How to Make Better Bets | Maika Isogawa - Webacy

of sport City with hello everyone and our next guest is uh Micah isagawa from wey uh for how to make better bets thank you all right good morning good afternoon welcome to eth Denver I love East Denver because this is my first crypto conference ever four years ago and I remember the first e Denver I came to was snowing out it was raining it was slushy and I was trudging from event to event in my sneakers and then now we have this beautiful weather uh proving that global warming does not exist so I'm not going to complain it's fantastic um well thank you for spending the next 15 minutes with me to talk about something very near and dear to my heart which is gambling or betting or whatever you want to call it so we'll get straight into it we only have 15 minutes together so I'll try to make it quick my name is suala very briefly on myself I studied machine learning in AI at Stanford and I specifically studied decision making under uncertainty so these are things like imperfect information games self-driving poker Blackjack you get the gist but that was the area that I was very interested in back in school and my introduction to crypto was actually in 2014 so I used to be an acrobat for Cirus if you're familiar with the entertainment company very different career path from now but I first learned about bit coin back then and kind of went down the rabbit hole ever since fast forward I started a company called wey and we originally started to protect digital assets for everybody and we'll be uh launching a bunch of things this year but that's not what we're talking about today before we get started we need to set some context so betting and gambling has it's nothing new it's actually been around throughout human history just like everything else that's fun uh so where did it start from the first recorded parts of bedding and gambling was actually in 2300 BC in Ancient Ancient China uh where they first discovered tiles and they had things like the lottery which many governments utilize to build great projects like the Great Wall of China fun fact fast forward and then ancient Rome they discovered the first dice with a caveat they did find dice in the pyramids of Egypt way back in the day but they started to see more dice appear historically in ancient Rome as well as chips so just like anything uh gambling was outlawed in ancient Rome at some point and so people started gambling with chips instead so that if they were ever caught they could say they were just gambling and playing for fun which is very um reflective of where we have chips in the casinos that we have today pretty cool history all right more less ancient China 800 ad0 uh they started seeing cards and these are not like the 52 deck playing cards that you play with today these are more like trading cards like you would see like Pokemon Yu-Gi-Oh uh we're all nerdy here so we've probably seen those kinds of cards um but then the 52 card deck became more prominent in Europe so they started playing games like bakarat which I have no idea how to play bakarat but that's what happened and then in the 1600s Origins kind of unclear but Blackjack became a thing so I'm sure all of you have played blackjack before but it was a part of a social you know the social upper class and then kind of migrated to everything else within Spain France America it's a big question kind of where it uh came from originally and then Italy the first casinos uh I wish I could have been there back then in 1638 but that's where they started to appear and then now we have them all over the world and then can you guess what the last one would be that is more modern for us someone say sports betting but we're at a crypto conference so it is memec coins uh this is what I would consider the modern day gambling betting that kind of ecosystem betting has always been a mix of entertainment risk and speculation and it's also something that's always existed our human society in the world and it's very actually quite fun in each of these eras there were the people that were insiders and then the people that were Outsiders and when you're gambling and playing these games this type of dichotomy is super important to remember as you play this game and historically the house has always won but as we've seen in mean coins and trading and crypto especially recently we now have an opportunity to become the house in many ways whether it's legal or not it's kind of a gray area at the moment but before we move forward I personally think about gambling and betting in a bit in a different way I think that every decision we make every way we choose to spend our time the fact that you're here with me today the fact that you're here at this event at eth Denver is a decision and it's a gamble of your time and your resource and your attention and whether or not it's going to pay off that's the Gamble and the bet so that's how I like approach all of the decision making that I make every single day and it brings us to what we're going to talk about today they say that we make 35 100 decisions a day and for as many seconds as there are on a day this means that you're making a decision every 3 to 6 seconds you wake up you decide to wake up you decide to come here you decide to work in crypto these are all choices that you make many many of them unconscious but you have to consider where those came from so maybe it's because you were raised somewhere or that your parents taught you something or that you're in a certain circle of friends and that influences your decision so all of things we have to start considering unfortunately or fortunately I personally really like it meme coins and gambling have found a sort of pmf we can argue this later uh in the market especially the past you know few months and years uh and this is a reality we have to understand as a founder and a builder I'm a Founder myself and so sometimes I feel this way and sometimes when I make some