Tales from the Crypto - Chaper 1

The following story i'm going to tell you is 100% true.

Over the last few years, getting involved in cryptocurrency has taken my life down a surprisingly unusual path with some very pretty peculiar twists and turns of events, some euphoric highs and some heartbreaking lows...and I'd like to share my story with you....but why?

For entertainment - some pretty weird and amazing stuff happens, and we all like a good campfire yarn.
For you - maybe you can learn from some of my mistakes (I make plenty of these!)
For myself - to help me make sense of some of the things that have happened in a slightly self-indulgent but hopefully cathartic process.

I've learned a lot about cryptocurrency, but my journey so far has taught me a lot more invaluable life lessons and I've learned a lot about myself. I'll break it up into a few chapters as a lot has happened...and still is happening.

I've never written about myself before, but so you know who's telling this story here's a one line résumé :

NAME: Call me 'Al' / AGE:40 / ADDRESS: Scotland / CURRENT POSITION: F/T Daddy Day-Care to 3 year old and 1 year old boys

CHAPTER 1
"Whit’s Fur Ye’ll No Go By Ye" - Scottish expression meaning “What is meant for you by fate won’t pass you by”

My introduction to crypto started in January 2014 when my wife's aunt gave my wife 500 Quarkcoin for her birthday. Yep, a pretty unusual gift - I'm sure she'd have been more happy with a H&M gift card, but together we installed a wallet, sent her the address and waited patiently for her digital curio. When the balance of 500 was received it was incredibly anti-climatic. So what we do with them? Nothing? What can you spend them on? Nothing? Errrrrr okayyyy...thanks for that. However although the gift wasn't for me, it certainly piqued my interest in crypto as her aunt said these coins could be worth millions of pounds one day (how wrong was she, although I just checked the price and they're up 20.72% in the last 24 hours so there's maybe still a faint glimmer of hope). I delved into the world of crypto with a youthful enthusiasm and dreams of being a millionaire, and like many others made their tentative first steps into the murky pool of altcoins via everone's favourite first pet-pooch -Dogecoin.

Being a tight-ass (frugal) Scotsman I wasn't prepared to risk any of my increasingly dwindling supply of real-life-beertokens on invisible canine currency so quickly discovered faucets and would regularly visit them all to collect free dogecoins. I didn't have a regular full time job so I had quite a lot of spare time, and although the amounts were negligible I soon amassed a few thousand. Like any sane person I soon got bored of solving recaptchas all day for imaginary money I couldn't spend, but I really loved dogecoin. The inclusiveness and friendliness of the community, that happy wee puppers face, the humour, the uncrushable optimism that one day we'd go to the moon - I wanted to get involved. I also had amassed load of these doge and didn't know what to do with them. I had the idea of setting up a twitter persona to be a Robin Hood kinda apostle who would not only spread the good word of doge but also distribute my funds for a bit of fun and "Free Dogecoin Guy" was born.
A few carefully placed hashtags with the offer of free doge meant that the popularity of my character and interactions increased exponentially. I also found the more dogecoin I gave away, the more people would give me, with some people donating to me more than I knew what to do with (should of hodlled some of them - there'll be a lot of woulda coulda shoulda in this saga). I really went to town on creating this alter-ego which had a generous dash of my own humour and character but caricatured into a psychedelic crypto-hippy who just wanted to spread the love. This started taking up a disproportionately large amount of my life, spending all day sending doge to strangers just for the fun of it...but really it was fun and I took great joy out of making people happy. It was however a huge of a waste of time, time that should have probably been better spent looking for ways and doing things to increase my ever dwindling real-life wallet balance. I gave a load away and pretty much let the sleeping doge lie.

It was towards the end of whilst I was doing this that the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum was in full swing with a forthcoming vote deciding the fate of whether Scotland would remain as part of the UK. As you can imagine it was omnipresent - constant media coverage, arguments down the pub, signs, posters - unavoidable. I wasn't hugely interested in it, and I am in no way a nationalist, yet it still permeated my mind and my forthcoming decisions. One of them main issues during the campaign was, if Scotland became independent what currency would it use.

"I had a dream"

When I say I had a dream, it wasn't an aspiration, ambition, or ideal or an idealistic political ideology, it was an actual "series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep".
I'll set the scene: It was a weekday afternoon. I'd done everything I'd intended doing that day (not much), I fancied an afternoon nap. I fell asleep on the sofa. I dreamed.
I had a dream that Scotland had become independent and the currency issue had been solved by blockchain technology and we all used and spent something called Scotcoin.

