Last year in July, my boss asked me to participate in a machine learning competition.
It was called numer.ai, a competition where data scientists uploaded their predictions to stock prices every week, and the top 100 best performers could get USD payouts every week (and you could withdraw the prize as BTC). That was my first time to get in touch with bitcoin.
I played the game for half a year and I got $100 in total (I got statistic + finance + cs background, that's why.), well in fact that was not much. I stopped playing it because a lot of strong players came, and I could no longer get into the first 100 places. I took out all the cash at 1BTC = 700USD, and I though that was the end.
However, few months ago, numer.ai suddenly paid every player (only for those who did receive some USD payouts before of course) some Numeraire (NMR), a new cryptocurrency issued by numer.ai. NMR could be used by the data scientist to stake on their on stock preduction models, and numer.ai will give you the additional payout in NMR according to you stake. Well, I got 5400 NMR free of charge, which now worth $125k. And my real journey to cryptocurrency begins.
That made me started learning how to trade cryptocurrencies, I got an account on Bittrex last month and started trading. I didn't take much finance courses in my university, and I started reading technical analysis readings. As I got a quite decent amount of capital, I just placed large buy orders at a lower price, placed large sell orders at a higher price, controlled the market, and it works!
After one month's trading, now I have 80% in BTC, 10% in USD and 10% in other altcoins (ETH, NEO, PAY, OMG, MTL). Now my portfolio worths $200k (counting in the recent rise of BTC of course), like a 60% increase in my portfolio.
After developing great interest in cryptocurrency, I started looking at ICOs. Few days ago I saw an ad on Facebook, and it caused me to attend a blockchain-related event held in Hong Kong today (my first time!):
It is a startup called cloudwithme that offers decentralized cloud service, and they are having an ICO to use their coin as the currency for payments related to their service. Well I am not posting an advertisement so I wont' talk more about it here. In fact I am only 23 and it is the first time I join such a high-class event! Free wine, free food to eat and the quality is high! (P.S. I paid 1 BTC to this ICO, hoping it will get at least 25% return...)
Blockchain and cryptocurrency is the future!