In the early stages of 2016, my father got very ill from his cancer treatment. The toxins flowing in his wretched body had worn him down to a knob and we could see the sad ending on the horizon.
His death in august 2016 almost felt like a release. No more would he have to endure every single moment of every day in pain while he knew we suffered with him. The sorrow of course, was unbearable.
A couple of days later I decided to open up his computer, like he told me to do, if he died. There I would find everything I needed to prepare for his funeral and all the papers already filled out to make the job easier for me. I was the one to have to do it, and he knew this would not be an easy thing for me.
In the letters he had written, he had planned for my mother's house to be sold, because she would not have enough money to keep it. He told us that he loved us dearly, and that we had to take care of each other. He told me in a personal letter to me, that he thought I had messed around a lot in life, but I was starting to get things done now, and that - he was proud of me.
About 1 year later, in december 2017, on a trip with my family in Thailand, I had gotten so many hints about cryptocurrencies, in spam mails, on the web, on Facebook etc, I had become aware of it. I suddenly remembered that my father had bought a Bitcoin in 2013 for about $800-900. I now saw that a bitcoin was worth nearly $20.000 and I started the hunt for my father's Bitcoin.
After a lot of Googling and in and out of different forums, I found the wallet.dat on his computer. I transferred it to my mac and downloaded the Bitcoin core program. After syncing the blockchain for days I could finally open the wallet -- it was there -- the 1 BTC!
Now what do you do with almost $20.000? This is a lot of money for any family. I thought day in and day out about what to do with it, but after speaking to my mother she told me one simple thing -- this is what your father wanted you to have. You solved the puzzle and the treasure hunt, you do what you like with it, I have some money saved up if we need it.
In that moment I knew I had to use this opportunity to make the most of it -- without even knowing how. The same day I moved it to Coinbase to make it ready for the next step. If I changed my mind I had setup my bank account to withdraw it there.
Some days later I saw Bitcoin's price declining - fast. I was panicking. Dad, what do I do? I could not call him. I couldn't run up to his house and ask him anymore... I was confused with the feeling of not having my mentor and guide in life there by my side when I needed him.
I had to figure this out all by myself.
While Bitcoin went downhill, I saw many ads on Facebook about the ICO's. Initial coin offerings. That fascinated me. I thought to myself, if I am going to be able to save this Bitcoin and the money, I had to do something -- now.
I was completely new to cryptocurrencies and had ended up in the most turbulent time of the number one cryptocurrency.
Swissborg (CHSB) Was the first ICO I "hedged" some of the Bitcoin into. This is a promised crypto wealth management platform: https://swissborg.com/en/ . Here I was careful, because I did not know what I was getting into. I used 0.05 of the Bitcoin I had. These guys are just about to start with the development of their platform as an app for mobiles (later for web) as a result of their first referendum, a blockchain voting system. I got 8378 CHSB now after gaining about 80 tokens as the reward from voting. This token has dropped in price from $0.10(ICO) to $0.03. But so has all of the market.
There are many hours in a day, and I studied the crypto world with eager to find the right path to go. I felt like a horrible dad for my two children of 2 and 4, playing while I was glued to the my phone looking for clues.
I thought about buying mining gear, but saw that it could basically not be profitable with my budget if the price of the market went too far down.
I then discovered Envion's ICO - https://www.envion.org/en/. Their idea is that the mining of crypto can be using excess green energy from green power plants and solve the crypto mass consumption energy issue. Their MMU's (Mobile Mining Units) can be deployed anywhere in the world and mine at the lowest rates possible.
I got into Envion's ICO with 0.5 Bitcoin. At the time that was about $5.500. I studied the whitepaper, their team, their everything to make sure I was doing the right thing. My whole point of not cashing out the 1 Bitcoin I got from my father was to make more out of it, expand it and make what I got grow, so that in the future this could support my family in some way, more than that 1 Bitcoin would have.
Envion is scheduled to start paying out dividends (payout from mining) in July/Aug. I'm excited about this.
The Bitcoin bear run was ongoing and I hadn't found many ICO's that had Envion's premise. I used all my spare time on researching what was available and found a couple that looked fairly interesting. The Bitcoin price was now about $12.000 and rapidly declining.
I bought in with about 0.1 BTC each in Tokia - https://www.tokia.io/, Iungo - https://iungo.network/ and Debitum - https://debitum.network/, all which will have products ready in mid to late 2018. My hopes here are the products themselves. I joined not only because they serve a good purpose, but because there is actual business to be made with them at the same time.
Tokia has promised a card that makes cryptocurrency usable in real life, exchanging your crypto into fiat the moment you use your card for purchasing something.
