The first time I ever heard about bitcoin was from my brother-in-law in 2016, most likely during the summer. It sounded somewhat interesting but I didn’t think too much of it, and soon after his visit I forgot about it. The next few times he came (he lives relatively far away so that’s not too often) he would mention bitcoin. But I still didn’t get much further than looking it up on Wkipedia, where I also found out about ethereum.
During this time I was day trading stocks, which wasn’t working out for me. In early 2017 i heard that on the web site where I learned how to day trade there was an educational video on trading bitcoin, which I immediately purchased. My thinking probably was something like: “maybe I can make money on bitcoin”. The video mentioned a documentary about it, which I watched as soon as possible. It really intrigued me and put me on the road to more documentaries about crypto.
By the end of summer in 2017 i quit the day trading of stocks (I switched to investing). I was still receiving emails from the place where I learned day trading (evidently not very well) and in October of that year I was sent an invitation to a cryptocurrency investing webinar. I didn’t buy their service (though I was very tempted and almost did) but I did become more enlightened about the whole field. They gave out one free crypto recommendation for XRP and hints about another (i figured it to be zencash, or horizen as it is now called). I quickly purchased those and gradually began researching other cryptos and buying the ones that sounded promising. I also watched as many other webinars as I could, especially the ones that gave freebies (one of them being EOS). I guess that would make me a webinar scavenger.
It was at the end of the big crypto run up in 2017 that I made one of the greatest mistakes of my life. You can probably guess what happened. When the uptrend stopped and things started and continued going down I kept telling myself that it’s only a temporary pull back and that the cryptos would go still higher. For quite a while I basically froze up and didn’t sell. I eventually did sell the two that were still higher than when I bought them. I did make almost a thousand bucks, but I could have probably made over $10,000 (which would be quite a big amount for me). Greed, indecision, and lack of a plan did me in. I still haven’t completely forgiven myself, but as it is said: you learn more from your failures than your successes.
In the summer of 2018, when it looked to me like the crypto downtrend was over, I started buying more cryptos. As you know it turned out to have been too early, given the recent sell-offs. But it could have been worse, I could have bought much higher. And besides, it’s very difficult to predict the bottom. I should still make some nice profits during the next bull market. That is if I chose the right coin.
Two weeks ago, in addition to my hodling, I bought a short term crypto trading service powered by artificial intelligence. It’s too early to tell how this will work out for me. Time will tell.
I often beat myself up that I didn’t seriously look in to bitcoin at least when he mentioned it, maybe I would have brought some and now I would be wealthy, or at least on the way. If only.
What is your story? If you would like to share how you got into cryptocurrency then write it in a reply. Please keep it to under 1000 words. The author of the story that has the most upvotes will receive 25% of the proceeds of this post in the form of Steem (in addition to the amount the story generates from its upvotes). The cut-off for voting is December 27th at 7:42pm PST.
Bitcoin by Kevin Smith/ www.scootergenius.com is licensed under CC by 2.0
Thank you,
Bolko Rawicz
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