money on a meme coin I'm not too angry about it but you can't really argue with money it's been one of the largest money-making platforms this cycle memec coins gambling and all of us here I'm sure have done something to bet into a mem coin to bet into a narrative and hopefully you made some money along the way although the numbers would say that most of us has lost now they say that all of these mean coins are fair and yes maybe in some ways the platforms and the way that the meme coins for example on pump. fun which is screenshotted here is a fair launch the code is the same the opportunity is the same the platform is the same but we all know this is actually not true there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes that make the BET and the gamble completely unfair to people that are not in the narrative and in The Insider Circle so now I don't have too much more time with you so we're going to get to the practicality of how to actually make better bets and this can be applied to crypto but hopefully you can take it away for the rest of your life the first thing is to understand the narrative and understand the incentive every Builder every Dev every project has an incentive and for crypto it's probably to make money maybe it's to raise money for a good cause but most of the time it's just to make some cash but you also have to understand the narrative cryptos and meme coins with really good stories end up exploding many many times so for example if you remember uh Peanut the squirrel there was a big narrative behind it and then of course it gets picked up by kols the biggest K Elon started tweeting about it it became something that people believed in because then it became bigger than a person or squirrel or only fans it became bigger because it was government overreach in many ways so this is a narrative that people got behind and it really went up in value so when you're buying into something is there a narrative that could gain popular attention and gain popular po vote it's kind of like a religion if you can sell a good story you're going to have followers and it's going to become bigger and have traction the second thing and this is a real wakeup call or a real kind of self check is to understand your place if you're not The Insider launching the coin or you don't have Insider information you're probably an outsider or the exit liquidity and you can play this as much as you want to but the reality is you're probably not going to win against the people who know the best so again back to this slide there are insiders and out ERS so if you're here you're more of an Insider than a lot of the retail consumers but the reality is if you want to make money and you want to make a good gamble whether it's crypto or not whether it's legal or not uh you need to understand your place within that network of information uh we found out recently that there are some major major Insider information games being H like being played on the some of the bigger mem coins that happen to be launched at the end of last year but this is not just a mem coin thing this is everything this is every business this is everything you decide to do this is every relationship that you might even have and so you have to think in a bigger context of where is your positioning are you well positioned to even make this bet in the first place the last part is to give yourself an edge there's a lot of opportunities out there whether it's self-education or whether it's paying for tools to do better research do better filtering and you have to use them if you want to not just be the sucker at the end of the day uh this is bubble Maps I'm sure you've heard of it before but you have to do your own diligence on a token some people might argue oh you know when the token token launches it's all about speed yes that might be true and if you're okay losing all of your money then do that uh but the real reality is there's a lot of tools out there that will tell you things like where is this token coming from who are the Insiders that are getting the token distributed to them are you enough are you early enough are you going to be able to sell early enough to make a profit on this and these are things that are all available to you even things like bundling which became a big issue in salana bundling is not actually a bad thing it's a little counterintuitive sometimes if a team is really good enough to bundle that's something you might actually want to bet on a little bit or the opposite way if it's too bundled then you know that you don't have a chance at making any money and so there's a ton going on here within the ecosystem and there's tools out there to be able to understand them so we're coming up on time I'll leave this out here but you have to think about life in percentages every decision you make there's a percentage of success a percentage of failure this part uh this slide in particular is talking about the percentage of an asteroid hitting I'm a huge poker player and a huge poker fan and I know that more than more than times I can count my Aces have been broken plenty by things that have less of a percentage of winning uh so this is kind of the showcasing the percentage of an asteroid hitting and if you play poker before this has happened many times so count your days um but just just to Showcase that every time you choose to go do something you hang out with someone you extend like the the time and energy to go talk to someone you are making a Gamble and you are making a beted so hopefully uh whether or not you walk away with anything here uh this time together you'll be able to understand that the decisions that you make every day are not just like willy-nilly decisions you can actually improve them by thinking about it and taking these things into account so I'll pause there uh my name is Micah again you can reach out to me at mik sagawa and also the company that we run check out dd. XYZ Doud or web.com DD thank you [Applause]