I for the first time heard of Bitcoin
during the end of 2012. It was my eighth semester in med school (we do 12 semesters, in the French style of medicine)
Since mine is a public university Universidad Nacional de Colombia, unrest by protesters was a common occurrence. Left wing ideas about education and a student movement coming from Chile was the new wave, so we stopped classes for a whole semester. My university lost ownership of our Hospital 8 years before I enrolled due to pension debt to their workers. We wanted our own hospital, since begging other universities was embarrasing to use theirs, and thus we went into a strike.
At the time I told that a strike was super dumb, that a Boicot was more effective. History proved me right, but whatever, strike it was.
I spent that semester reading, learning music and surfing the internet. One of the books I read that semester was "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown. After that, I watched the DaVinci code movie and the book also by Brown. That got me interested in cryptography. By watching email lists of cryptography I got to Bitcoin.
Be your own Bank,
was the motto at the time. I didn't know what a libertarian was at the time or how to buy since you had to make transactions through international banks and get it from Mt.GOX, or risk getting scammed buying from someone else (I actually got scammed of 20 dollars, a week of my savings at the time, for 2.2 BTC which I never got)
I didn't try to mine them because my computer was old and had an integrated graphics card. I just couldn't make sense of how to do it. Got happy with the idea of getting a little of the faucets, I got some of it and that calmed my desire.
I thought as a coping excuse:
Well, you are not really your own bank. Banks check transactions, hold deposits and do exchanges. If I can't keep the registry of my own transactions or do the exchange myself, then I'm not really my own bank.
Heard again of it in the news when it reached $1,000. I was devastated at the thought I tried to buy when it was $8. Then forgot about it until I graduated and started working.
I got into this because I understood just how dangerous it is. The biggest pyramid scheme of our time.
That year, 2014 a movie. "The Imitation Game" got me again interested in cryptography. So I checked Bitcoin again. Now it was easier to buy and I had real money of my first job as a doctor, so I got some. Just because I wanted it. At the time I thought I was an idiot for buying something 50 times more expensive than when I first tried to buy. Not just that, It went from $400 to almost $180. My room mate, she was my unrequited love and after I happily told her about it said I was an idiot playing with my hard earned money, which truly hurt my ego.
I finished my first year as a doctor heartbroken and having lost tons of money trying to impress that woman. Spent a couple months trying to decide what to do with my life as I was burned out. Then learned about Ethereum on YouTube. I heard Vitalik answer questions and it made sense. At That moment Bitcoin for the first time made total sense to me. I could invest.
As part of my quest for money, to impress that woman I was infatuated with, I had tried to get into stocks with no success. There were too many regulations and the barrier for entry was high even for me as a doctor, which is a relatively well-paid profession in my country. Lost money to renown account saving company.
I was super happy with the Idea of Ethereum, as I could invest in the future use of people building on top of it. The services were the important thing, I was not planning on doing money then. I wanted Ethereum as a master key.
By the end of 2016, I had an unexpected expense. After I ended my first year as a doctor I had not worked a single day again. I had to sell most of my crypto to help pay my parent's mortgage. Until that moment I had not seen them as money. They were keys to freedom (APIs) to use in something like a game. They were fun. After that, I got into a scarcity mentality and started trading. I had to make for the time I had lost and recover my cryptos.
Like that between March and May, I had to see how the crypto I had sold were now some 10-100x more valuable. I felt super old. It was like losing 10-100 years in six months.
While trading during June and July I lost money. Not much, but that got me scared. I was not good at trading. I studied but it was super hard to do right. Watching the charts minute by minute was not life. Doubting myself at every moment with my hand ready to buy and sell, ready to jump in front of destruction at any moment. That summed to some unexpected news by the girl I was dating almost broke me.
Finally, I decided to go back to working as a doctor. To sustain myself in the coming months I was in need of selling my crypto in a controlled way. How could I do it without being accused of money laundering as my government doesn't see Cryptocurrencies as legitimate? Twice I had to visit my bank to explain my deposits.
So I checked alternatives and found something interesting. An ICO of a working crypto debit card that could exchange for my own currency. I told myself: Hey, I can be my own exchange! This is getting real.
I made some calculations and if I could buy just a couple hundred tokens from that company the card would just pay itself in a year and from then on it would be free. So I decided to buy and ordered the card. I was super happy with what happened afterward. Not only the card is amazing but just the valuation of the tokens can pay for the card in the next 10 years. Sold some of the tokens to pay the card. Which now was truly and effectively from now on for free.
- Holding your own deposits - YES!
- Being your own exchange - YES!
- Checking your own transactions - ~50/50 Not entirely there yet, but soon.
That got me my mojo back. I never intended to make money, making money was a side effect. What I wanted were keys that opened the doors to rooms with new keys to open more doors until I was out of the maze.
Since then my swings have been successful. Because what I'm buying now is not leveraged positions to make money, I'm buying keys to freedom.