused this epic $20 billion meltdown, there is one thing that every explanation has in common.
There’s not a damn thing you can do about it, once it starts.
Cascading liquidations will wipe you out if you’re sitting on a highly-leveraged long position. And they will do it before you have a chance to react.
I’ve been in this business for almost a decade, and what was true when I started is true today.
Leverage is gambling.
And that’s okay, so long as you do it with restraint, with some small degree of awareness.
Casinos are fun! Casinos are shiny! Casinos sate our natural human appetite for risk, without having to actually go out hunting saber-toothed tigers.
But would you walk into The Bellagio and put your home on red?
Would you throw your life savings in front of the dealer and draw on sixteen?
Just because it’s digital, dispassionate, a long way from the blinking lights and honking slots, just because it *feels* like you have some control because you did your research and you have a thesis… doesn’t matter.
All that matters, at the end of the day, is that you play within your means.
Have fun. Take a few bucks and go long on whatever seems attractive.
But don’t gamble your life away on crypto. There are just too many reasons, even today, why the market isn’t mature enough to handle ridiculous leverage.
And yesterday proved it.
I’ll leave a few questions on the table.
Should exchanges allow you to gamble everything on a bet that’s so risky? Should they be held responsible when their infrastructure shuts you out? Should your local regulator have put sensible guardrails in place, instead of abdicating their responsibility and refusing to even acknowledge that we live in a different age than the one that spawned Las Vegas?
All of those questions aside, the fact is that YOU are still in control of your future. You are not a victim, you have agency. You can decide how much risk you’re willing to take on.
And maybe once you’ve decided that you’re willing to take on that risk, give yourself five minutes. Walk away from your phone or your computer, and think hard. Is the risk truly worth it? What happens if your play goes bad?
Those five minutes could save the sats you’ve been stacking for years.
Here at Cointelegraph, we hope you’re okay. Financially, emotionally, and of course physically.
And if you survived this washout — good for you.
But learn from it. Be safe. Your future is a lot more interesting and fun with your savings intact.
