Like many people, I stumbled into the cryptocurrency world through Bitcoin. I follow the investing subreddit and a posting about the Mt.Gox meltdown was trending. After wading through all the memes, jokes, postings about suicide hotlines, etc. I learned that there was such a virtual currency called bitcoin that some anonymous cyberpunk had made, and for whatever reason, enough people had decided to allocate real value to them. After briefly browsing through some stuff, I just decided to ignore it and go on with my life. Throughout 2015 I'd see postings about it, mostly whenever there was a downturn, but inevitably the price always seemed to go back up. By September 2015, I was intrigued enough to open up a Coinbase account, and on Oct 16, I made my first buy of BTC: 0.25 for the grand total of $63.63. Sent of some texts to friends making jokes about how I was on my way to becoming a millionaire.
Over the next few months, I continued to accumulate BTC slowly, and realized that it was outperforming anything I was earning from stock investing. After weathering the June 20, 2016 drop from the 700s into the 500s and sticking with the recovery, I was hooked.
So anyway, while amused at BTCs Wiley Coyote style price movements, if I was going to invest "serious" money into this stuff, I wanted to see if I could gain even a basic understanding of it. The short answer was no. So I just decided to treat it as a risky stock trade and nothing more. I mean, I watch a video like this:
and I basically lose my ability to parse English sentences. I probably understand less than 1% of what they are talking about.So why stick with it? Well, in the stock market, the idea is to follow the smart money. The problem there is that the smart money has access long before you, has access to insider information, etc. By the time you can invest, you can certainly make money, but probably not enough to change your life. But in the crypto space, you have access to the same information, can see the rise of interest in any particular project fairly transparently, and most importantly, be able to invest at the same time as the smart money. Even if you don't understand the specific details, you can do enough due diligence to determine at least if the community seems to value the project and people behind it. And as long as you keep your investment reasonable (i.e., never, ever invest more than you can afford to lose), you can actually do fairly well.
So I am planning to invest in the upcoming tezos ICO. I watched a couple of videos, checked out the white paper, read what the community is saying about them on r/tezos, etc. Again, do I understand it? Nope. Not even close. These guys brains seem to be wired differently. But nobody seems to be acting as if this is a scam, and the minimum to invest is 0.1 BTC (or ETH equivalent), so what the hell? In what other sphere am I in a position to be investing this early on something that might be the next big thing? I can't think of any.
So yeah, a long-ass post about why I invest in the cryptocurrency space when I though I only understand the technology at a surface level :). Well, good luck to everyone!