The Mistakes I've Made Since Getting into Cryptocurrency

The Mistakes I've Made Since Getting into Cryptocurrency

Hello everyone, I'm new to the whole crypto scene, and just a short time ago I knew almost nothing about it.  Besides the fact that my younger brother prodded me years ago that I should invest in Bitcoin.  This was about in 2011/2012.  He told me that if I would put just a little money into it, purchase some coins, that in the future he believed it could be life-changing for us.   But he was my younger brother, and at the time I had a different life focus in mind.  And besides, what was this internet money he was telling me about?  To be honest back in the day it just seemed like a scam to me, something that would never pan out.   

To this day, I wish I would have been just a little more opened-minded back then.  Who knows what my future could have been if I had been.

But fast-forward to September of 2019 and my life focus had changed again.  I had become very passionate about investing, trying to start and grow wealth, making a passive-income.  This is what led me back to Bitcoin.  At this point all I knew was the discussions that I had with my brother back in the day, and also that in 2017 there was a large price-boom, and then collapse.

This is when I really began to research, and I liked what I read.  The concept of cryptocurrencies really began to intrigue me, especially Bitcoin.  I'm an American that had moved to Japan, and the benefits that these coins could now present to me, really became so appealing to me and could make my life much easier.  I liked the concept of them, and now I had a real use-case.

So I was time to invest.  And of course I made many mistakes.

I love Robinhood for investing in stocks, so I thought I would do all my crypto investing there as well.  All in one place, super convenient.  But the more knowledge I gained, I realized I had no control of my coins with Robinhood, they held the keys.  I couldn't send payments to anyone, I couldn't invest it in places like Blockfi to grow my funds, and most of all, I couldn't withdraw it to my own wallet.

So I decided to sell everything and re-purchase it from an exchange where I held the keys.  

But,

Naturally when I sold it, and I was waiting to collect my money, the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed, and so when I re-purchased, I had lost some of the position that I had before.  A costly mistake from investing before I was truly ready and had the knowledge.

Next.

I decided to purchase from Coinbase.  I knew that it had expensive fees, but I felt that with my lower skills, that it was the easiest of the exchanges for me to use.  

The problem was that I had become somewhat obsessed with investing.  Whenever I had any spare dollars I would love to put it towards some Bitcoin or other cryptos.  For example, today I didn't get a coffee from Starbucks, so I will purchase $4.00 worth Bitcoin instead.  I would do this numerous times a day or week.  But then at the end of my first month doing this I saw that I was paying an incredibly-high amount of fees for the somewhat low amount of Bitcoin I was purchasing.   

From that moment on I began really planning out my purchases before I actually clicked the buy button.  Now I was purchasing usually just one time a month, or at the most bi-weekly.  And I must say, I have saved a good amount of money doing this and been able to re-invest with this money.

While these mistakes aren't the biggest mistakes in the world, they were my mistakes and I learned a great deal by making them.

All the experts really are correct when they say you really need to research before you begin to invest in crypto.  I wish I had done just a little more as well.

I would love to hear what kinds of mistakes you made when you first began investing in crypto!