I have heard about Bitcoin in the News before, but I never had the money and the interest to buy a virtual asset until I came to the United States. I arrived when I was 18, and back then I had an eagerness to meet new people and to get to know new places of San Antonio, Texas. But here, I stumbled on a huge obstacle - I wasn’t allowed to enter any bar, nightclub or casinos, and I went from having total freedom in Mexico to being an underage teenager. While this shocked me at first, it wouldn’t stop me from getting to all of the places that I wanted to go, and my new friend Bitcoin helped me with that.
I bought Bitcoin when it was 430$ back in March 2016 and I spent almost all of it. Thank god I forgot some in my Coinbase wallet because it wasn’t valuable enough to bother with it. Fast forward to May 2017; I start hearing about these new cryptocurrencies, and at first I thought that they were all copycats of “The King” Bitcoin and I lost interest, but then I heard about this new and unique virtual coin that could replace Bitcoin. I read the Ethereum white paper and was impressed by all of the possibilities and innovations that this cryptocurrency allows, so I decided to dive in into the crypto world - the crumbles of my first Bitcoin purchase were not crumbles anymore and I decided to diversify my Crypto portfolio. This once forgotten Bitcoin pushed me to start my crypto journey, and these are the lessons I have learned so far:
1. Day Trading is for people with a financial background: Cryptocurrencies are really volatile assets. Each day coins have 5-20% gains and losses, and this makes everyone think that they can predict the market and trade currencies for a daily Bitcoin/USD gain, but this is nothing easy at all. Predicting the market is like trying to predict if a sports team will win its next 10 games; you have to take into account several variables like volume, market sentiment, regulations, upcoming and past events, trends, etc. There are so many variables that this results in an almost impossible task, a task that only real experts are good at doing. If you want to profit from this technology but you are not an expert on finance, the best is to hold onto the cryptocurrencies that you believe will grow the most.
2. Several innovative and original technologies: as of now, we have 1536 cryptocurrencies listed in Coin Market Cap and 98% of them are simply copycats or coins with no real use-case. Several of these coins in the 98% get hyped by their own developers or their community, some of them already with billions of dollars of market cap, simply because of the non-informed decisions of their investors. If you are looking into investing your time and money into a cryptocurrency, be sure to research it for several days first to make sure that it is in the other 2%. These coins have to have a real use case, innovative technology, and real communities behind them pushing these coins into mass adoption.
3. Possibilities that this technology enables: this topic has two sides: first, the disruption that the Blockchain technology will be for all the industries. It enables the tokenization of assets, the transfer of value, decentralization, monetization of data and several other capabilities. Examples of the industries that can be disrupted are banking, finances, voting, music rights, internet identity, security, ride sharing, advertising, education, cloud storage, real estate, healthcare, and supply chain. Secondly, the possibilities that this space gives to people like us is huge. Software developers, artists, investors are having the biggest chance to profit and make a disruptive change in society since the internet.
4. Growth: I have seen several “finance experts” or “tech experts” that do not understand the revolution that is happening within the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, we often see their false statements about the “Bitcoin bubble” comparing this current state to the tulips mania. This space is currently in diapers, it is maturing in a really fast pace but it needs to mature a lot more before mass adoption and industrial adoption can be reached. Yet, this doesn’t mean that it will take more than 3-8 years, because the growth of the internet was slow compared to the current growth that we are seeing since it was limited to the technology of that time. Now, the technology that we have developed is totally suited for the adoption of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
5. Bad Actors: last but not least is the saddest thing that I have seen in this space, even though this is a really disruptive technology, this does not mean that you will be a millionaire from one day to another. While it is true that several people got millions in the first years of this crypto space, mainly all of these people were really tech inclined and informed ahead of anyone else, and projects that promise this to you are not legitimate. Bad actors are pushing them, and since this is a maturing space that lacks of regulation, it is really easy for them to do this.
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