Eyeballcoin: Stop Trading Money, Start Trading Attention

Dec 10, 2025

Buck Rennicker

DeerDown82

Why the real market in 2025 is your screen time, not your dollars.

There’s a lie baked into every chart.

Candles, order books, portfolio screenshots—they all pretend this is about money. Dollars. Capital. “Value.”

It isn’t.

What you’re really staring at is a graph of attention. Price is just how many eyeballs are locked in, and how hard their dopamine is spiking while they watch.

Once you see that, it’s hard to go back to pretending you’re just “trading.”

Down here in Texas, we have summers where your phone overheats before you do. You leave it on the dash for ten minutes and it shuts off to protect itself. I think a lot of people’s nervous systems are one bull run away from doing the same thing.

Let me explain.

Charts Are Just Eyeball Meters

Here’s the frame that finally clicked for me:

Stocks, coins, whatever—most of the time you’re not trading fundamentals.
You’re trading EYEBALLCOIN.

One unit of Eyeballcoin = one human brain pointed at a thing with enough emotion to act.

Look at the whole pump-and-dump circus we’ve watched over the last few years:

Half these tickers are literal jokes.
No product, no business, no plan.
They still 50x because a certain corner of the internet decides, for twelve minutes, that this is the meme.

Then the attention shifts.

Nobody cares anymore. The ticker’s still there. The logo’s still there. The “project” is technically unchanged.

But the price dies, because the eyeballs left.

We talk about “liquidity,” “volume,” “momentum” like they’re financial abstractions. Most of the time, they’re just:

How many people are looking at this right now?
How worked up are they?
How fast can we keep new eyeballs coming in before the current ones get bored and leave?

This isn’t just markets.

Every app on your phone is a small, polite Ponzi scheme for your attention:

Infinite scroll isn’t a design flourish. It’s a needle.
Notifications are little digital cattle prods.
The “For You” feed is literally the “Against You” feed if you think about it long enough.

The first-order problem for everything in 2025 is not “how do we make money?”
It’s:

How do we keep you looking?

Because once they’ve got your attention, they can staple any monetization onto it later.

AI, Feeds, and the Attention Panopticon

AI didn’t change the game. It just turned the volume up.

We used to have humans writing clickbait. Now we have models spinning up infinite content, tuned to whatever gets the most rage, tears, or cheap inspiration out of you.

I watched my mom scrolling one day—heat index outside is 110, AC’s humming, TV off, just thumb-flick, thumb-flick on her phone.

Every video was the same emotional formula:

Sad music.
A kid in trouble.
A stranger stepping in with a miracle.
Or some dramatic “caught on camera” moment that feels just barely real enough.

A lot of it wasn’t real. Some of it was obviously AI-edited. But that didn’t matter.

The point wasn’t truth.
The point was retention.

If the clip makes her cry, makes her angry, makes her hopeful for 12 more seconds, the feed learns:

“Oh good. This is the vein. Drill here.”

Now imagine that process scaled to every news headline, every trading tweet, every “breaking” update on your favorite asset.

You’re not just reading the internet anymore.
You’re walking through an attention panopticon:

Everything you see has been selected because it worked on somebody like you.
AI is constantly A/B testing your nervous system.
“Information” is just the lure. The hook is your time.

This is why staying “informed” can feel suspiciously like staying exhausted.

The feeds don’t care if you understand anything.
They care that you keep scrolling.

The Little Startup That Showed Me the Real Game

A while back, I tried to build a small startup around markets.

Nothing huge. Think: private Discord, some tools, a game-ish layer on top of trading. A place where a couple dozen degenerates could hang out, talk plays, and eventually plug into a system I was building.

I thought I was building:

A strategy engine
A backtesting platform
A fun gamified “casino”

But what I had, before a single line of real production code was finished, was:

30–40 people checking in every day
People literally saving up thousands to “use it” once it was ready
A chat full of eyes glued to every tick, every news headline, every rumor

Meanwhile, I’m in the background:

Burning out
Overdosing my nervous system on caffeine and stress
Trying to duct-tape an actual product together while the room screams, “Is it done yet?”

No one was really asking,

“Hey, are you okay?"
"Do you need help building this?"
"Do you want another dev, a designer, a project manager?”

They were asking,

“When can we plug our attention into your thing?”

I didn’t have the language for it back then, but I see it now:

The real asset wasn’t the code.
The real asset was the room.

All those eyeballs, all that overclocked screen time, all that compulsive chart-watching—that was raw fuel.

If I’d structured it right, those people could have been:

My research desk
My signal scanners
My stress-testing engine

They were already doing the one thing the modern economy really rewards:

ROT IN FRONT OF SCREENS.

And I was killing myself trying to share that job with them instead of designing it so they did it for me.

That’s when it clicked:

You don’t want to be the most dedicated screen zombie in the room.
You want to own the room where screen zombies congregate.

You want to build the container that their attention flows through.

Power, in 2025, Is the Ability to Ignore

So what do you actually do with that realization?

You stop worshipping “locked in” as the god of productivity.

