Do you remember the first time you heard about cryptocurrency? I sure remember mine! I was playing football outside with a few of my fraternity brothers when one of our friends started talking about this thing called Bitcoin.
He went on to explain it and how it was this new way to pay for "things" and back then I am fairly sure he was talking about weed. A few hours later, I went back to my room and immediately started looking up what the hell a Bitcoin was. After reading a few articles I knew that I needed to get in on this. Especially since my degree is in software engineering!
Below is picture of my first ever purchase on the famous Mt. Gox Exchange. Back in March of 2013 you had to jump through several hoops to purchase a Bitcoin. I remember I went to this website and they had me print out the below slip to send a MoneyGram that would get my cash to Mt. Gox. My first order was for $20.00 which would get me roughly 0.25 BTC. I went to Walmart handed the cashier my slip and money and then the waiting game began.
I cannot remember how long it took to get the funds to show in my account but I know that it was a moon shot that this was actually happening. At one point in time I thought for sure I probably just through away $20 of drinking money for that weekend.
After continuously checking, the funds finally arrived! I couldn't stop talking about how cool this idea was. My friends and family thought I was crazy and blew me off when ever I would try to talk about it. A few days later I ended up going right back to Walmart with that paper in hand and requested an additional $60 worth. That would roughly get me one full bitcoin which was around $80 - $100.
It was so exciting to see my 1 BTC grow in value over the coming months. I loved the feeling of being in something that few people knew about. In November of 2013 I ended up opening my first Bitcoin wallet with Blockchain.com. To make sure everything worked as expected I ended up sending around $7.00 to my new wallet. Low and behold it worked and I was amazed! I knew then this would be a technology that is here to stay.
Fast forward to I believe early 2014 and Mt. Gox was "hacked". I remember everybody who owned Bitcoin went into panic mode and was not exactly sure what to do or think. Oh boy, did I hear the heckling from friends and family once this happened. Overall, I ended losing nearly 0.75 BTC and only had about 0.50 left in my Blockchain wallet. Luckily I was smart enough to split my funds over two different services unlike many others.
After the Mt. Gox fiasco I ended up shying away from Bitcoin for a few years as not a whole lot was happening with it. In October of 2016 I ended up selling about $20.00 (at that time) worth as I was dead broke and needed money to buy food. The only great thing about selling it was that I used my first ever Bitcoin ATM. I remember it being so amazing that I was able to send BTC to the machine and a few minutes later $20.00 dropped out just like any other bank ATM.
In April of 2017 I was feeling disappointed since I wasn't a millionaire yet and ended up selling about $200 worth so that I could invest this money into a few marijuana stocks I heard about. This left me with 0.25 BTC.
Then BOOM!!! In late 2017 Bitcoin and cryptocurrency started gaining traction. I figured I would sit on the sidelines and see what happened. Next thing you know Bitcoin just kept climbing and climbing. I thought this was the time to get back on board before I missed out. I ended up buying some BTC, ETH, XRP and a few other altcoins in late December and early January 2018 like everyone else. As they say, the rest is history.
Bitcoin and all other cryptos took a turn for the worst. In July of 2018 I figured the market couldn't get any worse so I ended up accumulating more. Over the next several months Bitcoin continued to fall. I started to use this down period to really learn about some other cryptos and ended up making some solid purchases in XRP, Tron, HOT and a few others.
Overall, I am still very optimistic about where crypto/digit assets will go. My love and passion for the various technologies have never been stronger. There are several projects that I really follow and truly believe they will change the way the world works. I have definitely learned many things along the way. I invested in a Ledger Nano S (get one if you don't have one), tried out a few different exchanges, learned that this is a long term game and most importantly keep accumulating...