"Decisions are the hinges of destiny"

The dream was so realistic and profound that when I awoke from my half-baked-slumber I was so moved by it I made the decision to create a twitter account 'Scotcoin' and did it straight away. Why? I'm not sure really. I thought i'd create a fictional cryptocurrency called Scotcoin, complete with a mocked up looking coin and stuff. As the currency didn't really exist I didn't really have anything to do or say on this twitter account so from it I just re-tweeted any Scottish independence articles or opinions which mentioned using block-chain technology as an independent currency. I did this for a bit, and lost interest - another one of my pointless wastes of time...or so I thought. The referendum came and went, and we voted to remain part of the UK and the hype, media coverage all petered out as did my activity on the twitter account. I'd completely forgotten it until one day a few months later I received a notification that someone had tagged my twitter account...something to do with a Scottish crypto currency. The tweet notifications started coming in at an increasing rate so I investigated further.
As eye-patched pop princess Gabrielle once sang "Dreams can come true". "What the actual fuck!? There is an actual cryptocurrency now called Scotcoin!? Eh? Am I still dreaming?" - it transpired that my dream did come partially true. The currency existed, was trade-able, and people were erroneously tagging my twitter account when talking about it instead of the real one (scotcoinproject). I really couldn't believe what had happened and convinced myself that I must be some kind of crypto-Nostradamus and that anything I visualised could come true. I took it as a sign that I should get involved with the coin and proceeded to download the wallet and apply for my free 1000 coins. Which I received. Which were useless, and essentially worthless, however I felt emotionally rich that something I'd subconsciously envisaged, and had the conviction to put out into the world, came true. I continued retweeting all the new online content regarding this new altcoin from my scotcoin twitter account. I even put my wallet address in the bio. Like many things I do, my interest in it faded again. I had much more important stuff I should be doing. It wasn't long until I received correspondence from the actual Scotcoin asking if they could aquire the twitter handle to help promote their currency. I agonised over giving it up and entered into an at times quite hostile chain of communication with the developer at the time. The ruder he was to me, the less inclined I was to give up the account - so I didn't. A few months passed and nothing much happened until one day, I must have been really bored, I loaded up my Scotcoin wallet.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!
Balance : 1,001,000 SCO
WHAT? HEART RACING. HEAD'S GOING TO EXPLODE.
"I'm a millionaire". My heart is racing now just remembering when this happened.
WHY? HOW? WHO? EH? A MILLION!? NOOOO? YES!

I still to this day have absolutely no idea how it got there. I can only assume someone saw my wallet address on my twitter and sent it to me, why I don't know. I'm not even sure why I put my wallet address in my bio. I looked up how much it was worth. OH I'M NOT RICH. I think at the time they were worth about 15 satoshi each, and a bitcoin was worth a lot less than it is nowadays. "Oh well they might be worth something one day" I thought...and again, forgot about them.

Scotcoin went through many changes, being taken over by a new set of devs, migrating between wallets to the counterparty website, and other exchanges, I was a bit confused actually. I'd never used a market or anything like that. So I did nothing. I left them in a counterparty exchange wallet and forgot about them. The new devs got in contact with me and it all got a bit serious. When I was unresponsive and uncooperative about giving up the twitter account it got to the stage where they were going to serve a cease and desist lawsuit against me. Arghhhh this was just a bit of fun which is getting out of hand. I know you can't sell twitter accounts but I agreed they could have the twitter account if they gave 70,000 SCO as a present to my newly born son. I handed it over, and they gave the baby some crypto. I know this all might sound a bit dodgy, and that I was intentionally squatting on the twitter account in order to make a personal gain. Please believe me I wasn't - i'm a bit of a daft dreamer, it was my dream, it was my idea, I liked having it, I liked what had happened. If it was taken away from me would my powers of unconscious future foresight be diminished? I didn't want to find out, but I also didn't want to get into anything illegal so I parted with my twitter account. It was a bit of a weight off my shoulders actually as I started to feel guilty having it. I was still very happy that my dream had come true and I had more than a million of a cryptocoin i'd actually dreamt about. I felt like the guy at the end of Trainspotting walking away with the bag of cash.

It was brought to my attention that Scotcoin was being delisted from Counterparty, so I moved the coins to a newly opened bittrex account. OOOOH this looked more exciting, I kinda see what's going on here. "Oooh you can sell and buy stuff. WTF - how many other coins are there!?" yet I did nothing, in the hope that one day Scotcoin would be worth a lot. Now, there are only 5 million people in Scotland, and maybe about 18 people know what bitcoin is (I'm joking, it's gotta be at least 100) - in short Scotland's own independent digital currency is and still has been a slow starter. Such a slow starter that Bittrex even delisted the currency. What I did next has changed my life. I sold all my scotcoin for bitcoin. Now the volume was low and the buy orders placed were small yet I managed to sell it all and had a Bittrex bitcoin balance of 1.2btc.
I'd seen stuff that claimed "BUY BITCOIN NOW - IN THE YEAR 2036 1BTC = £34982739487239874298374" so I did nothing. I just left it there, and got on with my life - moving house, having 2 kids, being a regular family guy...that was until 1st March this year. Then I started trading....

I hope you enjoy what you've read so far, there's plenty more weird stuff and ridiculous crypto based situations I've got myself involved in in the last 5 months - it's been a crazy year so far. I've got to give the kids some lunch now, but I'll write chapter 2 in a few days. Thank you so much for reading.