FOMO, FUD and Five Other Words That Cost People Money
Crypto vocabulary is unusually effective at shutting down thought. Seven terms, what each one actually does, and what it replaces.
Every field has jargon. Crypto has an unusual amount of jargon whose function is to end an argument rather than to describe something.
These are the seven that have cost me or people I know actual money.
1. FUD
Nominally: fear, uncertainty and doubt spread to depress a price.
Actually: a label applied to any negative information, regardless of whether it is true.
The word’s function is to let you dismiss a concern without engaging with it. The test is simple and almost nobody applies it: is the claim accurate? If yes, it is not FUD, it is news you do not like. Several of the largest failures in this sector were called FUD for months before they turned out to be correct.
2. FOMO
Nominally: buying because you fear missing out.
Actually: a term people use about others and almost never about themselves, because from the inside it does not feel like fear. It feels like having finally understood something.
The useful version of this concept is not the acronym. It is the question: would I have bought this at this size if the price had been flat for six months?
3. Diamond hands
Nominally: conviction through volatility.
Actually: a social reward for never selling, which converts a risk management decision into an identity.
Rebalancing a position that has grown beyond your tolerance is prudent. The vocabulary frames it as weakness, and people hold sizes they never chose in order to avoid the label.
4. Not financial advice
Nominally: a disclaimer.
Actually: four words appended to financial advice, which change nothing about what was said and are believed by the speaker to change their responsibility for it.
Treat content with this phrase exactly as you would treat the same content without it.
5. Early
Nominally: participating before broad adoption.
Actually: a claim that cannot be evaluated and is never retracted. Everything is early until it has failed, at which point it was never mentioned again.
Ask what specifically has to happen for the thing to stop being early, and how you would know.
6. This time is different
Nominally: an observation that conditions have changed.
Actually: sometimes true. Conditions do change. Spot ETFs were a genuine structural change, not a story.
The problem is that the phrase appears with equal confidence when conditions have not changed. The test is whether the difference is verifiable: a rule change, a new legal category, a measurable flow. If the difference is a narrative about adoption, it is not a difference.
7. Do your own research
Nominally: an encouragement to verify claims.
Actually: a way to transfer responsibility to the reader for a claim the speaker has not supported.
Genuine research means primary sources: the documentation, the contract, the filing, the flow data. It does not mean reading four more posts by people with the same position.
Why this matters
Language of this kind does not persuade you of a conclusion. It removes the step where you would have evaluated one.
I have made two significant mistakes as a direct result. Once by dismissing accurate reporting about a platform as FUD, which cost me a recoverable but irritating amount. Once by holding a position past my stated limit because trimming it felt like weak hands, which was a considerably more expensive lesson.
Both times the vocabulary did the damage before the market did.
This is a personal account of holding through market cycles. It describes what one person did and why. It is not a recommendation, and past cycles do not predict future ones.