I’m not sure what the point of writing this post is. A warning? Simply putting my thoughts onto paper? Maybe even a cry for help? I’m not sure - but I had figured, since it’s a story about cryptocurrency, a forum like this would be the place to do it. Regardless, my thoughts have not been straight for the last few weeks. I’m also not sure what kind of feedback that a post like this one will receive. It’s honest, but that’s about it. I’m not sure if anyone will even read it - I mean, if I were not the author, I probably wouldn’t. I have posted here before - one of my pieces was one of the first posts and is still one of the most popular articles, on here, of all time. For obvious reasons, this is a different account. Partially out of embarrassment, partially because of the fact that this post would disgrace any of my other writing. But here I am.
I’ll be brief with any backstory, but some information is necessary for context. I’m 22 years old. I was majoring in Economics at the University of Northwestern, Chicago but had to discontinue that for personal reasons. I’ve never had much in life. My dad died when I was 13 and my mother is a loser who doesn’t make enough money to support herself but instead would leech off her son with zero expectation of paying it back. I have two jobs where, up until Covid, I was working 80 hours/week to try to scrape by. As of the last few months, I’m lucky to get 20-30 hours. In short, any extra income was a blessing.
I got into cryptocurrencies in January of 2019. My best friend since childhood had just died unexpectedly of congestive heart failure. Needless to say, I was looking for something to immerse myself in as a distraction - and cryptocurrencies were the perfect temporary solution. For the first year, I would put 40%-50% of every paycheck into HODLing. I was stressed, but I was happy. This was the first experience I ever had with investing and I found the subject to be the most interesting/exciting thing that I had ever thrown myself into. Cryptocurrencies became my life. I spent almost all of my free time with it. I’ll never forget the countless nights in the summer of 2019 where I would plant myself in front of my computer for 10 hours doing nothing but claiming faucets until 3-4 in the morning. I was happy and these will forever be some of the best times of my life.
Around November - December I was introduced to leverage trading. At first, I was horrible at it. It took me until about January 2020 until I started to make my first profitable trades. On March 12th, 2020 I made my first $1000+ profit from a short trade on Ethereum. I was on top of the world, but this would be the beginning of the darkest period of my life. I was cocky and reckless. Within the first week, it was gone. Within 5 days, I had made it all back. This would become a cycle where almost on a weekly basis, I was battling to essentially break even. Over the next 6 months to present, I made $65,611.10. And don’t have a penny to show for it.
The story ends there as fast as it climaxed. I’ve lost everything. All of my savings for the last year and a half. I have $11 in my bank account with $5,000+ in credit card debt from credit cards that my mother took out in my name - that’s a story for another time, but I was left unaware until lawyers knocked on my door informing me that Wells Fargo was suing me in order to collect the debt. I don’t sleep at night. I don’t think straight. I’m beyond stressed out of my mind. I’m filled with constant thoughts of the mistakes that I have made. The only thing that I feel is regret. Simply, I’m to the point of rambling about it on a Bitcoin Cash forum. Fully exposed and aware of how dumb it sounds. I’m just not sure what to do at this point.