Being a full-time student, like myself, can make it hard to make money on the sideline especially when you're away from home for 7 or 8 hours of the day. I wake up at 7am so I can get on a train to town at around 8am so that I can be at class at around 8:45am (I stay about 32km from campus). Classes actually start at 8:30am but who cares. I used to work in a bar when I was in college but that ultimately killed me. I had class at 8am, finished at 3pm and be at work at 5pm and then finished up at the bar at around 3 or 4am the next morning leaving me with about 2 or 3 hours of sleep. I eventually quit working at the bar because I was constantly sleep deprived and couldn't focus in class. I actually dropped out and had to go back to redo a subject.
So a while back a friend of mine, the same one who introduced me to Steemit, introduced me to Ethereum. I've known about cryptocurrencies for a while but I've always been skeptical about them and even more skeptical about trading them. He referred me to Cex.io(https://cex.io/) which was where he was trading as well. I created an account and got everything set up with no intent of actually starting trading because of my skepticism and mainly because I didn't have the money to invest. I'm also a terrible gambler, I've never walked away from a casino with more money than what I took with me, which also contributed to my lack of interest in trading because I knew I would screw it up somehow. Anyway, after a lot of nagging from my friend about when I was going to start trading he gave in and eventually just donated 0.5 Ethereum to me, which is the minimal tradable amount on that site, so that I could start. At the time Ethereum was standing on $42.
I did my research, read up on Ethereum news daily and eventually started trading. I saw Ethereum drop into the 20's and rise up into the 50's at the time. I made a few dollars, not a lot but enough to keep me interested and motivated to keep on trading. My last sell order was in at $51. After the order went off I went to bed happy knowing that I made some money looking forward to buying again the next day when Ethereum was down. At the time Ethereum patterns were somewhat predictable.
To my surprise I woke up the next day and Ethereum stood on $70+ and I had 0 Ethereum in my account. I didn't panic too much cause I was confident that it would drop again. Well it didn't drop and it's now standing on $268.464 at the time of writing. fml. I could've had $130 if I literally didn't even trade and just kept that 0.5 Ethereum which at the time I thought was nothing. $130 is roughly R1600(Rands) here in South-Africa. Do you even know what cool stuff I could've bought for R1600?
I could've bought this cool pepperoni pizza bed set
We'll I haven't completely lost out, it's just that at this moment in time I don't have enough money to reinvest into at least 0.5 Ethereum again. All in all I'm glad I did what I did because I learned a lot and technically I didn't lose anything even though I might have lost my friend who I screwed out of 0.5 Ethereum which will probably be worth a lot more in the future. We're still friends though.
I know this is absolute pennies compared to what people are trading out there, it's just pretty depressing knowing that I would've been better off if I had done absolutely nothing.
I'm pretty new to the Steemit community and I would love your support. Give me a follow if you want to read more of my stories in the future. I've had a pretty eventful life so far and I hope to translate those events and experiences into blogs for you guys to enjoy. You guys can go check out my introductory post as well if you want to know a bit more about me.