It was December 2017: dark days, darker nights, work stress numbed by too many seasonal beers, eyes to the floor trying to block out all the faux Dickensian Christmas nonsense, and the economic pain of having succumbed to maybe one too many gingerbread lattes.
And cryptokitties:
I guess they were kind of seasonal, I guess they were/ are kind of cute, they were certainly a new thang - an NFT on a blockchain - it made pre-Hive seem positively dull!
And I was flush with a salary, crypto off its peak but still doing OK, and my blog income going up and up and up.
So I bought in - I took 0.6 of my precious ETH and spent it on a few gen 4 and 5 kitties, and bred them, until I had 11 of them.
Almost three years on, I still have all 11 - despite putting all but 2 of them up for siring or for sale, I don't think I made a single penny on them!
And looking at the prices at which I put them up for sale and siring, I wouldn't have made that much of a return on my initial investment either!
There are some GEN 4/5/6 kitties up for sale at around 0.002 ETH, so if I make a generous estimate my 11 Kitties are worth somewhere in the region of 0.02 ETH - that's quite a loss!
It could have been worse!
I remember considering whether I should have bought a gen 0 at the time, I think I didn't because they were each going for around 1 ETH, which was a fuck of a lot of money, more than I wanted to spend!
What to do with the Kitties now?
Well they're not worth selling ATM - and they're even less likely to now given that it would cost someone 10 times more in GAS fees than the cost of the kitty:
(I didn't buy, it was just a test!)
Maybe I should wait, maybe there is hope? One joker has this kitty up sale for around three trillion trillion ETH....
So you never know, although I'm not planning my retirement on selling my Kitties!