If you think you’ve missed out on Cryptocurrencies, reading my story should, in theory at least make you feel better. That said, I don’t think you’ve missed out on it at all, as the blockchain renaissance is only just beginning.
In about 2010 and 2011 I was subscribing to the Socionomist Dr Robert Prechter’s Elliott Wave International Theorist Newsletter. Like him I was convinced that the US stock markets were due for a major correction, or even a substantive crash. Still do. Of course this was just about the time when the Fed was getting ready to manipulate the markets with their series of QE rounds to pump up the markets.
Shorting the Dow and S&P off and on over the course of the next few years was a very painful experience indeed. But thanks to Bob Prechter, April 2011 was when I first heard of Bitcoin, as he mentioned it in his newsletter. I must admit it sounded like a real Mickey Mouse to me, but there was something about it, so I decided to get some. I visited the link he provided, downloaded the Bitcoin wallet, which looked quite cool with a nice leather wallet splash screen. I managed to find a seller and bought my first 100 Bitcoins for the princely sum of $6. They were 6 cents each. I paid the guy his $6 via Paypal and as promised he sent me the coins which arrived in my fully synced Bitcoin wallet.
I remember thinking at the time that some day they would be worth a fortune, and that maybe I should buy 10,000? But, I had bills to pay and it would have cost me about $600, which I just didn’t have at the time.
Having forgot about them for a while, they sat in my wallet. Every now and again I would be watching the market on Mt Gox and one day I noticed they had gone up in price to $4 each. Wow! I was up about $400! Whoopee!
Then I made my second mistake (first one being not to buy more). I sold them and took my $394 profit!
Shortly after that, the price sky-rocketed to around $1,200 on Mt Gox. It was a strange feeling of nausea, butterflies and adrenalin all rolled into one, and then there was the self-inflicted outrage as to how I could have been so stupid to sell them when I did. I went for a long walk to try and reconcile and rationalise what had happened, wracking my brains trying to figure it out. But during this walk I had an epiphany. Once I had accepted what had happened, the question popped into my head.
What if someone else had copied the Bitcoin idea?
I dashed home to search the Internet. Sure enough, there was Litecoin (LTC), Namecoin (NMC) and Novacoin (NVC) to name a few I remember. Later there was Feathercoin (FTC) and Worldcoin (WDC) and of course many others. The first Bitcoin-forked ‘Alt coins’ had arrived and were already trading on BTC-e. Some of course were forked off LTC. Interestingly enough this was about the same time as the Mt Gox scandal.
BTC-e was fun in the early days with the original troll box in full swing. What a laugh that was, I spent hours on there. Trading was easy and fun back then, the volumes were low and the coins were cheap. The pump n’ dumpers were having a ball. Annoying terms were bandied about incessantly, such as ‘to the moon”, and “chickun”, as well as copious amounts of fud used to try and bring the prices down even lower.
Those days are long gone now and crypto has evolved with hundreds of new and innovative ideas bulit on the blockchain. The problem now is deciding which ones to invest in. Last year in 2016 I had about a million coins of various sorts and once again made the mistake of selling most of them, partly on account of being impatient, and partly because I needed the money (fiat) again to pay some bills. I was also somewhat disillusioned after the DAO token debacle. So, I ended up selling more than 200 Ethereum (among others), now worth more than $60k. That one alone would have paid off my mortgage. I told myself it was only temporary and I’ll gradually buy back in after a few months. Then all of a sudden, earlier this year, they all took off to the moon with Bitcoin leading the charge. Great! Except I had done it again, sold way too soon.
It’s easy to say could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, but I really should have been a multi-miilionaire by now. And it doesn’t help knowing that I came so close. But I don’t give up easy.
So, what now?
Moving Forward
The good news is there are lots of exciting opportunities emerging, and I’ll happily stick my neck out and name a few given my track record for being right about buying the coins (albeit wrong about selling them). I could give you a disclaimer and tell you that this is not advice because you know that already right? These are just some of the blockchain based projects I quite like or getting involved in.
- Ripple (XRP)
- Agrello (DELTA)
- Everex (EVX)
- Anthem Gold AGLD (HERC) Gold Backed Digital Currency
- Ethereum (ETH)
There are of course others, and depending on how they develop, once I’ve had time to do some due diligence on them I’ll do an update in another follow-on piece. The following is a somewhat controversial issue that I feel deserves to be mentioned.
The SDR / ACChain World Digital Currency Debate
There is a debate raging in the truth community and alt-media at the moment about the question of decentralisation and moves by the Central Banks, the IMF and BIS to take control through centralisation initiatives via the SDR (Special Drawing Rights). Central to this debate is the ACChain (Asset Collection Chain) and whether it represents a move to bring about a Global Currency designed to digitise all assets (Globally) on the blockchain.
Whether this turns out to be the case or not remains to be seen, and only time will tell. In the meantime if we focus our efforts on supporting blockchain technologies that offer decentralised services for the benefit of humanity, then hopefully there won’t be any need for a world currency that enslaves us all.
Finally, hopefully you feel inspired for having read this piece, and from my own perspective I’ll be making a real effort to refrain from selling the few tokens I have any time soon. That’s because I’ve well and truly learned my lessons in crypto the hard way so that you don’t have to.