Bitcoin’s Run and Crypto FOMO in the Barkada

Archive note: this is a backdated post, written years later while rebuilding this site. It’s dated to the moment it covers, but the hindsight is real.

On April 14, Bitcoin hit an all-time high around $64,000 — the same day Coinbase listed on the Nasdaq at a valuation flirting with $100 billion. A crypto exchange is now worth more than most banks it was built to route around. The symbolism writes itself.

And down here at ground level: every barkada group chat now has at least one crypto evangelist. The signs are universal — screenshots of green candles, “sana all” replies, someone explaining Dogecoin (a literal joke coin, up several thousand percent this year) with complete seriousness, and at least one tito asking how to buy “the Bitcoin” through GCash.

I write code for a living, I’ve explained NFTs to half my contacts this month, and I still find the social dynamics of this run more interesting than the charts.

What a mania feels like from inside

A few honest observations, written down now so future me can check them against whatever happens next:

FOMO is the actual product. Nobody sends you a screenshot of their losses. The feed is a survivorship-bias machine: you see the friend who 10x’d, not the ten friends who bought the top of the last cycle in 2017 and quietly never mentioned it again.
“Number go up” recruits better than any whitepaper. In 2017, people at least pretended to care about decentralization. This cycle, the pitch is just the chart. That’s not automatically wrong — but know what thesis you’re actually buying. “It will go up because others will buy after me” is a momentum trade, not an investment philosophy.
The unit-bias trap is everywhere. “Bitcoin is expensive, but this coin is only ₱2!” — as if price-per-token meant anything without supply. This single misunderstanding probably moves more retail money than any other.
Leverage is the silent killer. The exchanges pushing 20x-100x leverage to first-timers are not offering investment; they’re offering a casino with extra steps. Liquidation doesn’t care about your conviction.

The boring advice that survives every cycle

This isn’t financial advice; it’s pattern-matching from someone who watched 2017 from the sidelines:

Only in what you can lose completely without changing your life. Not “would hurt” — can vanish.
An emergency fund and no debt come before any coin. Crypto is the roof, not the foundation.
If you can’t explain what you bought to a friend in two sentences, you bought a story someone else is telling.
Take profits sometimes. Nobody went broke converting gains into actual pesos; many went broke waiting for one more x.

The part I’m genuinely watching

Beneath the casino, real things are moving: PH crypto exchange signups are surging, remittance-via-crypto experiments continue, and blockchain games are quietly onboarding more Filipinos than any exchange — there’s one with cute creatures called Axie Infinity that keeps coming up in conversations about people earning through lockdown. That story feels bigger than the price of Bitcoin, and I suspect I’ll be writing about it soon.

Until then: hands off the leverage, and mute the chart-screenshot guy. He’ll be quieter at the next dip anyway.