Ask HN: How much money can you make with DeFi and how long will it last?

No you should not have FOMO. Move on, nothing more to see here folks.

I fell into the trap this year, down overall but had a couple wins. Some thoughts:

Watch out for your downside. Reflection-generating coins pay out based on transaction volume, there's always a lot of traffic at first but then they die out. Dead coins make no payouts!

Nodes are a little safer cuz they "guarantee" payout, but gotta watch for an ecosystem that has trustworthy players and wont collapse in a month. Also Nodes have transaction fees when you get the payout, so if you have a bunch of small nodes that translates into lots of fees. And ETH fees during the day are insane right now.

Staking seems the safest but that's the lowest rewards

As always if the base coins crash (i.e. due to a european war) then the payouts are gonna crash too.

Nothing is as valuable as sitting on a pile of ETH that you can flip into a good deal when you see one.

Dont forget to calculate Buy and Sale taxes into your decision making. I made a lil spreadsheet I can plug values into, basically need at least 2X on the sticker price to make any overall profit. And forget about selling the top/buying in after the crash, fees eat up all your margin.

Oh yeah, then there's real world taxes. Conservative approach is to count payouts as income in the year it is earned.

Bottom line, treat it as entertainment and budget accordingly!