Hi guys,
I thought it would be interesting to tell you about my journey to crypto currency. I have been a technology fan for a long time, in the 80's I spent most of my time in arcades. My grandfather had to literally drag me out of the place because it was dinner time. I got involved with the internet in 1998 and never looked back. I fell in love with the ability to create a website and the entire world could see it. I got involved with buying / selling / appraising domain names for a while. Setup numerous e-commerce businesses for clients and myself. Learned valuable lessons about e-commerce that no school could teach.
In 2011, I read a story on CNET that spoke about bitcoin. How bitcoin was fundamentally going to change the way money circulates and is accounted for. It really moved me and I thought it was a great first stab at currency disruption. Over the years I saw the internet disrupt so many industries, so I did not think it was that far off to disrupt one of our most fundamental mechanisms of commerce. At the time Bitcoin was only $4 a coin. I thought that it was already expensive for something we cannot touch or feel, but I believed in the core concept of it all. My experience in tech also made me realize that many things fail and something better will come along to replace it. So, with that in mind, I was cautious and I decided to invest only $100 just to see what happens. I was willing to lose $100 if it failed. I bought the coin on some strange website call trade hill and it felt a bit shady, so that also made me not want to invest more than a $100.00
I followed the market for a few months, and I did not see much action. I lost interest and moved on to thinking, I will revisit this later. In early 2013, I heard some positive stories concerning bitcoin, and read the value was going up, around that time it was $50.00. The ride got wild shortly thereafter, on April 10th 2013 bitcoin risen to ~$180.00, then it came crashing down. It was in a freefall, the media was going nuts. Bitcoin lost almost half it's value in 6 hours. These were wild swings with a currency I had little faith in. My wife was wanting new appliances for the house. Gyft just released the ability to buy Amazon gift cards with bitcoin. The stars aligned to sell. I lost complete faith in the coin and sold it all to buy gift cards to amazon. It really felt like the right decision then. Boy, did I feel stupid later that year. The price rose to $1200 per bitcoin. :(
I learned a very value lesson that year, you have to believe in the core concept of the crypto currency your buying into. If you feel strongly about the mission and the community around a crypto currency, then you stick with it. Swings in the currency come and go, but if the mission is strong and the community is strong, then you stick with the community and don't sell and bail out.
I played around with a few alternative coins, like Litecoin, Infinity coin, and quark coin, but never invested any significant amounts of money in them, because they were just copycats to Bitcoin. I did some Bitcoin mining as well, but that quickly got too expensive to stay in the game. Sold my mining equipment and I got out of Crypto for about 2 years and just casually read about new developments. Something caught my eye that was different than a copycat crypto, it was the Ethereum project. This project was definitely different, the people behind the new crypto did a presentation on their technology, but did a terrible job explaining what it was. I had to piece together comments from other people just to understand what this new crypto was all about.
Ethereum is an amazing new crypto that basically allows money to be programmed. A developer can create a small program called a smart contract, and it will instruct the money on the how, when, and where. There are many use cases for this type of technology. Here is an example: If certain conditions occur in our world, like the temperature hits a certain degree or ocean level rise to a certain point somewhere on earth. Monies can be deployed that was set aside in case that event occurred. In this case, it allows promises to be stored and executed when the conditions are met. There are some negative people saying that the technology will not work because of certain challenges, but they can be overcome. I just look at the vision of the crypto and the community that is driven to make it happen. There are many use cases for smart contracts and it will disrupt many industries (IE: court systems, record keeping, crowdsourcing, banking, and much more)
I decided to get back into the crypto game after hearing about Ethereum and now I have learned from my past mistakes and will be holding on to my coins for the long term, and only getting out when community starts to fall apart. Then out of nowhere, steemit comes along, wow what a great concept. Paying people to write blog posts using the perceived value of a social network. The more people post, the more people get paid, the more perceived value is created, and the cycle starts over. That's a system I can believe in, it's unique and will drive people in droves to earn money for their contributions. Steemit was a no brainer and I have also purchased some steem power to get me started.
I hope my crypto journey has inspired you to look at the crypto currency market a bit more, I have enjoyed the ride by learning, and I hope my mistakes and insight will make you a smarter crypto investor.
#introduceyourself #crypto #currency #journey #story #truecrypt0 #craigrant