Hello people of steemit. Today I want to share the story of how I got into cryptocurency. It actually started December 2016. I had heard of bitcoin before then, but I had not thought much about it. I was in a terrible state, and I clearly said to one of by friends, "I have nothing to live for." And I remember feeling no desire to do anything.
At the time I was working heavily on my game project BIOCODE X, found here http://www.biocode-x.wikidot.com but I was feeling depressed because nobody had bought my game, and it is a lot of many many hard hours of dedicated time I had spent making my game over the past year.
One day in early december I woke up and had the idea firmly in my mind that I must find out about bitcoin. This led me directly to coinbase.com, which I immediately began applying to get an account for. Signing up for the account was instantaneous, but buying my first bitcoin pieces was not very easy. This involved first finding a bank that would allow me to buy bitcoin. Once this was done, I had to wait for my new debit card, which came with my name wrong, so I had to wait 3 more weeks. When I finally got it, I had to also send coinbase photos of my ID, thankfully they verified it quickly.
The first thing I bought and sent bitcoins to was an online ponzi scheme. This was because I did not realize that buying bitcoins or another cryptocurrency was actually investing. This resulted in losing some money, but I noticed it was better to just buy the coins instead of sending it to a ponzi scheme. Then I discovered online cryptocurrency gambling, but I don't like losing all my coins so I avoid that now.
I then started getting interested in mining, and learning more about how the coins are made, as well as how the transactions are verified. This led me to realize and understasd the bitcoin scaling problem. The most obvious solution I could see was to simply use different coins, the altcoins. I had been introduced to these primarily through the gambling sites, and I knew their faster transaction speeds and cheap price made them prime candidates to help the bitcoin scaling problem. However, I did not begin to take the scaling problem seriously, and decide to avoid using bitcoin as much as possible and only use altcoins, until I had a bitcoin transaction get stuck due to a low mining fee for a couple of days. This was a major warning sign of a pending doom for bitcoin that would manifest itself as extremely high mining fees, which we are beginning to see more of recently.
I then began to seriously consider investing heavily in some particular altcoins, the question was which ones. I had been heavily exposed to dogecoin, so I had experienced the fantastic price increases one can see when holding 100k or more of a coin, even with a tiny price increase. This line of reasoning led me to the cheapest coin at the time, reddcoin. This coin has changed my life, and I believe the redd-id web browser extension will thrust this highly undervalued coin to all time highs. I think it has the potential to surpass the market capitol of bitcoin. In the short period of a few weeks, the value of reddcoin briefly went up 20x in value. This was a wake up call for me to invest seriously and not sell my investment for years, and to actually keep buying more even more coins new and old.