The Beginning ...

Hello to everyone in the STEEM Community and especially you, my reader!

TL;DR - I'm going to write about how I feel , my thoughts, my endeavours and anything the comes to my mind that might help you, give you some insight, interest you and of course give me some venting from the day to day activities. Expect not so great English since it is not my native language. Also I'm quite new to this platform so please bear with me regarding not so fancy looking content. This particular post will be about something that happened to me recently and the things I've learnt.

It all started in the beginning of this year. I'm not sure how many of you are aware of the MakerDAO . It's ta really nice project in the cryptospace community. I would say it's one of the few projects that are actually working hard to deliver and create awesome products. As far as I know they had never had any ICO. Everything is build with their own investment or with some external investment ( gotten not from ICO apparently ).

To save you some time reading and going back and forth between your tabs - its main product is the DAI. It's an algorithmic stablecoin that is backed by physical collateral. So far they support only ETH as a collateral but soon this will change. Simply put in order to get yourself some DAI you have to either sell some ETH and buy some DAI or lock a position ( lock your ETH to a smart contract and creating a CDP - collaterized debt position ) and in return get some DAI. Of course choosing the second one you keep your ETH, you can use the DAI to buy more ETH and lock it again into your locked position or just simply use it to pay you bills. I won't get into details how to do it and what are the pros and cons.

So one day I decided to test the system ( for which I didn't have deep understanding ) by opening a CDP and getting some DAI. People around me were talking about something called Leverage. I will be honest with you I was greedy, I wanted to get more and more so I've decided to take advantage of this technique. With the DAI I had I bought more ETH and locked it back into my CDP and got more DAI and bought some more ETH locked again and you get the point. Of course this is kind of a "loan" so I can hold this position as long as the price of ETH doesn't cross a given threshold.

That CDP was opened during the price inflation. If you had check the link about regarding what leverage is, you would know that my idea was to wait for ETH price raise even more and the moment it did I would have paid back all of my debt. Well unfortunately it didn't happen like this. Actually it was quite the opposite. The price of ETH began dropping. During that time I was close to getting liquited ( meaning that my position is getting closed, I pay fee and most of my assets are used to pay back my debt ) meaning becoming broke couple of times.

I approached a friend of mine to help me with this and so he did. He agreed to risk his own fortune to bail me out. We managed to glue the situation for sometime but forwarding to the current situation, we didn't make it. I got liquidated and all of my assets were used to cover my debt. At least of the lost fortune was returned to my friend. Apart of the fact that I owe him money, I valued most of all the fact that he helped me unconditionally. I will be always grateful to him!

Why am I telling you this? I wanted to share with you the conclusions I came to so that you might learn from my mistake.

Never invest in something you don't understand fully.
Don't put all of your eggs in the same basket.
Be humble.
Don't get your friends involved. They don't have to suffer because of your mistakes.
Don't wait for some miracle to happen but rather sit on your ass and work hard for you money.
Improve yourself every single day but compare it only with you not with others.
Don't waste time on meaningless activities.

Another reason for this is that I've always wanted to start something like a blog but never had any idea what to write about and how to actually do it. This friend of mine is huge fan of STEEM platform so more or less I get involved because of him!

Some of the conclusions are explicit some are the results of other activities and doings of mine. The bottom-line is that never leave things to changes and word hard for your money. Be creative, innovative, daring! Never settle, always experiment, always look for new paths.

I think this is it. I would value any feedback from any of you. Apologies for the potato English but come on... it wasn't that bad.

Thank you all for your time!

Good luck and god bless!

ph33r