Cryptocurrency has been both a blessing and a curse to a lot of people. Some persons have been left with a smile on their face after their encounter with cryptocurrency while some others have had their fair share of hell from it. Those who play their cards right and have lady luck on their side have greatly benefitted from this fountain of wealth, so basically it can make you or break you.
I first heard about cryptocurrency back in 2015 when bitcoin was still in its infancy, the price was around $250, give or take. I was a moderator on an online forum when suddenly I noticed a new section has been created titled "Buy and sell bitcoin". Sure enough, I was curious and inquired about it from the moderator on that section and he explained everything to me.
After the explanation which I admit I didn't understand any of it at then, I concluded that bitcoin was some sort of Ponzi scheme and it was going to crash sooner or later. My line of thought back then was "So I buy this bitcoin at a certain price then wait for it to go higher and then sell It, but who is gonna buy it at a higher price? It's stupid". Years later that thought came back to haunt me (It still does actually).
Early 2018, a friend of mine introduced me to a mining website where I can get free coins (yes! Another good opportunity to drink from the fountain of cryptocurrency). So I quickly jumped on it and started mining, which involves logging into the site every few hours to collect the accumulated coins which are bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, and dogecoin. I referred a bunch of people to it as well which also helped to boost my earning, hell yeah I'm gonna be swimming in a lot of money by the end of the year (so I thought).
A few months later, I noticed the mining rate has greatly reduced and the accumulated coins after a few hours are now lower than I started. I found out it was because there are now a lot of miners which led to the reduction of the mining rate, "Damn! If only I discovered this platform a few months earlier" I said to myself.
Towards the end of the year, I have accumulated a fair amount of coins but it was far below my expectation, so I decided to quit. The platform gives you the option of converting all your coins to a single one and then withdraw, so I chose to convert the others to BTC, but my friend who is a big crypto-freak suggested converting to LTC or BCH because they are currently low at that point and the exchange rate will greatly favor one of them, compared to converting to way higher bitcoin. Well, I couldn't see his point back then and be wondering why I should convert to BCH which was at about $150 then (It started the year at about a $1000, so it was basically dying).
I converted to BTC at a higher exchange rate while my friend chose BCH, which got him a lot of BCH, and he hodl. By mid-2019, he had the last laugh as BCH rose to about 3 times the price it was at the end of 2018. I just closed the chapter on cryptocurrency at that point and moved on.
2020 witnessed the rise of cryptocurrency as it became very popular in my country. Whatsapp and telegram groups dedicated to crypto sprang up everywhere, which also led to a high rate of scams. Airdrops was the order of the day as the lockdown brought by covid-19 persisted. New tokens and defi-coins kept coming out every day and the lucky ones made lots of profit. I participated in a lot of airdrops back then (a hell lot of it), and most of them turned out to be a scam in the end but I benefitted from some of them.
I remembered a friend trying to get me to register for two pyramid schemes that were trending last year; forsage and million money, both based on the ethereum blockchain. To be honest, it was both of these schemes that led to the popularity of cryptocurrency in my country. I wanted to register for forsage but after a little research online, I quickly changed my mind. It was definitely a pyramid scheme (specifically a gifting scheme).
My friend got about 4 ETH from both schemes and he sold it at a rate of $200 per ETH (total of $800) but guess what? ETH rose to about $2700 a year later, his 4 ETH would have been worth approximately $11,000! (I still remind him of this every day). But I guess it isn't easy for most people to hodl for a very long time, I included.
It was at this point I became interested in crypto and I was active in a lot of social media groups and forums dedicated to cryptocurrencies. We would stay up late into the night fishing for good airdrops to participate, the airdrops are usually fast-paced and involved filling a form to be among the specified number of persons. Sometimes, they will drop a form with an instruction that it's only for 100 persons (in a group of over 10,000 people!) So yeah, the pressure is high and the forms get filled up within seconds.
It was later I got to know what was going on; those coins that were springing up everywhere were designed as a scam. The creators of the coin pump money into it to make it look like it's doing well, thereby luring investors into it and then the coin gets dumped. The funny thing is they usually have really funny names ($yam, $rice, $tears). Well, the guys in my online group didn't care as long as they aren't spending their own money, they just participate in the airdrops and as soon as they get the coin, they exchanged it before it gets dumped.
At one point the rate of new shitcoins drastically reduced (probably because most people also figured out what was going on behind the scene). A lot of persons got ripped off which led to the reduction in the number of new shitcoins, although they are still out there, I don't see them as frequently as before.
After a while, I decided to stay away from airdrops and focused on buying cryptocurrencies and hodl for a while. Although this comes with its own risk, I usually follow the advice of some of my friends who have basically become crypto experts but their predictions are sometimes wrong, I remember buying $500 worth of a particular coin, and I woke up the next morning and saw just about $30 left (yeah it's crazy sometimes). Most of the time I make some decent amount of profits, but we can't win them all.
The bottom-line is I have both been blessed and hurt by cryptocurrency just like most people, the main thing is learning from your mistakes. Some persons repeatedly make the same mistake all in the bid to make it with cryptocurrency and end up getting burnt badly. The wise ones learn from the mistakes of others, but what I have learned from my experiences in the realm of cryptocurrency is that; nothing is certain.
