My early crypto investment journey

I want to write a little about my early investments in crypto. It feels relavent now because it was a bit over 4 years ago that I started and so far the crypto market seems to have a cyclic pattern every 4 years, so because of this what was relavent 4 years ago could easily be relavent today (but of course not neccessarily — because nobody knows the future). Spoiler, it’s not good!

Anyway — like most new investors at the time I got my money into crypto through Coinbase. On Coinbase you only had 4 options of things to buy, BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC. I ended up trying all of them out back and forth though I probably prefered LTC the most. Ultimately though I wanted to look deeper and found out about something called IOTA that sounded cool.

I soon realied I should probably try move my cryptos into Binance in order to get more exotic things.

Quite soon I ended up beting primarily on ADA, though I also thought ONT seemed very promising and tried to time trades between these. It didn’t work too well. ADA fascinated me probably the most because it seemed really ambitious but ONT was performing better.

I tried out various other tactics also and eventually I came upon something that’d lose me all the money I had invested. A project called Bytecoin had just been listed on Binance and it was doing extreme volumes (even higher than BTC!). It had done a mega pump (I think 250x) and dumped back to 1/2 or 1/3 of this, and was sitting pretty stable there, but with increasingly higher and higher volumes. Pretty damn insane. I felt an urge to try it out, and maybe get a 1,3x as it rebounded as it went up a bit I managed to time an exit with a 10% gain, but then decided to get back in and go to bed. When I woke up the nex day it was 90% down.

Harsh lesson learnt, I didn’t invest again but stayed interested in what was going on in the crypto world. I got particularly interested in EOS. At the time EOS and ADA were considered the two promising cryptos that might overtake the scene and EOS was about to lauch its mainnet. Though I felt uncertain of EOS as a long term investment, I felt for sure that the spectacle surrounding its mainnet launch must for sure make the price fly! So I decided to invest again and at first it looked like I was right. The price started going up quite a lot days before the mainnet launch. But the actual launch itself was so utterly dissapointing and dull compared to all the hype that the price plummeted quite quickly. It took me a while to realise that it wouldn’t be recovering, but I did get out only partly broken, but was a bit lost on what to try next, so I ended up beting on BNB which was the only crypto that seemed to be winning at the time. Don’t bet against the house, right? Probably the only good choice I manged to make that year, but unfortunatly my timing was a bit off, so I even managed to lose some there before I found a new love.

This was QLC. What primarily attracted me was that it was one of the absolutely lowest caps listed on Binance, so I felt, how could it not grow? Since this was a much less “hype” investment than the others, I decided to get to know the project better by following it closely and joining their various social media forums. QLC was looking to revolutionize wifi with an app that let people share their connection with one another and using QLC as a currency when doing so. They were using NEO but were also building their own chain. The team was primarily women which seemed pretty fresh and different in an otherwise male dominant market. I eventually got out of QLC after learning about a previous product launch by their tech lead in another company which pretty much had 100% dissatisfied customers. I think I had also come to realise, that when trying to create actually useful products (which they may have been trying), throwing your own completely new currency into them might not actually be the best idea.

Moving on I decided to try an ICO I was in particular interested in payment processing: especially peer to peer, partly inspired by a new listing on Binance called PundiX, I was looking for competiors to it and one ICO that I found considered themselves a competitor to it. This was Monarch and so much about their plans seemed super good. But I won’t bore you with it because it was an utter dissapointment (as an investment at least). Their wallet turned out okay, but their tokens didn’t launch until 1 year later, and with nearly 0 liquidity. So, in practise money lost again…

Except a little bit… and with this small bit I actually had some luck for the first time. I ended up beting on a highly interesting thing called Holochain and ended up doing 3x with it. Learning more about Holochain I decided to invest some more as it began droping back. It seemed really, really exciting and novel. More peer to peer based and not even a blockchain and could still remain fair somehow. Consensus wasn’t needed was one of their main messages. With time as I considered their concepts some of it did feel like they didn’t really add up after all. One of their concepts was that their tokenomics was a 0-sum game. If there was tokens at all, there was also someone with a debt who owed money for creating those tokens and there was supposed to exist a kind of reputation system where anyone with high enough reputation could create this type of debt and issue tokens. The major such party being the Holochain Foundation. There were many things about this that didn’t really add up for me. Primarily the fact that if the currency gained in value, how could the Foundation ever be able to repay the debt, if required. It’d seem impossible. Some things they were saying was also not really true, such that blockchain could never scale enough to be used for everyone. Though it’s true for Bitcoin and Ethereum there were other blockchains that were much more scalable.

So I ended up liking GoChain instead, which was basically a Proof of Authority copy of Ethereum niching itself towards enterprises, which would also be validators of the network. Their goal was to have the top 50 reputable organizations they could get involved in validation. I still think this is actually quite a good idea but the problem seems to be that no enterprise really wants to associate themselves with the crypto world. This reputation that they were supposed to “stake” simply isn’t something they are willing to put on the line. Even in the cases some enterprises actually were using Gochain they weren’t running a validator and the actual validators was just some nodes that GoChain itself had set up (almost). My investment luck with GoChain was also absolutely horrible (but I still quite enjoyed it, because the investor community was good and fun). It was also here that I finally found Fusion. One person in Telegram mentioned it once and said he felt it was really promising.

When I looked into it and became more and more impressed. Following Gochain I had become a bit sceptical about why the node validation wasn’t open to anyone. In Fusion this was already the case. Anyone that wanted could run a node, and earn solid interest in the process! In addition Fusion wasn’t just a mere copy of Ethereum, it also had completely unique features such as Time-locks and Quantum Swaps and a solid plan to bring other cryptocurrencies onto the chain with an interoperability solution called DCRM. The community was also super smart it seemed like, but sometimes also a bunch of angry cunts and the founder DJ Qian was always active in teh chats and open about everything.

Basically I was sold, and still am. All did not go well. At first I pretty much “lost everything” — again (after Huobi listing + theft). But thanks to loving Fusion so much I ended up buying loads and loads at the bottom and have since found numerous unique and untraditional ways to earn money through Fusion that are much more advanced than simple buying and selling on the market. Likely I’m a “Fusionite” for life thanks to this and I have earned several times over all that I lost in my initial bad luck years (but do look out for those traps in the coming 2 years. Crypto is full of them, even in good times). To be honest probably I also “missed” some chances, following Fusion so hard. Maybe I should have bet more on $ANY, or maybe I should have gotten in some big bets on $LUNA or $FTM, but on the other hand I probably avoided just as many traps by just sticking hard with $FSN. That’s my guess at least and one can never know ones “alternate paths”. Most important I think is to never regret anything, just learn from mistakes and adapt accordingly until you get to something that works for you.