Don't let Gremlins ruin your Christmas
Always think about Incentives
The lights are on.
The house feels warm.
Everything looks manageable.
That’s usually when mistakes can creep in.
This is why, every Christmas, I think about Gremlins.
Which is a Christmas movie and written by Chris Columbus who went on to create the great comedy Home Alone.
Gremlins isn’t exactly festive
But it’s instructional.
The movie doesn’t start with chaos.
It starts with optimism.
A gift.
A good intention.
A feeling that something new might improve life.
No one in the movie is trying to destroy the town.
They’re trying to enjoy what they’ve been given.
It was a town in middle-class America when the US didn’t send all its industrial capacity overseas. There was a sense that all problems could be solved with a reasonable amount of time and a little holiday spirit.
(Unlike the Godless Nomadland and, surprise surprise, directed by a Chinese filmmaker)
The dad of the story is overseas and buys against the owner of the shop’s wishes what they call a Mogwai (that animal before it turns into a Gremlin)
But it comes with rules.
Simple rules.
Clear rules.
Rules that sound so basic they feel almost insulting.
Don’t get it wet.
Don’t expose it to bright light.
Don’t feed it after midnight.
Nothing abstract.
Nothing philosophical.
And that’s exactly why they’re ignored.
Humans don’t rebel against complexity.
They rebel against simplicity that interferes with momentum.
Nobody ever says, “I’m being reckless.”
They say, “Relax, I know what I’m doing.”
I recognize this pattern because I’ve lived it once with technology, once with markets, and several times with things that came with instructions I skimmed confidently and then resented when they turned out to matter.
Cryptocurrency arrived in the world the same way.
A gift wrapped in ideals.
Decentralization.
Freedom.
A system that didn’t require trust.
It also came with rules.
Understand custody.
Respect leverage.
Don’t confuse price movement with adoption.
Don’t assume speed equals safety.
None of these rules was hidden.
They were just inconvenient.
In Gremlins, water isn’t evil.
Water is normal.
It’s everywhere.
It’s harmless—until it isn’t.
Water doesn’t corrupt the Mogwai.
It multiplies it.
One small mistake doesn’t stay small.
It scales.
That’s liquidity.
Liquidity isn’t a villain.
Liquidity is an accelerant.
A minor flaw in a dry system stays manageable.
The same flaw in a liquid system becomes uncontrollable.
This is where people get confused.
They blame rather than take responsibility.
Crypto didn’t break because of bad intentions.
It broke because incentives outran restraint.
Even the dad, at first, when he saw the multitude of Mogwai, thought about how much he could sell them for.
Because someone always said, “If this works once, why not ten times?”
Because someone else said, “If people want it, who am I to stop them?”
That’s how rules don’t disappear.
They get negotiated.
Politely.
Confidently.
Usually during good times.
Bitcoin, to its credit, assumed humans would misbehave.
It planned for impatience.
It planned for greed.
It planned for shortcuts.
Slow blocks.
Predictable issuance.
Difficulty adjustments.
It didn’t ask people to be better.
It assumed they wouldn’t be.
Most of what followed with the explosion of competing cryptocurrencies made the opposite bet.
Faster settlement.
Higher yield.
More leverage.
More water.
Christmas is the perfect backdrop for this mistake.
It’s when people trust systems to behave themselves.
It’s when vigilance feels unnecessary.
It’s when “just this once” sounds reasonable.
Gremlins don’t collapse during panic.
It collapses during comfort.
The town doesn’t fall apart because everyone is afraid.
It falls apart because everyone is relaxed.
Markets work the same way.
They don’t fail at the bottom.
They fail near the top.
They fail when dashboards glow green.
They fail when risk is decorated with optimism.
They fail when speed feels like intelligence.
At some point, speed stops being efficient and becomes anxiety-wearing a blazer.
I’ve owned the blazer.
Light matters to Gremlins.
Not as decoration.
As discipline.
Light exposes what you’re dealing with.
Darkness is where leverage hides.
Darkness is where complexity pretends to be innovation.
Christmas is full of soft colorful light.
The comforting kind.
The kind that convinces you nothing bad will happen tonight.
This isn’t an argument against crypto.
Gremlins wasn’t an argument against gifts.
It was an argument against carelessness.
The Mogwai wasn’t the problem.
What people did with it was.
Technology doesn’t decide outcomes.
People do.
Every December, investors promise they’ll be more careful next year. Or that another year of bounty will occur.
January has a way of testing it.
Christmas isn’t about fear.
Some things are powerful.
Some things multiply.
Some things come with rules that don’t care how confident you feel, ignoring them.
Enjoy the holiday.
Enjoy the lights.
Enjoy the optimism.
Just remember, there may be a Gremlin around when you least expect it.
Merry Christmas.
And Keep the lights on.
Eric