The story
Luca spent evenings reading stories about crypto investors who turned a few hundred dollars into life-changing money.
One trader bought a meme coin before it exploded. Another spotted an early DeFi project. A third held a token that multiplied a hundredfold.
Luca noticed a pattern: the winners seemed to have courage, conviction, and a sharp eye for opportunity.
So he started taking bigger risks, convinced that he could learn the secret.
What he rarely saw were the thousands of tokens that collapsed, the investors who lost money, and the projects that quietly disappeared.
He was studying the survivors—and mistaking their stories for a reliable roadmap.
The visual metaphor
Imagine a lone investor standing in a vast crypto graveyard.
Hundreds of cracked token symbols and forgotten project names stretch across the dark foreground. At the top of a distant golden mountain, one shining coin glows above a banner reading “100× WINNER.”
The investor looks toward the light. The graveyard behind him fades into shadow.
The winner is easy to see. The failures are easy to forget.
The psychology behind it
Survivorship bias occurs when we focus on people, projects, or investments that made it through a process while overlooking those that failed.
Crypto feeds are full of spectacular success stories. Failed tokens, abandoned protocols, and investors who lost money are less likely to become viral case studies.
That creates a distorted picture of how often success happens—and which decisions actually caused it. A winner’s story may involve skill, luck, timing, or all three. Looking only at winners makes it hard to tell the difference.
The practical takeaway
Whenever you study a big crypto winner, study failed projects in the same category too.
Ask what proportion survived, what risks wiped out the others, and whether the winning strategy would still look smart if you included the failures.
Don’t build your strategy from the highlight reel. Look at the whole field.
— The Behavioral Investor — Understand yourself.
