Taiwan's "Real Life" PoolTogether
PoolTogether Community Interview #11: Neken
Welcome to the start of the Holiday period as we enter the end of an incredible year for PoolTogether!
We are also coming up to three months of this PoolTogether Community Substack and we have now grown to over 200 subscribers with hundreds of people viewing each post.
Most importantly, we have committed Community Members involved in developing, producing and sharing the content.
Including, the guest of today’s PT Community Interview - Neken - from Taiwan!
Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts:
Lucky, optimistic, epicure, curiosity and gamer, own export company and a coffee shop, invest in real estate, traditional finance and crypto. life is great and sort of retired.
How long have you been into crypto?
I started mining with my gaming computer in January 2021 with Nvidia RTX 3090(90 days of payback period). It was super profitable but there was no way to buy the original price of the graphics card, plus the ETH2.0 turning POW into POS, so I gave up this idea.
In February, I started to look into Defi project and then I found PoolTogether.
Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?
Don't use or invest in forked protocol(get hacked easily), don't trust any airdrop announcement and don't buy meme token(mostly controlled by whales and it is Ponzi).
How did you find out about PoolTogether? What has made you stick around?
Reading news about defi, then I saw news about the Pooltogether airdrop.
I have stayed because it is a warm community without hierarchy, everyone is so nice and friendly.
I believe PoolTogether can change Traditional finance and help people build up healthy finances.
How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.
Being a Chinese Substack writer this includes translation English content and PTIP. Translate website into Chinese and help people in discord.
Will be interesting to learn more about the crypto life in Taiwan!
Financial independence is the goal for most people in Taiwan, the financial independence formula is: Asset x 4% = Total Spend.
Due to extremely low wages, Taiwaness need to learn how to invest to achieve this goal. People invest in real estate, stocks and crypto. Because crypto have more potential to become rich quickly and difficult to fight against whales in traditional finance. So more and more people are investing in crypto.
Most mining Graphic cards and technology are from Taiwan, TSMC, ASUS, MSI, etc.
We understand there is a “real-life” PoolTogether in Taiwan. Tell us more…
Taiwan has a similarity with Pooltogether, we both have a no loss lottery. You will get a receipt after shopping, with the receipt number on it and you can join a big lottery, draw every two months. Grand prize is around 360k and about 0.3% chance to win $7 Prize.
The history behind this is tax evasion, people are asking for receipts so merchants, traders and businessmen(no matter how big or how small you are) will have to declare a full amount of income and revenue. After this policy tax income increased more than 10 times.
What are the main lessons you have learnt from your investing and entrepreneurial career which you have taken into crypto investing?
There are two reasons for my investment success. Firstly, being in the export business, we can always get the latest information on raw materials, costs, need, supply, etc.
This information helps us to make an estimate of the inflation rate and economic recovery.
Secondly, there is a Chinese proverb “Along with real estate comes about wealth.” so all the hot money will end up into real estate or other value generating assets.
My crypto investment is more likely a Cigar Butt Investing, I can invest in bubbles but they can also have huge potential.
I believe that DeFi and crypto can change traditional finance and help to build up a accessible finance for every one, especially in those countries which have currency depreciations and sanctions.
What mistakes or errors have you made in crypto?
I did not buy any Smart Contract Platform token (ETH, Matic, BNB, AVAX, etc), you will have to pay gas fee for every transactions. Most of them perform so well, unlike DeFi have huge sale pressure due to intensive use.
What is your advice for new people considering PoolTogether?
Time plus compound interest are the easily way to become wealth.
Don't be greedy or leverage, just save in a prize saving account(PoolTogether). More than 90 percent of success crypto investor are Diamond hands (Holders).
We hope you have enjoyed this interview. We will have one last one for you in 2021!