Lately I’ve been practicing reading options, and the more I look, the more I feel like “time value” is pretty real: the buyer gets slowly gnawed at by it every day—if the market doesn’t move, you’re still losing, like paying rent. The seller looks like they’re collecting rent on the surface, but really they’re taking tail risk as collateral; it feels comfortable most of the time, but one black swan could cause them to give back everything they collected up front… To put it plainly, who is time value eating? Most of the time, it eats the buyer’s patience; occasionally, it also eats the seller’s luck.

What I care about more now is: am I actually buying volatility, or am I buying the illusion of “something I think will happen very soon”? Lately, those Layer 2 debates—Tps, fees, and subsidies, all the back-and-forth—are the same way. They’re lively, no doubt, but once time drags on, the heat of the narrative fades, and people who pay the bills are easy to get worn down. Keep practicing for now—no need to rush to prove myself.