Saturday, 12th of November 2022
Hello Hivers! I know I have made an #introducemyself post through Hive already couple of weeks ago, but today I would like to introduce another side of me, which I've only briefly mentioned in my first #intro post.
Since LeoFinance is all about money, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you all about my background in finance and crytoverse.
When I was still a Mathematics student back in Poland, I opened my first online bank account and become fascinated with investment funds that were available to account holders. I read all there was to read about this option and using my scholarship money I purchased a few of the options. Even in my early 20's I already had an appetite for middle to high risk investments looking at which options I picked back then. I still have some of those funds in my Polish bank accounts. Not sure how well it did over all those years, as I haven't checked it recently.
I didn't have much money to invest, but what I have gathered very fast is that the more risky investment, the higher rewards. Saving accounts back then were giving around 7% APR, which sounds like a bliss in current marking conditions, where my best savings account gives me less than 1% APR. Hence why those higher risk funds sparked my interest.
For many years to come I was earning, saving and spending my money freely without actually making my money work for me. Earning in UK was much easier than earning back in Poland, so I didn't feel the urgency to save for a rainy day.
Fast forward to 2017... I discovered an investment app which I could use for free to try my investing skills. Needless to say I was doing great until I wasn't. Back then I didn't understand that I was using laverage option and what it means. These days I don't touch this form of investment. I find it way too risky for my limited knowledge and greedy approach ;)
What I remember from that time is that I saw BTC/BCH fork and how it went for both coins. I so wish I had the any crypto knowledge back then to invest in either of 2 coins. I'd be driving Tesla now!
But hey, we live and learn is my favourite saying. Some months later I got a bit more time on my hands and I started to learn more about crytpo and claiming some various coins from faucets. The subject was too vast for me back then to stick to it, so I got other hobbies and forgot all about crypto.
Until 2021... as April of that year was the time when I joined 2 sister crypto platforms - read.cash and noise.cash. I also wish that I have found these earlier, but I also believe that when the student is ready, the teacher arrives. These 2 platforms kickstarted my crypto journey. Although I also joined Hive through #ecency that year, I feel I wasn't ready yet to enter such a vast and overwhelming ecosystem. I had some more learning to do before I was ready to start and appreciate all it has to offer.
On read.cash the tips are distributed by TheRandomRewarder in BCH and I have been rather lucky that he noticed and started to tip my articles right from the beginning. I know that some people took long weeks before being noticed. I started from making all the mistakes a newbie can make, which made dive into all tutorials that I could find to learn more about how things work. Back then I didn't even have a crypto wallet, so I was learning EVERYTHING from scratch.
Luckily I had plenty of time on my hands back then and I do love to learn new things. I created my first wallet in Bitcoin.com and learned all there was to learn to be able to make my first steps in this vast cryptoverse. I have made many friends and soon joined the amazing #Club1BCH funded by 
It must have been around August or September last year, when SmartBCH evm chain was launched. That was my first exposure to the beautiful #DeFi world. I was a few days late, as setting up my Metamask and bridging money to sBCH seemed like a lot of effort back them. I smile at this memory of how overwhelming it all seemed back then. I read a few tutorial articles first before I was all set up on sBCH. Something that takes me just a few minutes with every new chain I join these days. Clearly the effort and hours spent on learning did not go to waste.
SmartBCH was my first DeFi love and a cruel teacher. I mainly traded tokens, as well as staked and provided LP's to various new dexes popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Some days I took great profits, other times I got rugged. It's how the story goes. You need to get burned before you learn I guess ;)
What was a game changer for me was introduction of NFTs into the chain. My first mint was on BlockNG, where I minted my first 3 human ladies LawPunks. I admit, I had no idea what I was doing. I saw many people talking about minting punks, but I didn't understand anything. What is a mint? What is an NFT? I asked in Club1BCH and a friend sent me her ref link to minting page at BlockNG without explaining anything. 'Go mint' she said, so I did. I decided to leave the learning for another day and FOMOed into minting, as the price was only 0.01BCH and it was an amount I was comfortable with loosing if shit hit the fan.
Well, it didn't. I saw the 3 wierd looking pixelated women in my wallet and I couldn't see what the fuss was all about (those 3 smoking ones in the middle are my mints). I did however get curious of the potential and I wanted to mint a few more of those weirdo's. By that time I realised the mint was over. One person in the club advised to keep these for a year in our wallets and they will make a 20x easily by that time, so for a moment I considered buying some more from the market, while the price was still only 0.02BCH per punk. It seemed a bit too easy to be true and I left buying 'for another day'. That other day when I checked, they were already 0.08BCH and I thought it was becoming too much!
What do you know? It was a one-off rare case when it actually wasn't too good to be true. It was better! For some weeks after the mint the price was going up and down and finally the day has come when staking platform was launched. On that day I was one of the first people to stake my LawPunks and seeing how much Law I was earning and how fast I quickly sent a message to our punk guy in Club1BCH to buy some more punks off him. He was nice enough to sell me 2 punks at the floor price and I also bought 2 more and had 7 punks in total.
We could only stake up to 5 NFTs in 1 wallet, so I quickly created another and staked my 2 lonely male punks there too. Day by day I was harvesting bags of Law (I wrote about it in this article) and using it to upgrade all my punks to level 2 and the next harvests I used for buying new promising sBCH tokens that were still popping up from all directions.