Iungo is an interesting company, which wants to provide you with a router with a secure and free wifi, based blockchain, that would give access to internet to all corners of the world. This is a great way to earn passive income, by enabling every business to provide wifi to everyone. No more monopoly! I have no dates yet on when they will start to ship, but I follow their Telegram chat.
Debitum caught my attention because they are making a platform that enables everyone to directly fund a business of their choosing, anywhere in the world, that has the need for it. This is dear to me as I have co-owned a business that struggled for a long time with finances and could not get help from the bank. This enables so much potential in so many entrepreneurs hearts that I cant wait to hear their stories of at least getting the chance to try their ideas.
After Bitcoin hitting the bottom and bouncing slightly up and down from there, and every ICO i was in was down -50%, I ran across a guy on Youtube. Cryptoface is his youtube name. He introduced me to robot trading - Profit Trailer. I watched Cryptoface's clips and Crypto Crow's and many others, but it was Cryptoface that stood out. His disturbingly wierd humour, brutally honest views and comments and a strategy that could make Profit Trailer make from 0.5% - 1.5% a day from your initial investment.
I put 0.2 BTC into Binance - https://www.binance.com/?ref=18958709 (yes this is a referral link :-) and connected my Profit Trailer bot which I had installed and setup on my mac and started trading Ethereum paris. I now make about 0.3% - 1.3% a day depending on the market. Some days are better than others because of bull and bear runs of the trading pairs. This robot has now made me about 1 Ehereum and it is steadily climbing.
Profit Trailer has been my only active crypto trading thing while I wait for the other investments to hopefully flourish. There is a lot of tweaking you can do in the settings, but beware, if you are not used to black screens with commands and code sheets, dont freak out, let me help you. I have settings I haven't touched for about 2 months and the bot is kicking butt!
The last crypto adventure I went into was with my last 0.1 Bitcoin. I waited and waited, for something to cut through the mediocre ICO's that were presenting themselves, though many looked "good enough" I had to make the last little part of my fathers Bitcoin worth it. I think I did it with this one, though it's name has been tainted by clones and copies of its code and lack of understanding of the whole picture.
I like to look at myself now as a man that doesn't jump into the best advertised ICO's with the most flashy promises that in the end delivers nothing to investors or the world in general. I like to think of myself as the man my father wanted me to be, to have faith in what I do and believe in it. I used my last 0.1 BTC in Proof of weak hands. (POWH).
Proof of weak hands had gone on for a month before I got into it, I didn't pay much attention when Cryptoface was screaming "you gotta get into this" because I was too focused on my Profit Trailer bot settings and performance. I also had let go of stressing the crypto world because some parts of my real life was more important.
I exchanged my 0.1 BTC on shapeshift.io and got Ethereum back into my Metamask - https://metamask.io/, a wallet you add as a chrome extension and has send and receive functionality. I bought the proof of weak hands token "P3d" and got about 60 tokens on their own exchange.
Then the token price went down and I panicked. What have I done?
But, just as people were selling off, I understood the game. I get 10% dividends (rewards) in Eth every time someone sells in this game, and 10% every time someone buys. I actually earned Ethereum while the price was dropping! So I just held on for dear life and reinvested, a function in POWH that lets you either withdraw what you earn in dividends or reinvest them into more of the P3D token, making you a bigger hand in the game. The dividends are payed out based on the percentage of how many tokens you have, so accumulating more is just the thing to do.
Then it reached bottom at 6200 Eth "in contract" as it is said. That means that every token holder that's still in the game and have not sold together in total has 6200 Eth in the game.
My hands stayed strong.
3 days later it went back up, up to 7000 Eth, up to 8000 Eth and the dividends were pouring in. This proved to everybody that Proof of Weak Hands has what it takes to be here, and I have never been so happy about an investment before. I reinvested once a day and I even added 1 Ethereum from my own funds to get a bigger piece of the pie. I now have 158 tokens.
Now, in the moment of writing this, it is up to 9223 Eth in contract. But I have understood that the price or the amount of Ethereum in contract, in contradiction to regular markets, doesn't have so much to do with the success of POWH. It could go up to 30.000 Eth or it could go down to 2000 Eth, I really dont worry about it. (if it went low I would buy in more, cheaper) And since the dividends are coming in anyway it could just go up and down like this forever. I'm not selling this one ever - this one stays in the family - because when I am high enough in tokens - the dividends will also be high and then I could withdraw what I need and reinvest the rest, and actually live off of this as a type of universal basic income!
If you are interested in getting into Proof of Weak Hands, I would really appreciate if you used my referral link: https://powh.io/?masternode=0xd419166bb45d48e46095979e2d10a12b9ad92ed5
Be sure to let me know if you used the referral link, I will ask for yours to use next time I invest!
Thanks for reading my story. I will create follow-up posts to the journey if you would like to read more :-)