A Reason to Always HODL - Doge Coin

Everyone who is on hive has a starting to point as to why they are on here. Mine is related to learning about crypto in 2017 and started investing in it. Later on I started to trade crypto and before I knew it I was hooked by the possibility of becoming rich overnight.

Back in early 2017 crypto prices started to go parabolic. I have read in the news how people were making a fortune. I told my wife its the future and I need to invest now. I was so excited by the possibilities that even the words that I spoke made my wife feel I was crazy. Indeed at the time I was. I was crazy for crypto.

I wanted to go all in, put all the money I had saved into crypto in 2017 but my wife would not let me. We had kids and a house to pay off, no free cash to just risk. Yet I saw the risk versus reward at the time and wanted to go all in. All in.

Crypto 2018 Bust

My wife gave me a shot and let me invested a small sum of fiat into crypto in late 2017. I was going in on cloud mining and peer to peer lending because at the time those were the hot stuff. I went with Genesis Mining and Hashflare as they would produce me daily amount of BTC. With BTC I would then withdraw into a crypto exchange.

On crypto exchange I started to learn how cryptos were traded and started studying all the different altcoins that where out there at the time. I went speculating a few altcoins by trading my BTC. I never held any one of those altcoins longer than a few days as my goal really was to hold BTC. I traded and traded to stack sataoshi until by end of the year I had over 1 BTC. At the time BTC was close to hitting 20k but I was thinking bigger.

My wife saw my trading account and was pleased with the outcome. So please she decided to let me do all the investing I wanted in crypto. Our greed blinded us. We had little at the time to invest in but I scrap what I could that was liquid and borrow where I could to amass at the time a decent fortune all into crypto. We saw BTC as the gold we needed to retire on. Gold as in the golden ticket like the kid in the Chocolate Factory. One of the special tickets that will be the fee to enter paradise.

With so much money on the line I did not want to take on so much risk and I decided to hold majority of the most familiar cryptos at the time. BTC, LTC, and Doge. On coinbase at the time those were the only coins people can buy and I went almost evenly split among all three. I also went on a buying spree and build my own mining rig that ran 24/7 at home.

At the same time at work I was not focusing on my job but on crypto. I was looking up how to earn more crypto and doing research on the latest tech. Back in 2017/18 the hot item was forks. Get into a coin that fork, get the new coin, sell the coins to get more BTC. Rinse and repeat over and over again.

BTC was the most easiest to hold back then because there was almost a fork every week. Keep the BTC at a specific exchange and wait until the day the blockchain got fork and in less than a week I get the same BTC and some new coin. There was BCH, BTG, BTC diamond, BTC lite, Bitcoin God, and so many more. Each did not have much value after a few months but at the time they were a decent fraction of a BTC. As the new forks got traded I went and sold mine to stack even more BTC.

Then something hit, not price crash yet but a function inside the blockchain. Transaction Fees. Moving any amount of BTC when it was close to $20k in 2017 was expensive. We were talking about almost $100 dollars to move a few BTC. Not to say this is as bad a a fiat bank but it was still much more expensive than transferring other altcoins.

I did some research and learned that Doge coin at the time very cheap but low fees to transact. People were basically using Doge coin to move their assets one one place to another at a fraction of the fee. Basically it works like this, I have BTC in an exchange and I want to move it out to another exchange or wallet. I trade the amount of BTC into Doge and then from Doge transfer to the new exchange. From the new exchange trade Doge back into BTC. Most times I had very little price difference by doing this compare to basically moving BTC directly from one exchange to another.

By close to mid 2018 crypto investors had the euphoria but prices were not the same. BTC was dropping fast and I was at the time weak handed. I never been in a massive bear crypto market even though I went through the Great Financial Crisis. To me crypto was the hope I wanted for my future. A potential of rising wealth and not relying on fiat currency. In a matter of weeks I lost it all.

When crypto prices started to drop in 2018 I was still trading them. I kept trading them in hopes to hold up my equivalent amount of fiat value in crypto. I basically was taking on more risk by trading in altcoins that promised high APR. The thought at the time was hold coins that earn high APR will offset the down fall of crypto prices. That would not be the case.

As crypto prices fall they fell very hard. Not even a triple digit APR was going to keep prices up or balance out the fallen prices. Within months of the big 2018 fall my wife and I were devastated by the massive draw down. We talked for over a day about what to do. I remember the long and grueling discussions we had.

I fail to Hodl

End result was to cut the lose and never return. Why? Back thIen in 2018 we needed money to support our lives. I had little children to feed. The risk was just too much and we knew if we still sell then we had enough nest egg to slowly rebuild. My wife and I were also young back then and strong enough to pick up side jobs here and there to earn income.

We thought about past generations and came to the conclusion that only hard work pays dividends. I gave up crypto for a few years and promised my wife to never trade it on an exchange ever again. The remaining assets we still had in crypto back in 2018 I basically sold out. One of them was a massive amount of Doge coin. At the time I was transferring out all my crypto into coinbase and the cheapest method to me was moving Doge to coinbase and trade back to BTC to exchange for fiat.

That last exchange had a large amount of Doge. Without totally remembering exact number I remember the moment clearly. I was in tears holding up my iphone 6+ looking at the big number of Doge coin alone in my room. I was a couple of clicks from exchanging it all back into BTC.

At that time one Doge coin was worth around 50 Satoshi. 100 million Satoshi makes 1 BTC. I had just slightly over 1billion in Doge coin. Instead of moving the entire amount at the time I left about 1 million Doge coin. The plan was take 1 million and try to grow with that while the remaining turn back to fiat.

Conclusions

The 1 million Doge coins at that time I had left I basically moved to Steemit and try blogging there. It became an on off thing as I was not making much of getting very little in return. I picked up Splinterlands but beyond that I did not blog or curate as much.

Fast forward to 2021 now there is no words to explain how I feel right now. All I can write here right now is the memories I had and how close I really was to the golden ticket.

Not one day that passes me do I have not have regret of what I did back in 2018. The only way I learn to be rich in crypto is that I have to hold. I have to hold in the investments I believe in. If I have faith I will come through this with the dreams fulfilled.

My wife would always say "this was meant to be because it happened." What I see is that I failed to do what I truly wanted to do in 2018. I fail to believe in myself and now I face the consequences of knowing I was literally just a few years from a financial life changing event. My wife won't let me put a single dime in crypto exchanges now and I have my own doubts as 2021 parabolic rise looks similar to 2018.

Yet here I am blogging daily and interacting with my fellow crypto fans. I have a revised vision now on how to invest in crypto. I would focus my time and energy to earn crypto rather than go blindly all in with my life savings. This way if I fail its all on my as a person who fail to see what is an investment and what is not.

Money is not everything, it is a way to make life easier. Whether crypto will replace fiat or not the potential is there and with that I have faith in the asset class and will hold on to them for dear life from now on even when there is a draw down. I know there is a end to this and holding is key to reaching that end.

Thanks for reading.