I don't know if this is the correct place to post this. I originally posted this to the Cryptocurrency reddit but they do not allow self stories anymore. I hope it is allowed here as I want to help people on their journey. I know it's a lot. I'm sorry.With all the fear and losses in the crypto market, I wanted to take the time to tell my story; that ordinary people can change their lives through crypto even if everything looks like it's crumbling down now. Here's my whole story with Crypto. Long, boring, filled with regret, luck, and bad moves. I don't know if I should post this or even if anybody will read it all but I am hoping that it at least helps a few realize that they can get there too.
I first heard of Bitcoin in 2011 or 2012 when my friend showed me this website where you could buy drugs online and have then shipped to your house. I thought it was fascinating and went home to access the same site. From what I remember, you could purchase small amounts of weed for 20-50 Bitcoin. I wanted to try it out but I didn't want to jump through hoops trying to buy Bitcoin so I just shut my computer down and forgot about it for a year or two.
Fast forward to 2013 and I saw that "Bitcoin thing" pop up again, this time the price was over $100. I thought that I missed the boat but it was still moving upwards so I bought some. I was a broke 20 something year old kid so I only got 1 BTC. I wanted to try mining so I took out a loan (from Amazon I think) and got 35 Block Erupter USB miners and some USB hubs. I also put in a pre-order for a Black Arrow Prospero X-1 miner. I wanted the 2 TH/s miner but the 100 GB/s was still faster than anything currently out at that time and I could still profit.
I mined with the little USBs for a while. Mined some altcoins as well. Looking at my old Bitcoin Talk forum posts, it was peercoin mostly. That's where I met a friend that I would try to start a business with, in some obscure peercoin mining chatroom. We talked for a while and we both expressed interest in trying to push Bitcoin to the next level. I found an auction website template to use and tried to run the business on the front end (advertising, sales, customer service) while he hosted the website on his computer. You could auction for crypto or for fiat. You needed to provide your wallet though as we hadn't modified the auction template enough to have our own wallets that users could store crypto in and use on the site. I also tried and failed at advertising the site. Keep in mind I was an eager 20 something year old and thought if I spammed the forums we would get some business. That did not work out, only a few people used it. We got mentioned on the Mad Bitcoin youtube channel (Is he still going?), which was a small channel, that got us a few more people to list and buy stuff but not many.
I tried messing with trading on Mt. Gox for a while. By this time, the writings were already on the wall. If you wanted to cash out, you were to do it in Bitcoin because cashing out fiat to your bank took a long time. I only did about $100 of transactions and trading lost me a but of money so I pulled out my Bitcoin. The account was left with a tiny amount of Bitcoin left. 0.0000001 or something small like that. I left it there and went on my way.
By now it's around December of 2013 and Bitcoin has peaked. It's starting to drop and I decided to sell my USB miners. I post them for sale in Bitcoin Talk and get a decent amount for them, more than what I paid. The guy sends me the Bitcoin but no transaction in sight. We used a reliable Escrow forum user so I know he sent it. I was worried that I had given him the wrong address but I double checked again and it was correct. The price was still dropping and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to pay off the loan I took out for the miners if I didn't cash out soon. Finally, after a few hours, the transaction went through. Turns out the escrow didn't use any transaction fee (or really low) so it took a long time to go through. I was able to sell between the first peak and the peak before the fall. I sold the Bitcoin paid off the loan and was happy that I made a few dollars in the process.
Looking back at my forum posts, I sold them the day Bitcoin peaked. Talk about luck. I also kept one of the block Erupters as a souvenir. I still have it laying around somewhere.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355708.msg3814221#msg3814221By now, it's January or February 2014. Black Arrow has delayed the miners. Great. They are offering to have someone else buy you out of the pre-order but only if someone purchases a miner and you are in front of the line. Nobody is still pre-ordering these things right? Wrong. I put my pre-order up for sale through Black Arrow and somebody bought it immediately. Good thing for me too because Black Arrow would not deliver until around 2015 I think? I don't know. The crypto auction website still wasn't going anywhere and I didn't want to waste my business partners time anymore so we parted ways and stopped hosting the site. This is the first time I was out of Bitcoin completely. The price of Bitcoin stayed around $200-300 through this whole period.
