Written by: HUMBLE FARMER ARMY RESEARCH
Compiled by: Deep Wave TechFlow
Introduction
What are the psychological barriers that prevent us from getting free benefits?
Currently, airdrops have become a hot topic in the cryptocurrency circle, and many people participate in them at low cost to achieve rapid appreciation of assets.
However, after every large-scale airdrop, there are always people on crypto Twitter complaining about the unfair distribution of airdrops, thus no longer planning airdrops. However, this has fallen into a misunderstanding. There are still only a few people doing airdrops, and airdrops are still profitable.
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It seems that everyone is discussing how to arrange airdrops now. How can you blame them? Instead of paying $50 in gas fees to swap assets on the ETH mainnet, I saw someone turn $50 into $10,000 by staking $SOL on Jito. This will incentivize new players to learn about self-custody and on-chain DeFi, which can be seen as a Trojan horse for cryptocurrency adoption.
We should celebrate this! Investors with small funds finally have a way to achieve a 10-100 times increase in account value without having to indulge in memes, leveraged trading or getting caught up in chasing ups and downs. However, it seems that after every large-scale airdrop, we see many angry users on crypto Twitter complaining about the flaws in the airdrop distribution mechanism, and no more airdrops are planned.
So there seems to be two groups of people on crypto Twitter:
Airdrop hunters who are ecstatic about the lucrative airdrops
People who complain about the uneven distribution of airdrops and claim that it is not worth airdrops because they will be diluted in the future.
But if you consider the psychological profile of the second group of people, they would never play airdrops in the first place. They feel comfortable in their own space, trading cryptocurrencies on CEX, telling themselves that they don't need to learn how to use the chain. They complain and tweet about people who masturbate, get engagement from those tweets, and take comfort in the fact that strangers on the internet agree with them.
I decided to call this phenomenon, "The Midcurve Airdrop Fallacy."
Airdrop Curve Fallacy: Far more people complain about airdrops than actually do them. The result is that people will mentally imply that the airdrop will be diluted and choose not to do it, but this does not actually dilute the airdrop they complain about.
Of course, this does not mean that future airdrops will not be diluted. In fact, we can see that the number of Celestia stakers is rising. Similarly, we have also seen an increase in the number of wallets airdropping on Solana. However, I do believe people are over exaggerating the extent of dilution and underestimating the combined size of all future airdrops. What makes an airdrop "diluted"? If we stake $500 of $TIA and receive an airdrop of $500, is it diluted? It was indeed diluted as it could have been a $1000 airdrop if not for those new stakers!
cognitive dissonance
First of all, I proudly admit that I am a midcurve myself. In fact, I consider myself an expert on this topic. So, I have a certain amount of credibility when it comes to identifying people exhibiting curve behaviors. In fact, everything has a simple explanation: cognitive dissonance.
(Editor’s note: “midcurve” is a coined term in this article to describe a psychological misunderstanding that causes people to refrain from taking action due to excessive concerns about reward dilution)
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological discomfort that occurs when a person holds two opposing beliefs or ideas in his mind at the same time. When faced with facts that contradict their beliefs, ideals, and values, people tend to find ways to resolve the contradiction in order to reduce their discomfort.
We subconsciously make sub-optimal decisions in the market because we don’t want to make ourselves uncomfortable. Your token has tripled? Let's sell half of it. Your token dropped 50%? Let's wait until we get our money back before selling. The reality is, the market doesn't care about your cost base. We decide to sell the winning coins because we are afraid of a market drop and a retracement of profits, and hold on to the losing coins because we are afraid of admitting our investment mistakes.
Wanting to avoid pain leads to mid-curve behavior.
People don’t want to start placing airdrops because they don’t want to buy at the top of $TIA. People don't want to use Solana because they're used to ETH. “Airdrops will be diluted” is just an excuse people use to prove they are lazy.
Summarize
I believe airdrops will be profitable in the coming months. I'm also willing to accept that this view may be wrong. I'm not saying you should invest a ton of money into anything, but I strongly encourage people to at least give it a try.
Why not use 1% of your portfolio to pledge TIA? Why not move 1% of your portfolio to the Solana ecosystem and see what airdrop opportunities are available? I guarantee that you will learn a lot more about Solana by using these chains.
I bet 90% of the people reading this will roughly agree with me. Unfortunately, only a few people will take action because they are too lazy to download a new wallet and learn about the new ecosystem.
That's why I'm not even worried about my airdrop being diluted because most people won't take action.
