When I first got started in cryptocurrency, my wife and I were behind on the bills, we had a mountain of credit card debt that we had accumulated earlier in the year, and our mortgage had fallen behind. We were in the worst possible place to start investing, but we decided we had nothing to lose, so we took $200 that we didn't really have to spare, and we bought our first Litecoins on Coinbase for $30 apiece. This was back in August of 2017.
The next month I decided to cash out my retirement account at work, so we could catch ourselves up on the bills, and put whatever we had leftover into crypto. This was our first experience trading and investing. We learned everything online, and we spent a whole month building our separate portfolios.
My first major investment was Cardano, and I immediately fell in love with the vision behind it. I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself. My other big investment was Electroneum, and I was really excited to be a part of the ICO. I had never done anything like this before, so it was all very novel and I had high hopes. I had no idea at the time that I had made two very good choices, but I wound up making a very bad choice a couple of months later by selling my Ada. I had bought them at .02/coin, and it rose to 1.30/coin at the height of the bull run in January, 2018. My holdings would have been worth a little over forty thousand dollars at the top.
I was devastated by this mistake at first, and for a couple of weeks I didn't want anything to do with crypto. But eventually I got over it, and my mistake led me to learn how to trade, which has been one of the most amazing things I've ever pursued. It has actually made me a better person, by forcing me to confront my emotions and overcome them. And it also led me to join Steemit, where I've finally found a home for my writing and a place to share my trading journey. I haven't gotten rich off of cryptocurrency, but it has helped me grow as a person, and enriched my life through Steemit. I can share whatever I want here, without fear of censorship, my data being sold to the highest bidder, or my creative work being stolen by a soulless corporation. That's real freedom of expression, and that's the power of crypto and the blockchain that powers it.