Sometimes I think I'm pretty smart. And then I remember some of the things I've done in the crypto space...and suddenly I'm not so sure.
It's a quiet Sunday around here and I'm feeling reflective, so I thought I'd write a post about three of the dumb things I've done in crypto, and what I've learned from them (if anything). It's confession time!
Quick Disclaimer: I learned some lessons but this is NOT investment advice! Don't do what I did and don't assume I learned the right lessons!
1. I sold ETH at $10.
Yup. When Ethereum first came out, I was really excited about it. A lot of us were. Smart contracts were a pretty new idea, and I thought to myself: This coin is going somewhere.
So I put all the mining power I had into Ethereum. I even bought a couple of extra Radeon cards, since they did a pretty good job mining it. And it was early days! In 3 months or so, I had a whopping 17 ETH sitting in my wallet.
Of course, the smart thing to do would have been to hold onto that and to have seen what happened when Ethereum matured. But no, not me.
I was tracking the price of Ethereum, and one day it had a spike. It had been hovering around $2, but it worked it's way up to--wait for it--TEN DOLLARS.
Well, who am I to pass up a round number? I sold it all, and enjoyed my $170 right up until the point when I realized I could have waited and sold for $17,000.
The lesson: Patience, patience, patience.
2. I "invested" in Bitcoin at $16K, and sold for half.
You know how in some of my mining posts, I put a disclaimer that mentions that I'm not an investor and I have no qualifications to give investment advice? Well, this is why.
I'd been in the crypto space for four years or so and I'd done a lot of stuff. Mining, work-for-hire, it had all worked out pretty well so far (except for the above). I saw that people I knew were investing real money in Bitcoin, there was a ton of chatter about it, and it had just hit an all time high. I thought: Why not?
Famous last words, right?
We all know what happened right after Bitcoin was at $16K, right? It went down. Fast. Day after day, I sat there looking at red candles on the charts. And then I did the only thing dumber than buying right around an ATH: I panic sold. For half what I put in.
My career as an investor was short and unprofitable.
The lesson: Even more patience. Also, buy the dips, I guess?
3. I bought used ASICs.
This may be the dumbest of all the dumb things I've done in the crypto space.
Let me ask you: Why would somebody sell an ASIC if they were running it at a profit?
Well, that's the question I wish I'd asked myself!
Every miner has seen it happen. You're happily mining away on a coin, then somebody releases an ASIC for that coin's algorithm, and the difficulty skyrockets. (Or, usually, the difficulty skyrockets just before the ASICs are released, because all this logic applies to new ASICs and the companies that make them, too.)
So buying an ASIC months after its release is probably not going to get you a lot of crypto. But I suppose sometimes you have to learn things the hard way.
(Incidentally, there are cases where it's a good idea to buy an ASIC, and I may write about that sometime. But this wasn't one of those cases.)
The lesson: Just because hardware is cool doesn't mean you should buy it. ESPECIALLY if someone's selling it cheap.
What about you?
I really hope I'm not alone in having made some mistakes in my time in crypto. How about you? What's something you've done with cryptocurrency that you really, really wish you hadn't? Let me know in the comments, if you can stand to write about it!