If there is a lesson to be learned by the recent market meltdown... it is to diversify. Lets take a look back at how I got introduced to the crypto market and where ive come since then.
Personally, I used to play the stock market and options. Did ok... not great and not bad. Made one bad decision on playing an option on Amazon last year for the Christmas quarterly report thinking Amazon did great... there is no way it missed its earnings report. Well I could only afford to buy ATM for the week of releases... which was over 5 thousand dollars. Anyway... long story short; when Trump became president I lost a lot of money in gold because the value of the USD skyrocketed. I did not take in account that Amazon's sales overseas had to be converted back into USD; the amount they lost due to the surge in USD exchange was 700 million. Since analysts never saw that coming; Amazon missed the mark by 700 million. Tanking the stock value by about 50 dollars a share; making my stock option worthless - just like that. Vanished in thin air. To pour salt in my wounds... investors realized Amazon was killing all other retail space and the following week it rocketed up 150. So if I bought more time on my option I would have made somewhere around 30-50k.
For those of you not familiar with how options work. You are buying a contract of a bundle of 100 shares at a certain price and a time period. A graph based on odds and volatility and time - determines price. You can wager bets either way... going up or down. Risky but the pay off is pretty big. I made 10k for every 150 contract I bought when Apple missed their earnings report about 2 years ago when the iPhone 6 had subpar sales. Facebook was roaring along and crushing earnings every quarter - made decent money off of it as well. I felt like my money always had to be in something - not just sitting there and that was my downfall. I like to gamble... and patience is key.
So because of the situation mentioned above; I started looking for another place to put my money. I watched a documentary by Morgan Spurlock on bitcoin; that was the first knowledge I had of bitcoin. The value of bitcoin in his documentary was 600 dollars; he bought his 1 bitcoin at an underground auction where he negotiated his price and came upon an agreement with a seller. Then he tried to go a day buying everything in bitcoin. I think he bought a coffee and the transaction didn't go through until 40 minutes later. Anyway... I found Coinbase and at the time - bitcoin was definitely the only thing BIG. It was 300 dollars each and Ethereum just got added to coinbase which was 2 dollars each. I researched Ethereum and found it added smart contracts (basically bitcoin 2.0) and all about Vitalek and his leadership and vision for Ethereum. Found out about the fork from ETC and the millions stolen. I watched for about a month and that 2 dollar Ethereum became 12 dollars and then 30. I plunged in; head first - FOMO. I watched as it doubled and sometimes tripled in value in a single day. Made a 10x return in a few months... started telling others all about crypto. No one wanted in... or believed in it.
The funny thing is I wanted to buy something with crypto so bad that I paid my girlfriend for a plane flight to Europe that she put on her credit card in Ethereum. Made her get Coinbase and I gave her the equivalent in ETH. Flight was $650 and I gave her 17.1 ETH for it. Well... the transaction took 6 hours to go through... I thought I made a huge mistake and lost my money. Finally it went through. We are still together and I looked at her when ETH hit $1000 and said... wow that flight cost me 17K; you made out like a bandit. She laughed and said she sold it the next day and put the money back on her credit card.
I started learning there is a sea of altcoins beyond Coinbase... got a Jaxx wallet. That got hacked and I decided to never use it again. Then I got an Exodus wallet which is incredibly user friendly and now all of a sudden I had access to 6 coins including EOS and AUGUR. Started learning about those. Then found Changelly... expanded to 20 coins. Researched em all. Then I joined communities on facebook; cryptocurrencies for beginners. Once I found bittrex it was all over... started day trading... which has ups and downs but its straight up gambling. If I had just hodl my initial investment I would have done 10x better. Its very hard to trade without emotion... easy in a bull market because you can do no wrong but its very frustrating in a bear market. The good is soo good... the bad is the worst thing you can imagine.
Now things are different. Bitcoin has caught the attention of Wallstreet and the main stream media. Now bitcoin is a household name. Most have heard of it even though they don't understand how it works or what it is. Friends of mine have bought bitcoin off a stranger in the alley; because they wanted to get into bitcoin immediately but coinbase had a $500/week cap. That is crazy... I think he got what he paid for in the end but selling bitcoin like its a drug deal is pretty sketchy.
So my lesson to you is: Take emotion out of the equation... just do your research and find projects that really mean something to you. I got into crypto for the technology... and when times are tough such as the drop we had earlier in the weak which I lost 50% value in my portfolio and I am thinking of calling it quits. My girlfriend reminds me of why I am in it in the first place... its because I believe this is the way of the future. We are already making digital payments via paypal; debitcards and venmo. Hell - the only time i have cash on me; its usually because it was a bday or xmas gift. Then I go put it in the bank asap only to spend it digitally in the future.
I have never really been a fan of bitcoin... the tech is old and outdated. The mining fees are too high; not governed very well; highly manipulated; the amount of power it takes to mine blocks is insane and damaging to the environment. But everything is connected to bitcoin... this is the scary part. In my opinion; the mining alone cannot sustain itself for long term - but if it goes down - it will take everything along for the ride. This wasn't meant to be about bashing bitcoin but Bitcoin is not what it was meant to be. Bitcoin is now a store of value; not a currency. Bitcoin will always be the original blockchain but i believe another coin will step forward and carry out the vision set by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Who knows what the future holds for crypto... the movement is strong and I like the majority of projects out there. But it is the Wild West... Mcaffee can manipulate coins with a single tweet - which is completely illegal in the stock market. Rumors fly and whales profit. Then you have your scams that steal from minnows; Bitconnect. For the little guys... with dreams of living comfortably... I will not put all my eggs in one basket and hodl stocks, 401k and crypto. I have also learned to collect coins I like and then forget about them. Don't look back.
Here is a picture of me sporting a shirt of what i think will be the future of crypto. No miners and no fees; the internet of things. The public has no clue what the logo is. By the way.. this is the most ive ever written in a post. Hope you enjoyed it... I should write like this more often. Good luck to all of you and your future investments.
All photos are taken from bing.com search engine
