When I discovered bitcoin in late 2012, I “fell down the rabbit hole” as people say, and I spent the next few months trying to learn everything I could about this new technology. However, I fell into a trap that many other cryptocurrency people did at the time as well. I was a college student at the time so without barely any income, I was saving every last penny I came across to buy more coins. My life become obsessed with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and to this day it is as well to an extent. The trap I fell into was to treat crypto like a way of life, not an investment and hobby,
Every day I would log onto bitcointalk and reddit, reading everything I could, and partaking in useless arguments that got nobody anywhere. I stopped pursuing other passions I had and devoted all my time into the crypto space. This would be fine and well if I was a programmer, but I was merely a speculator arguing about prices and what the potential held. Every 5 minutes I would check the price on my phone and soon I forgot to start living life and going after the things I wanted in life. I was a junkie waiting for his next bit of crack, in the form of news or new company announcements regarding cryptocurrency. I was still going to school, but I was giving it a half assed effort and as soon as the class ended I was back on the forums again, reading all the various new posts.
If you weren’t there in those times, especially when we were hitting all-time highs, reputable people were predicting crazy prices per coin and it was easy to get swept up in the hype. I kept thinking to myself, “well I can stop trying in other parts of my life because I have x amount of coins and as soon as bitcoin hits 10,000 a coin I won’t ever have to work”. This is how my life went for a while. I kept piling up and I kept getting drawn into the hype. It wasn’t until the mt gox crash and the subsequent price crashes, that I actually started to realize that the future wasn’t definitive. It hadn’t occurred to me at that point that there was a chance that bitcoin or crypto in general could fail.
These days I still hold almost all of the bitcoin I hold, but I treat it as a long term investment, as I would stocks in a brokerage account. I still check the price daily, but I am no longer obsessed like I was. This is how you should treat your holdings, not as the only thing you rely on in life, but like supplements while you are pursuing and working on other projects. There is a possibility that all of us who are invested will end up wildly rich, but this idea is no better than the idea that we will win the lottery when we buy a ticket. It is something we cannot rely on. Interest in a hobby is not an excuse to not better your life in other ways, by working hard and pursuing other passions. If cryptocurrency is the only thing that you have, you should look at finding new things to do that make you happy. Don’t let your time and potential pass, by just waiting around for the price to rise or fall. Treat your effort and time in the crypto community like an investment and a hobby, but don’t let it rule your life.
-Calaber24p