In January 2022 I posted my December report which I closed at 12BCH increase in the value of my portfolio. Back then BCH was over $400, so that $5000 increase in December made me feel like I was on the top of the world! Crypto veterans were warning us to sell some of our BCH holdings as the market is about to take a downturn in the new year, but what do they know? I was a few months old crypto expert and I quickly became cocky with my investments. I mean, I saw BCH at $1500 when I was taking my first steps cryptoverse in May 2021, so how can it dip below the $400 even? It will go up!
Clearly I had no idea about how bulls and bears dance in a constant ebbs and flows and what goes up must go down and not necessarily the other way round. Well, at least not all that fast.
So what happened next? Well, I did even more mistakes! Not only have I invested money I couldn't afford to loose, but also my friend asked me to invest some of her money seeing how well I was doing and... I lost it all 🤣
It's funny now, but it sure wasn't funny then! Seeing how well my punks investment went (it was around 100x plus Law harvest back then) I was keen to find yet another NFT project with potential. The worst #NFT investment I've made was aping into Tropical Finance Gulls and Dudes. That's 10BCH I will never see again. They were pretty then, now they're pretty useless.
Had I been more experienced and careful, I would invest that money in LawPunks and at least the BCH value would be preserved plus I would have even more Law. I'm happy that at least I sold 2 of my giveaway Dudes NFTs when they still had value... Only to ape into more risky projects like Pega on Polygon.
Yes, Play2Earn games have sparked my interest too. I started as a scholar in AxieBCH gaming guild and I managed to grow my BCH bag a little before shit hit the fan and the game was not profitable anymore. Blessing in disguise was breaking of my main laptop, which made me quit playing for the guild without burning any bridges behind me. Thanks to Paul from Club1BCH I got the taste of earning in Pegasus P2E and I aped into the game with my earnings and some profit from selling TF NFTs. I was first trading the game token - VIS and needless to say that it was another painful lesson I had to learn.
Loosing $1200 in trading VIS didn't teach me enough. I was now desperate to recover my losses and finally earn more. I aped into buying my own Pega at $600 mark, then another one at $350 and even breed one of my own. I had 3 Pegas to race every day I was racing them despite VIS crashing more every day. Every new update would cause a tiny pump and much bigger dump. I chose to reinvest my earnings and breed again. My 4th Pega had not so great stats, so I decided to sell it and buy one with better stats. I sold it for $60 and took too much time to decide which one to buy. Lucky me and my indecision! After a few days VIS crashed even more after another bad update and all newborns were worth a few $. I couldn't belive my eyes.
It was then that I completely crashed too and without making a conscious decision of quitting I quit crypto for months. I was drained. I lost all my money, had depts and my tiny income from self employment didn't even cover my bills, let alone paying off the debts. I was faced with a difficult decision to make. I had to go back to full time employment and I resisted it so hard I ended up with severe anxiety attacks.
Going back to JOB (Just Over Broke) felt like such a failure. Why did this happen to me? I was doing so well with my crypto investments I thought. Then it all crashed and so did my dreams. I uploaded my CV online and instantly got a few offers to pick from. I went for 2 interviews and I got both jobs. That was easy - I really enjoy going for interviews and I learned to shine at them. The tough part was trying to decide with one of the 2 jobs to take.
I'll cut the story short here, as this article has already grown so big. It feels good to get all this off my chest though. If you're still reading until now, here is what happened. I picked less paid job, but permanent one and very close to where I live. I work 4 days a week, which is a huge achievement on it's own to find a 4 days a week job in engineering. I have nice colleagues and get on well with my boss, my director and even the owner of the company and I feel very appreciated for what I do. In fact I mostly enjoy my job there and last month I said to my friend:
Since when my job is the most exciting thing in my life?
That was unheard of before, so I guess I've made the right choice. Once I settled at work, of course I started craving something new to put my interest into. I slowly started to write on read.cash again and refilling my bags with BCH again. My dev friend from sBCH times came at a perfect moment and asked me to moderate his TG channel for the new NFT marketplace he was about to launch on new evm chain - DogeChain. Remember that $60 I've made by selling my Pega before VIS crashed? I still had it on Polygon, so I bridged it over to Binance and started filling up my bags of doge to then bridge it to DC.
NFT craze started yet again with 1000's of new notificiactions to wake up to every day from TG Oasis sales bot channel. This time I wasn't going to repeat my mistakes. I didn't ape in any huge amount in any of the new projects that show up. I was carefully picking where to invest and the best 2 projects that I invested in so far were again DogePunks and Cryptor.At.
First of course out of the sentiment for the punks I loved from sBCH. Turned out to be great investment when firstly rugged project was taken over by the community and marketplace with staking opportunity was launched. I bought a few from the secondary market when the price was very low and pretty much made all my investment in DogePunks back by selling a few when the price pumped. Now keeping the remaining ones staked in hope of future gains.
Cryptor.At project was another one that I did very well with. I minted quite a few rats and traits for them and sold a few when the price of rats pumped once people realised what a cool project it is. I didn't hesitate much before I invested, as I knew the dev from SmartBCH and I knew their track record of sustaining their projects was exceptional, even in tough bear market.
I will write more about various NFT projects I did well and not so well with in my future publications. Right now I should really stop typing! I think if you managed to get to the end of this aritcle, you have a clear picture of who I am and what my crypto journey looked like.
Until next time 💙