Three Months In Crypto - Our Little Secret

It all started innocently enough right before Thanksgiving. With some free time on my hands, I decided to fire up an old laptop and see if I could mine any crypto with it.  After doing some research I had found a software miner to download and install, that however came with a few challenges thanks to Windows defender and antivirus software.  After navigating those minefields I did some more research on coins and decided to mine some Doge.  Let's face it, as an outsider I had only really heard of Bitcoin and Dogecoin thanks to Elon Musk.

Turns out I needed a wallet and an address to send it to, damn this stuff is complicated.  Little did I know how complicated this crypto world really is only a few hours into day one.

I fired up the miner and soon I had earned a small fraction of a Dogecoin worth a fraction of a penny - I was hooked. Soon I had a second laptop running to double my crypto haul and after some careful calculating I found out I would reach the payout threshold in just over a year.  Wait?  What?  I mean we were talking about $5 worth of Dogecoin here.  So after a little more research I learned that GPUs were the way to go so pretty soon I had our two household gaming desktops hashing away for Ethereum and Ravencoin when not being used for Call of Duty.  What once would take a year could now be earned in a few days.

I was obsessed!  Next came faucets, then pay walls, then all sorts of ways to earn free crypto.  In no time I had over 15 coins/tokens by only investing my time and a bit of electricity.  Publish0x was a game changer, not only did it introduce me to an incredible community of bloggers, but a whole new world opened up as a result of the various topics they covered.  I absorbed as much as I could and begin writing myself, sharing my crypto journey along the way.  More crypto was coming in from just using a certain browser, and a new search engine, and a new social media channel all of which I learned about here on Publish0X.  

I wasn't making a lot at this point, but I was learning a ton and having fun every step of the way.

I worked with a designer friend of mine and launched an NFT collection on OpenSea.  I state these things like they are so easy but each step can be very frustrating and take days to figure out.  I found more platforms to publish on and spent a considerable amount of time on YouTube, listening to podcasts and reading articles on crypto until I was ready to start investing my heard earned cash.

I opened a Coinbase account where I can earn free crypto by simply learning about them.  I've opened a crypto.com account which earns interest on my crypto.  I opened a KuCoin account where I lend out my crypto.  Yet this was just the start, amateurish really.

I invested more in a platform run by a group of Russians that pays out great yields daily.  This was before any thought of Russia invading Ukraine.  I start connecting everything happening in this world to its impact on crypto prices.

I started staking on PancakeSwap after learning how to add the Binance Smart Chain and individual tokens to Metamask.  I'm now only interested in "play to earn" games.  My Coingecko portfolio takes up multiple pages now to scroll through.  When will this obsession end?

More recently I've begun yield farming and a whole new DeFi world opens up.  I check my farms multiple times a day to collect my rewards.  A new feature was to be launched on Tuesday in one of the platforms and I manically hit refresh over-and-over once the counter runs down to zero.  Then I find out a new timer started and it will actually launch Thursday at 10am.  Sitting on a Telegram voice chat I'm deflated as the developer pushes it back another day.  This morning at 10am it is go time but he delays a bit longer so when I return from lunch I find out I missed the launch and all the Liquidity Pool tokens I had ready to go will be worth much less than if I had just skipped lunch today and got in within minutes of the launch, oh well I had certainly tried the past few days.

Now it is onto futures trading and trading bots, yet my training wheels aren't even off the bike yet.  I've done so many things  since getting involved in crypto that I never even heard of when I polished off that last bag of Halloween candy just a few short months ago.  What's exciting is that I have so much more to learn on things I'm currently involved with and so many more new things to explore thanks to the writers of Publish0X, ReadCash, Steemit, Hive, etc.  Actually, it would be nice if each of you could hold off on publishing for awhile so I can catch up.

This is just the beginning of my journey and I am so glad to be on it with all of you.  Let's face it, most of my friends and family know little about crypto and until it becomes much simpler I don't see many dipping their toes in to find out what this crypto fuss is all about.  This is my time, this is our time, this is our little secret for now...