(12/) The following post is part 12 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 11 can be found here. Part 13 here.
A bit later on in 2017, the crypto markets really started moving. I don’t know what it was that kickstarted the markets, but I know that I got caught up in the whirlwind surrounding it. I got caught up in the hype. It was just MOVING. I remember at one point when ETH was around $90 or so, everyone who I knew was telling me ‘you need to sell this stuff right now!’ and I remember just calmly shaking my head ‘no’. ‘I think this stuff is worth way more than that.’
Unfortunately, I spent a bit of ETH on some of those crappy ICO’s (a.k.a. shitcoins) and it was mostly because nobody really knew what was the next big thing was and no one wanted to miss out. It was wild, for a while. Just jump after jump after drop after drop. Very few of those shitcoins amounted to anything, but it was exhilarating to be a part of it all, even if I was just a plebe trying to strike gold.
I can’t tell you how many hours I spent watching ‘livestreamed ICOs’ during the period of shitcoin supremacy. But, during this time, I became familiar with the crypto ecosystem and many of the things you needed to do to participate in the market. Buying, selling, trading, burning, redeeming, wallets. etc. Stuff that you could really only learn by doing, and I did learn a lot during this period, but I still had a LOT to learn. I was pretty confident that I knew what was going on and really felt like I wgmi. At some point, I saw my buddy making a ton of money trading through chart analysis, so I gave him a few ETH to trade for me. Things were going good until the market tanked and he ended up losing it all within a few weeks. One bloody Sunday in January gave us this chart:
And thus signified the beginning of the end. It didn’t kill me, but it definitely hurt. And with the market tanking like that…and getting worse in the coming days…I went into a bit of a depression about the whole thing. Not like depression depression…but I felt like such a fool for thinking I knew what was going on. I just couldn’t bear (pun intended) to look at it again for a few years…
After the markets started tanking there were no shortage of know-it-alls who came out of the woodwork with conversation starters like ‘hey, you’re into that bitcoin stuff, aren’t you? how about that price now? looks like a load of shit, just like I thought!’ My response was always the something along the lines of: ‘I don’t care much about the price today because I’m confident that in 5 years I’m going to be very happy with what I’ve chosen to put into it.’
Aside from those Debbie Downers - I didn’t have much money invested, but I was VERY emotionally invested. As I alluded to earlier - Wall Street was rigged but Bitcoin and crypto was *mostly* pure. Or…was it? If it was, why did the market collapse overnight? My whole worldview had taken a hit. I couldn’t bear to look at my shitcoin portfolio tanking because this simply wasn’t how the world was supposed to work. I tried, in vain, to hold out hope. But I couldn’t. It was over. Time to move on.
And fuck all this dev stuff. I’ve got no interest in staring at computers all day. Maybe it’s time to try something else…
I'm a bit flabbergasted that you, a Wall Street insider, would have the idea of a thought that crypto was anywhere near pure. How the hell did you assure yourself that the crypto game was not being rigged? You can't unless you know the motives of the people buying and selling it (which you can't because it's anonymous by design). You can't even tell which people (not wallets) own a majority of the coins. I'm not judging you. Just wondering how you got into this thought process that crypto could not be rigged.