This isn't a get rich quick story. It's not a crypto currency fan boy story. It's not a promo piece.
This is truly the story of how Bitcoin and a simple value proposition saved my life from ruin.
First things first. I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013. Back in the days when Bitinstant gave you the ability to purchase $500 worth of Bitcoin on a daily basis. In these days blockchain.info had the only bitcoin wallet with a GUI (that I know of). Of course you could use the command line wallet from the original program but that was a tad technical for me. Also, as I remember, you didn't originally have to even register an email address to open a blockchain.info wallet and it had Satoshi Dice built in!
I would put in my order on the now defunct Bitinstant.
Go to the local CVS.
Pick up the red Money Gram phone.
Punch in my code.
Pay the cashier.
And voila!
To my memory it seems that the BTC would hit my account before I left the store. When I purchased my first Bitcoin it was trading around $10. Of course on Bitinstant you paid a bit of a premium for the convenience. By the time a week had passed and I had done two deposits around the $10 mark I was excited to see that BTC had surged to $15. Another week and it was at $25.
BOOM!
So what does one do with a super quick double up? Buy some more BTC and "throw" Satoshi Dice of course. I started investing in stocks in 2010, with agreeable results. I had never seen or been apart of anything that doubled up so quickly on Wall Street or anywhere else.
I started gambling on poker when I was 16 years old. Card games with friends turned into casino gambling when I was 19. At that time I could go to Casino Windsor in nearby Ontario, Canada and play poker with the "big boys." That same year charity poker exploded in Michigan, I even got a job as a dealer at one. Often times I would get off my 5 hour shift and put the $50 I earned right back on the table with the players I was just dealing to (this was later banned).
By the time I turned 21 I was a regular in Detroit at the Motor City Casino, MGM Detroit, and Greektown Casino. Poker was still my mainstay but when poker got boring you could find me playing blackjack and roulette. By the time I was 25 three card poker, sports betting, horse betting, craps (dice), video poker, and slot machines were in my repertoire.
I never gambled absurd amounts.
I never gambled with money I needed to pay bills.
I've never gone broke gambling.
I've never borrowed money to gamble that I couldn't pay back.
However...
I gambled with my time.
I gambled with my health.
I gambled with my relationships.
I gambled with my attention.
I gambled with my focus.
Anything after time on that list is but a footnote to a footnote. I gambled my most valuable asset by spending countless hours in casinos, poker rooms, and horse tracks. Often times I could play poker all night...and day. One time I played live poker for 36 hours straight. I watched four shift changes. In a casino there are typically three shifts for the dealers. Early, Swing, and Graveyard. In order they typically go from 11am-7pm, 7pm-3am, 3am-11am.
That means that I came in on a Friday swing shift, and watched Friday swing shift end on Saturday at 3am. I watched them come back in on Saturday at 7pm and finish another shift on Sunday at 3am...all before I left the poker room.
To boot , when I tried to leave I woke up in my vehicle at a green light and decided I better turn back into the parking garage before I fall asleep at another traffic light.
I think it's also important to note that I did have a job in addition to side income and I wasn't necessarily gambling with money from Bitcoin proceeds.
Before the epic Mt.Gox fallout and impending BTC crash I had actually done business with Mt. Gox. I found that I was able to buy BTC for $100 on coinbase and that very day sell them for $120 on Mt.Gox. So I rolled all of my 10-15x gains and bought as much BTC as I could on Coinbase, and sent them to Mt.Gox that day and made 20%. I waited for about 10 days and got a wire from one of Mt.Gox's banking partners in Japan. I thought, "wow that's great, let's do it again," and I did do it again. In fact I did it three more times, making roughly 20% each time.
The only reason I stopped was because of a letter I received from Chase inquiring about the wire transfers from Japan. I took it to my personal banker, he made a call on my behalf and notified the compliance officer that I was "playing around with bitcoin" against his advice, and that I "didn't know" what I was doing and I "wont do it again." I was very grateful that he made this call on my behalf. The banker was actually excited that I had made money, but he informed me that I couldn't continue to get $10K+ wire transfers from foreign banks without raising a few flags. I was elated. I had done pretty well for myself up to that point so I was happy to cash my chips out and be done.
Within a few weeks Bitcoin sky rocketed to to $1000. I was devastated. I was buying 100 BTC at $100 a pop and happy to be walking away with 20% profits. Had I just held on to any of the 100 BTC I had bought on multiple occasions I would've been sitting on a small fortune (especially for a 24 year old). Making it even worse, when I signed into my blockchain.info wallet it showed me transaction values in adjusted terms. Even though it wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time of execution it sure felt like it was.
People were going nuts over Bitcoin. Even though I was very much an early adopter and on the inside track, I felt like I was on the outside. I remember two friends of mine who were managers at car dealerships spending $20k a piece when the coins were trading around $1200. I was green with envy and I swore that I was done with BTC. "No way I can spend $1000 on something I just spent $100 on, and not that long ago spent $10 on," I thought.
Then Mt.Gox happened. My friends lost almost all of their money, and I still ashamed to admit that I was happy. All the crash of Bitcoin did was re-enforce all of my decisions prior. I went from feeling like a zero to feeling like a hero...and a genius! Looking back I realize that I had just gotten lucky. Especially when I realized that I had somehow gotten wire transfers for an organization that had lost 800,000 BTC!!!
Yup..I was walking on air.
But how did Bitcoin save my life you ask?
Stick around for Part 2...