My name is Chase Benson, I'm a former full time poker player and now spend the majority of my time investing and obsessing over the crypto market.
My first taste of crypto currencies was with Bitcoin back in 2013 when a small group of fellow poker players started using BTC to play each other in heads up poker. The anonymity of the coin had appeal to poker players (tax purposes) and also offered a secure and way to get paid without having to carry wads of cash around. At the time I was playing heads up no limit hold em for 1BTC which was valued at around ~ $100 and luckily for me the poker games were pretty soft back then so within six months I was able to turn my initial deposit of 10 BTC into just over 700 coins. Of course I had no idea of the true potential of Bitcoin at the time and foolishly treated my stash with the same disregard that I would my poker roll. I remember coming home drunk one night and playing a game for 100 Bitcoins, which I lost within a few minutes... ($260,000 at today's price)
By 2014 I had transitioned into playing larger online MTT (multi table) poker tournaments, so I cashed out most of my BTC for what I thought was a pretty healthy profit at around $500 a coin. I left 12 coins in my wallet and for the next year I really just forgot about the crypto currencies as I ended up having the most successful year of my poker career, winning two major tournaments on Pokerstars and a handful of smaller ones. Life was good. I was flying high and thankfully made the decision to pull out a bit of money out and set myself up with a few essentials, because 2015 was a completely different story!
Somewhere along the line people finally got good at poker. I don't know whether it was the emergence of tracking software, the exposure of poker strategy through the internet and social media or the sheer determination of millennials to find an income stream outside of the mainstream but the games got much harder. The easy money in the online poker economy dried up and after 7 years of playing poker I had my first losing year, which made me take a step back and re-assess my life.
Losing money didn't really bother me, as a poker player you learn pretty quickly that money comes and goes and the best way to succeed is to detach yourself emotionally from the numbers, I was more concerned that my lust for the game/lifestyle had started to fade. While the idea of being a professional poker may seem very appealing, the reality can be a little different, not to mention when you're playing 6000+ tournaments a year there's not a whole lot of time for much else in your life!
So in 2016 I took a break from poker and that was when I re-discovered my Bitcoin wallet and my remaining 12 coins. At the time the BTC price was hovering around $600 which to be honest didn't really excite me but what I did find interesting was the emerging Alt coins that were starting to eat into Bitcoins market share. I decided to do more research and once I finally got my head wrapped around the concept of the blockchain I was hooked!!! I spent months reading anything I could find about crypto currencies and was amazed at the enormous potential for disruption in just about every industry. The deeper I looked the more I became convinced that crypto currencies will become an undeniable driving force of the future economy and perhaps more importantly an incredibly effective tool in the re-distribution of power, wealth and freedom back to the people.
When Bitcoin finally broke the $1000 mark in January of this year I decided to diversify my holdings evenly across BTC, ETH & LTC and I never could have predicted the unbelievable ride I was about go on!! I have always had shares in the stock market but I have never seen anything like the rally from crypto currencies during April/May/June this year, Ethereum went from being a word that was only used in small niches across the internet to a worldwide buzzword. And while I certainly didn't predict such a dramatic price increase, I did benefit from it and I was able to use my profit from Ethereum to further diversify my Alt coin portfolio.
There are so many promising looking coins at the moment and considering the recent downpour of money into the crypto economy it can be tempting to invest in a little bit of everything. However it would be naive to believe that the growth we've just experienced is sustainable across the board over the long term and therefore we should expect a significant correction in the market at some stage, which is why at the moment I am only holding coins that I truly believe will have widespread adoption in the near future such as Stratis, Lisk, Zcash, Antshares, Golem and of course STEEM!!
Even with all the craziness in this sector over the past few months, the upcoming Segwit integration, the Coinbase flash crash and the abundance of over-hyped ICO's, I still believe the crypto currency economy is incredibly undervalued and by far the best value proposition available for an investor. What other market can you see 10x, 20x, 100x return in just days or weeks??? And the best part about it is that crypto currency is still in its infancy, with less than 1% worldwide adoption! As more people begin to catch on to the advantages of the underlying technology and the personal benefits of its adoption, there will be astronomic growth within the sector that will dwarf that of the last few years.
Not to mention, the speed at which blockchains are evolving is unprecedented and you can be sure that some of the most revolutionary applications of this technology are yet to be discovered!
I still play a bit of poker but it's fair to say that these days my chips are all in with crypto currency and I cannot wait to see where this rocket ship will take us.
I am looking forward to connecting with fellow crypto enthusiasts in the Steem community and anyone else who is here helping the Steem eco-system grow!
Thanks for your time,
Chase