I will start off by saying this isn't a rags to riches story, it’s a rags to cleaner rags story.
My first encounter with crypto was about six years ago. A couple of local boys had a business selling homemade candy and honey on the internet. Included with their accepted forms of payment was Bitcoin. At the time Bitcoin was trading for about 5-10 dollars. The boys were on local TV news because they had saved all of their Bitcoin from selling dollar candy and had made a small fortune. With BTC on the rise, the boys really started to rake it in. I was looking into BTC mining and investing at that time and decided not to pursue it.
My crypto story started on March 4, 2017, throwing caution to the wind and going for it. I was tired of watching the price of coins going up and I wasn't involved with it. I had done hours of research and found out the best and most secure way to deposit. Most importantly, I found out how to withdraw funds.
Over the next few months, I deposited $300 into coinbase and purchased Bitcoin. From there, I transferred funds to Poloniex. If you don't know, Poloniex is an open exchange where coins can be bought or sold in a worldwide market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also I spent $130 at Genesis-Mining.com to mine Dash and Etherium. Dash, which was trading at about $90 at that time, caught my attention because of its huge price jump from $10 to $80 in just a few short months. Just like that, I was off to the races and started day trading on Poloniex. I created buy/sell orders and stop loss orders, I was having a blast.
Another fun pastime I enjoyed was playing the digital casinos with coins. For pennies you could play dice games. I never hit it big on the casinos games, but it was something fun to try. When I originally talked to my wife about crypto investing, we discussed spending $100. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a gamble. I was really hoping that this was all going to work out because I had spent a little more than my allowance.
Mid June I had created a Steem account and started making small deposits into my account. My wife, 
On July 4th, Independence Day, I withdrew .058 BTC valued at $729 from Poloniex. I sent the BTC to Coinbase and converted into USD. I was then able to transfer back to my bank. This process was quite simple and painless. It only took a couple of days for the wire to go through. The most important thing when sending coins is to verify and double-check your deposit addresses. If you mess that up, your coins disappear into thin air.
My total investments, $483 subtracted from the $729 withdrawal, left me with a small but suitable positive number, not to mention that I left $260 in Poloniex to continue to day trade with or do whatever I felt like. My Dash mining and Ether contracts are still paying out and have gained a couple hundred more USD.
In mid July, I started buying up Steem and pulled an “all in” maneuver with my investments. I was purchasing Steem between 80 cents to $1.20. I sold out of a multitude of other alt coins, including my payouts from Dash mining contracts. I had accrued approximately 485 Steem, which isn’t a huge number, but when you're dealing with the volatility of an alt coin, it’s possible you could lose all of that. I transferred the Steem into my account and my wife’s account and had used all of it to power up. I stopped day trading coins, which was somewhat of a relief. It was taking up a couple hours of my day every day. I was obsessed with it.
With Steem currently breaking records and trading higher than it ever has before, the future of Steem looks very promising. From the beginning, I decided that when I invested into Steem, I would do so for the long haul. I would not power down or withdraw until the income would be required. My blogging and curation rewards are immediately used to power my account. I believe that Steem will continue to grow, and as my account value grows, I find it harder and harder to hold onto that Steem; however, I’m staying strong for now. Good luck to you fellow Steemians.
Keeping all of that in mind, today I just sold all of my newly acquired Dash and Etherium, and I'm going to start trading again. I don't believe I will spend hours a day working and researching. I hope to buy low and sell high, making a nice profit in the process. Also, I will start selling "trading shares" in my investments to friends and family that want to get involved. The beauty of buying a trading share is you don't have the hassle of setting up all of the accounts. Basically how it works is each initial share will be valued at $5. Currently, there are 41 shares, of which 20 are available for purchase. Funny thing, since I started to write this post, there were only 40 shares available. The account already gained $5. But, hey, this is crypto. It could lose that in the next 10 minutes...
Thanks for reading. Have a good one. Q
If you made it this far into my story, leave a comment. I will be upvoting all of them!