Please, don´t invest in crypto like me in 2017

tl;dr

The wave of new shitcoins on the horizon in combination with celebrities as well as billionaires shilling and manipulating cryptos reminds me of the late 2017s when I got into cryptocurrencies myself. Since numerous new people found their way into this space this year, I wanted to give you a little anecdote so you don´t have to make the same mistakes as me.

· Only invest what you can afford and what you won´t need in the near future

· Do your own research and utilize multiple sources (don´t blindly trust celebrities)

· Weigh risk vs reward

· Think long-term (hodling for at least 1 year also brings tax benefits in most countries)

· Honour your profits and forget about the "what ifs"

· Keep calm and don´t check the prices every minute, it will ruin you

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1) Introduction

In late 2017, a fellow student told me about this new awesome thing to make a quick buck – cryptocurrencies. For reference, at the time BTC was at around 3,500$, ETH was at around 250$, DOGE was at around 0.00087$, ETC was at around 12$. Even though I had no idea about finances nor the tech behind cryptocurrencies, I bought my first 2 ETH for around 500$ which was a huge investment for me at the time. Shortly after, I started to check the price of ETH almost hourly and was fairly shocked that I still wasn´t a crypto millionaire. Looking for faster solutions, I stumbled across crypto-related subreddits, ICOs and most importantly the saviour at the time himself – John McAfee. For those who weren´t present at the time, John McAfee was praised by many for his interest in crypto as some kind of wealthy crypto enthusiast, similarly to Elon Musk nowadays.

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2) Pump & Dumps

Since I didn´t get rich quick enough with my ETH, I started FOMOing into numerous different ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) following the "educated" pieces of advice of John McAfee in addition to several high IQ subreddits. It seemed so simple, I just have to trade my ETH for some fresher coins/tokens that were shilled by John McAfee or Reddit and become a millionaire (well at least that was what I hoped). I started trading my precious ETH for shitcoins and scams such as SETH, MAN, MITH, ELIX (sorry if I offended any remaining investors) and many more of which I already forgot the names. MAN still especially hurts because it was the first and last time that I ever talked somebody into buying specific crypto – still feel bad about it. Promises were broken, development was slow or stopped completely and prices were plummeting. I even bought two more ETH so I could invest in even more garbage. This was also the time were crypto started to become fairly unhealthy for me. My days just revolved around checking the prices and news every free minute of coins that I had no idea what purpose they even served.

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3) Break from crypto

Wasting around 4 – 5 ETH (around 1,000$ – 1,500$ at the time) which would nowadays be worth around 12,000$ as well as having wallets full of shitcoins finally made me sick of crypto and my failures. The only thing left was the mining rig that I set up for fun in early 2018 because I always wanted to build a PC on my own. I primarily mined ETC (difficulty was way lower than ETH at the time) and PASC as the secondary coin. Following the big crash in 2018, I eventually decided to shut the mining rig off in early 2019 because it was far from being profitable considering the electricity costs were too damn high. I kept the ETC in a wallet and traded all the PASC that I mined for some DOGE just for the lols. I was so done with crypto that I didn´t even check the prices for the coming three years.

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4) Second chance

Early 2021 I read all the news about DOGE and just couldn´t believe it. Additionally, ETC was starting to get some more attention which drove the price up. By carelessly hodling these two coins for three years without checking their values, I was able to eliminate all my prior losses from 2017 and additionally diversify my portfolio with more stable and secure coins. I didn´t get rich with crypto nor will I ever be, however, I learned a lot in the process. In the end, it would have spared me a lot of drama and pain if I would´ve just invested in more low-risk coins from the beginning. Never get too greedy and honour the little profits you make. There will always be a "what if I would´ve invested earlier in coinXY", "what if I would´ve invested more money in coinXY" and so on. You can´t predict the future so just make an educated guess, lean back and know when to take out some profits.