The internet loves that phrase. “Locked in.” Six monitors. Sleepless grind. Market open to market close, then back to “research” until 3 AM. Shaker bottle, blue light, Adderall, repeat.

It looks serious. It looks committed.
It looks like every finance meme page’s wet dream.

But if attention is the real currency, that guy isn’t rich. He’s broke. He’s paying out his finite focus like a drunk throwing $100s at a slot machine.

The person with power now is the one who can ignore:

The feed.
The false urgency.
The 24/7 everything.

I know a dude whose smartphone might as well be a 2010 Nokia:

No social.
No notifications beyond calls and texts.
He checks markets in tightly defined windows, then gets the hell off.

He’s not a Luddite. He just understands that his brain is the bottleneck, not his brokerage account.

Down here, people will brag about how long they can sit in the heat. I’m starting to think the real flex is how long you can not think about your phone.

If everyone else is selling their attention at market price, the edge is:

Don’t list yours.

Reject “Locking In” and Outsource the Rot

The rat race got patched.

You need more credentials, more hustle, more “content,” just to stand still. Food, rent, time, everything costs more. Being “locked in” all day used to be optional. Now it feels mandatory.

The instinct is:

“Okay, guess I just grind harder than everyone else.”

But if the game is attention-denominated, not dollar-denominated, then grinding harder just means you’re feeding more of yourself into the machine.

You’re basically donating extra Eyeballcoin to whichever platform or market maker has you on the hook.

Here’s the heretical move:

Don’t play priest to the god of money.
Don’t try to out-martyr everyone on screen time.

Instead:

Let other people do the rotting and just build the pipes that bring you the signal.

That can look a lot of ways:

You build (or join) a small group that loves being terminally online about one topic.
You let them scroll, argue, chase rumors, clip screenshots, obsess.
Your job becomes:
- Design the filters.
- Set the questions.
- Decide what actually matters.

It’s the difference between:

“I have to watch every candle.”

and

“You all can watch every candle.
I’ll read the 5-minute debrief at the end of the day.”

The first turns you into a battery.
The second turns you into an operator.

One is an “I’ll die for this” vibe.
The other is a “I’ll live well because of this” vibe.

I know which one I’d rather have when I’m 40.

How to Actually Trade Eyeballs (Without Going Insane)

This is all nice theory. Here’s what it looks like tactically.

1. Audit where you’re being farmed

Not “what apps do you use,” but:

What consistently leaves you feeling foggy, depleted, or overstimulated?
Where do you lose track of time the most?
For markets: which dashboards do you stare at long after they’ve stopped giving you new information?

That’s where you’re paying the highest Eyeballcoin tax.

2. Pick hard “no-scroll” zones

Decide in advance:

“I do not read comment sections.”
“I do not watch short-form reels except on Saturdays.”
“I do not sit in front of charts outside my defined session.”

Write them down if you have to. Treat them like risk rules.

3. Find or build scouts

Instead of trying to be your own full-time news desk, leverage:

A couple of trusted friends
One or two Discords / group chats
A short list of newsletters / writers

Give them clear instructions, even if it’s just in your head:

“Your job isn’t to drown me in links.
Your job is to surface the 1–3 things a week I actually need to know.”

You’re trading some dependency for a lot of sanity. That’s fine.

4. Turn sessions into systems

If you absolutely must be in front of screens:

Time-box it. “I check the market 9–10 AM and 3–3:30 PM, that’s it.”
Have a defined purpose. “In this block I’m only looking at X ticker for Y trigger.”
Log it. Debrief it. Don’t just vibe and call it “research.”

The point isn’t to go monk mode forever. It’s to send a clear signal to your own nervous system:

“We are not available 24/7 anymore.”

5. Own (or join) the room

Even if you’re not building a startup, you can still move up a level:

Start a small chat where people post their best finds daily.
Curate who gets to be there.
Reward signal, ignore pure noise.
Slowly turn it into a place where people want to bring you information.

You don’t need a thousand followers. You need a dozen people whose natural compulsion is to stare at the stuff you don’t want to stare at—and who trust you enough to funnel the good parts to you.

That’s trading Eyeballcoin without being the one melting in front of the screen all day.

Unlock Out

We’ve all seen the posts:

“Locking in, no days off."
"If you’re not obsessed, you’ll lose to someone who is.”

Maybe.

But if the real asset in 2025 is attention, not dollars, then the most “locked in” person might actually be the worst off:

No boundaries.
No off switch.
No distance from the thing they’re trying to see clearly.

I’m more interested in the opposite posture:

Unlock out.

Log off. Walk away. Let the feeds and the charts and the AI sludge keep whirring without your eyeballs feeding them.

Then come back on your terms:

With scouts.
With systems.
With a container you control instead of one that controls you.

You don’t need to be the main character in the casino.

You just need to stop betting your entire life on USD, and start noticing where your Eyeballcoin is actually going.

Because once you see that’s the real trade, you get to ask a better question:

“If my attention is the scarce asset here…
why am I giving it away like it’s free?”