Mt. Gox, I couldn't complete this story without talking about the fall of Mt. Gox. They fell and doom was in the air. Everyone thought this was it. There were a few hopefuls but this was the largest exchange at the time and it permeated the air around anybody not in crypto already. Very few wanted to touch it. Later on I ended up getting a letter in the mail from... China maybe? Talking about the lawsuit for getting your money from Mt. Gox or something. It showed my balance in USD, we were going to get the USD value of our accounts at the time of collapse or something so if you had 1 BTC in Gox, you would get it's value at the time of collapse instead of the crypto itself. My share was about $0.02 or something ridiculous like that. They sent me a letter for the lawsuit over $0.02. I just found that pretty funny, people lost millions but I was also on their radar for the small amount of dust left in the exchange. Oh well. I just ignored the letter, received 1 or 2 more letters from them before they stopped. I don't know how many people ever got anything back from Gox but I'm sure it wasn't many.
Fast forward to 2015. I have a good job and some money and I'm back in school for software development so I'm feeling good. The halving is coming up soon and I know it will go up. I buy some Bitcoin, this time just to hold. I purchased a Prospero X-3 from someone who bought 10 of them years ago for thousands of dollars. I think he just received them and they were only worth a few hundred or something. Huge loss for him but I purchased one and mined on it for a while, getting a substantial amount more Bitcoin to add to my bag. A few months later I start going broke again and need money. I was terrible with money at this point in my life. I never had more than 1 paycheck in my bank at a time. It was usually gone the same day. I had to sell the Bitcoin and the miner because of my spending. Next thing I know, Bitcoin almost hits $20k. My family starts asking me if I'm rich now. I have to break it to them that I sold my Bitcoin and have nothing. This is the first wave of real regret. I thought I missed the boat in 2013. We always joked about Bitcoin reaching $10k but that seemed like a pipe dream. Impossible that it would happen but it did and I missed the boat. All hope is lost and I dip out again for a few years.
The year is now 2019 and I remember Bitcoin and the next halving is coming up. Now is my chance. I fixed my life up and had a few thousand in the bank. I was in between jobs at the time but I had enough to live for a while and buy some Bitcoin so I did. The price was around 9k or 10k. I got half a coin and waited. I got a new job and had more cash to go around. The price plummets to $4k overnight so I quickly buy some more. I had 1.5 Bitcoin now and the halving was coming up. I got a bit of Ether too but not much. Got myself a Trezor and stored my Bitcoin and other crypto.
I remember thinking there's more to the market now. I remember how altcoins always followed Bitcoin and looked for new opportunities. I remembered the downfalls, the pits, the hard times and this time I would use that to my advantage. I knew the signs and this time would be different. I looked around. Celsius seemed good with a known CEO behind it. I put a few stable coins in Celsius, about $500. To get the most of the interest you receive you needed a certain percentage of CEL to Crypto so it incentivized people to purchase and hold CEL. I thought that was a genius way to pump the coin. I bought about $140 worth of CEL, around 6000 CEL at the time.
This wasn't all. I was still looking for new opportunities. I saw Richard Heart was launching a coin soon. HEX. Instantly I knew it was a bad coin to get into. It had all the signs I saw people scammed with years before but the community was so die hard about Richard and HEX that I decided it could be an opportunity. I remember seeing Richard Heart on YouTube years ago so he was also a known entity to me, a sketchy one but still known. I waited a few days into the release of HEX and bought about $8 worth, around 127,000 HEX, from the Adoption Amplifier. I staked them for 2 years. I was going to buy about $100 more HEX just for shits and giggles but ultimately decided it was too risky. I would have had over 1 million HEX if I did (much much more if I staked).
