In my 'official' #introduceyourself post, I shared just a little about myself and a tiny bite of my journey.
I learned that you all may be called "Hivers" and I very much now, consider myself a #Hiver as well.
It is becoming a part of the language of the internet to hashtag things, so much that no one knows what a pound sign is- hehe.
I also stated the following:
I'm going to hit three posts to continue this "about me" journey. One of them is about what happened at the start of 2020, before the crushing blows of reality. The next will be about the true "who is Gordon?" topic. The third will be my hopeful journey forward after a third major setback with yet another crypto exchange (shocker, right?).
So, this is the first of those other 3 posts I promised. The world is waiting, and I am here to deliver!
I like to write as if I am sharing exactly what I'm thinking, feeling, sometimes more carefully planned and organized, other times like a conversation. I intend to entertain one way or the other. Truth matters to me unless I am intentionally SHOUTING the truth in the form of satire. Then, ironic non-truth truth matters as much.
The "about me" journey continues with the start to 2020 and the crushing blows to immediately follow.
I believe classic literature would call this post "in media res" and I'm intentionally not gonna Google it for smart points. I'm wingin' it and I'm here to entertain, remember?! It is the year of our Lord 2020, and the past year had been total wreckage. Among many things I have done in my life, I am now in my 3rd year as a day trader. One could define this as professional if you mean the literal sense, that it is what I am doing for a living. But, in terms of whether I am an expert who is living off their earnings, then let's continue to classify this as aspiring professional day trader.
In 2020, I found myself doing what I often needed to do; searching for a new home to trade cryptocurrency. Between changes in regulations, changes in fees, terrible options for N. America for the type of trading in which I excel, I always go through a list of more than 300 exchanges to see what is the same, and what has changed. I found an exchange barely anyone outside of Asia was aware of, and they had 0% maker fees for the top tier coins. Usually if I am fortunate enough to find something with very low, or no fees, they are either hidden somewhere else that is restrictive... like Robinhood for instance, or they suffer from "we're too good" volume and liquidity, meaning that because they are doing something right, they suffer from not having huge scammer market making, wash trading volume. In this case, I had found somewhere with just enough volume, and actual accurate order history, that I could see promise.
I practiced with very small trades and, as my trust grew, I added more funds and picked up the pace. After weeks, earning steady pennies into dollars off of just a couple of hundred dollars, I felt like this could be the place where I was going to make trading history.
I don't know if anyone here has ever tried to hire someone to do a small, cheap, fast, and did I mention cheap software coding project, but I have, and let me tell you it is like trying to trust the dude with the fortune stuck in a Nigerian bank and they have randomly chosen you via email... but worse; you are the one that contacts them! "Oh sure, dear brother, just send me 0.1BTC and I will serve you with a most prized crypto trading bot.
My dear Godfather once said "I may have been born at night, but I wasn't born LAST night". Before you tell me about all of the great platforms for hiring people, trust me I know. I have hired a lot of people on most of these sites for everything from graphics to marketing. When it comes to the code, they want to get you off site and paying ahead with crypto so they can run off into the sunset. But, this isn't the bad things that happened. I found someone on a legit site who nailed it, and now I had my own personal trading bot that was only designed to manually shorten the time in placing my sell orders linked to the value of my buy order, so I would not miss the opportunities to buy low, sell high scalping very quickly. It worked like a charm!
It took around 3 weeks from very fast initial testing to actual use. Every day I was feeling more stressed but more hopeful. I felt I had a home. I felt I had a working strategy. I now had a bot to make this more efficient.
I literally got to use my bot for 4 days until...
(this is the part where you lean in and prepare to feel sorry for your hero Gordon).
I was going to get a little trading done before going to run errands. The site suddenly changed from log-in to "system maintenance".
Well, that was the beginning of what would become history. I barked a little in their Telegram group about how it would be more thoughtful to announce these things in advance. It made it seem suspect whenever maintenance was announced suddenly without warning. Everyone knows it is standard for an exchange to give you time to resolve positions if concerned about them getting liquidated if you do options, leverage etc.
Ran errands.
Returned.
Still system maintenance.
The website?
FCoin.
What earned my confidence? Not the tiny drip of early news about their FToken structure that literally led to larger more successful sites like Binance creating platform coins. What got me was the true believers in the leader of FCoin, ZJ, and his "future of cryptocurrency" ideas, lectures, the book he wrote, the plan he had for his platform. Granted, there were signs of concern; a very disorganized community section, people who staked to have their own exchanges but it was hard and scattered to find them... other things as well.
The word was, that some of their team did not like a sudden knee jerk decision to give all of their token holdings up, and that team member deleted some of the blocks of data from the site. As the story developed over days and weeks, ZJ came clean that he was $130 Million in the hole, and had been stretching out the inevitable calamity using our deposits to keep afloat. We were stunned, angered, jaded and just plain devastated. There are people who had an unreasonable, illogical amount of funds tied up in the disaster. I pushed hard and others did as well.
Here's the remarkable part; ZJ stated a ridiculous plan in 3 phases. the first was a MANUAL email withdrawal lottery, seemingly first come, but also most accurate, first served (which makes NO sense if the databases were ruined as claimed), followed by an update on restoring the current site so people could access their now worthless accounts, and the third phase was one part out of touch with reality, one part narcissistic and one part just plain crazy, but meant following them down the rabbit hole to their next start-up already in progress, where they would make money fast and start returning everyone else's funds.
Keep in mind, there was a limbo where we thought a module was deleted, there was a time where people said he ran away, and there were ZJ sightings everywhere from Dubai to the U.S. and Japan. I had just gone through a few weeks of avoiding one scammer coder after another, finally had my bot, slowly, cautiously deposited funds I had been earning on for 7 months, and was going to actually start hitting a wall of getting behind on bills if I didn't start earning from trading at a quicker pace. Now, my funds were stuck indefinitely with a wack job who only believes in themselves.
It was awful. 2020 was now going from one of the best years ever, to one of the nightmares I couldn't wake up from.
Here's where things turned a corner, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So, this guy with FCoin... Future Coin, the future of cryptocurrency, cutting edge economics... actually followed through with the first phase of his plan, and started paying a handful of people back via email deposit verifications. Can you believe this? It would be like Bill Gates only sending messages via snail mail. After a week, he automated the process and a person could enter their email into the website and view the progress queue.
In the end, thousands and thousands of people are still screwed out of their funds, and I got mine returned to me. I was one of 352 people who received their crypto back. I've never been so relieved that I can remember. On the one hand, it wasn't just about the money, rather it was the opportunity to earn on top of it. It represented hope in a time of pressure that already built for months and years.
I lost a good 5 weeks, from trading to searching for a place to trade more efficiently, to spending time and money for a bot that was now useless, and then beginning the search all over again. But, I was so thankful to have the promise of hope and possibilities handed back to me. I met some new online friends, one who is the reason I'm pushing myself to do more on Hive, and others I pray will find some encouragement in the midst of all of this as well.
Next time, I will share the story about the 'real' Gordon Freeman. I will continue to live my best Hive Life as Gordon, though I do have another name. But, I will share a little about my true self in the next post.
...and for now, Gordon Freeman out.