Now I am set. Time to wait. I sit back and start DCA to get some more Bitcoin and build up my stack. Get to a new record of Bitcoin I own. I won't say how much this time as it is not important. Time goes by and Bitcoin halves. It's on. The price was stagnant for a bit. Some people called the halving an insignificant event because it did not happen right away. Steadily the price started to go up, then rapidly, then it was inescapable that we were in the next bull run. I was prepared this time. I sat back and watched the numbers go up. There's no way this is real. It happened, I had made something, more than I had ever made before. I wanted to hold this time, wait until the next halving, but I also wanted a house of my own. All this time I was a broke 20 something year old living with his parents, a loser. Nothing going for me and I never thought anything would go in my favor but now I had more wealth than I could imagine was possible for myself so I decided to buy a house when the time is right.
The bull run went on and the dip happened. Now for the telltale second peak. The peak that signifies the end of the bull run. I knew if I was going to change my life in any capacity that I would need an exit plan. I had one, once the HEX stake had matured, I would exit HEX. CEL had already rose to a point where I could sell half and I was already breaking even on ALL of my crypto. I sold half of my CEL for around $5 or $6 each. Now I was even, I could not lose all the fiat I invested, it was impossible. I was still sitting well in crypto. By now The second peak had come and gone. It was only a matter of time before it fell completely and I knew it. My HEX was still maturing and ending the stake now would mean half is gone. It was luck that it ended in February, a few months before the fall. I took my HEX and sold it instantly, around 250,000 HEX for $0.20 each. I didn't trust HEX so I was glad to be out. I put that into Celsius as a stable coin while I waited, slowly gaining interest. Looking back, I trusted Celsius too much and it was a very close call.
I now have a significant amount that I planned to purchase a home with. Owning a home is a good long term investment and a huge step in my life. From living with my parents to owning a home, skipping renting completely felt good. Now my money would be going towards equity instead of to a landlord. You could argue that I am giving money to a bank instead of an individual but I also get to build equity and spend significantly less on mortgage each month than renting a small 1 bedroom apartment. I spent a while looking for a home and eventually found one. I got approved for a small mortgage since I didn't want to sell all of my crypto.
It is now March 2022. The deal went through and the seller accepted my offer. Now the bank wants me to sell crypto to reach my down payment on the home. I do just that, withdrew all I had from Celsius, and have the most I've ever had sitting in my bank account. I withdrew my CEL and stable coins from Celsius just in time before they fell. My CEL is gone, HEX is gone, Ether is gone, but I still have half of my Bitcoin and soon I will have a house. Now the hard part, getting proof to the bank of where my funds came from. I had to gather all my transactions from a certain time period. It was a pain but I managed to do it. I had to explain to the underwriter how all the transactions fit with each other since they knew almost nothing about crypto. Jumping from one exchange to an Ether wallet, to a hardware wallet, to Celsius, back to my Ether wallet, to an exchange, then withdrawal to my bank. They said they've never dealt with Crypto before so you can imagine their confusion. They eventually understood the transactions, the mortgage went through, and I was the owner of a new home.
As I'm sure you know, just after April the market start plummeting even more. HEX crashed hard, Celsius blew up completely, Bitcoin took a big hit, Ether was down, FTX just crumbled a few days ago driving the price down further. All of this was very narrowly avoided thanks to incredible luck and my drive to buy a home.
That's my story. It's not lambos and a private island rich but crypto gave me enough of a boost to buy my own home. It took a long time with many mistakes along the way but I eventually got to a point where I am comfortable and still have some Bitcoin sitting there waiting for me. I'll not say how much I have currently but I am about to start DCA again soon.
Just know that if all hope seems lost now, there will be more opportunities later. We still have many more halvings to go and many years to gather knowledge about missed opportunities. I still have regrets even though I came out in a good position. I could have bought $100 of HEX and had enough to purchase a house without a small mortgage, reinvest some, and use the rest to start a business that I've been thinking about for years. I still think about it but I know there's nothing I can do about it now other than to use what I know for the future.
TLDR:
I spent many years failing to catch Crypto at the right time. This past halving I had enough luck to buy a house with Crypto and still have some Bitcoin left in my hardware wallet to continue to DCA and HODL.
