My Experience with Bitcoin
I’ve learned more about business, the economy, investing, and even my own emotional awareness since I bought my first piece of bitcoin. That original bitcoin purchase is locked away forever sitting in an inaccessible wallet, but that’s another story.
It would be ridiculous to attribute all I’ve learned to Bitcoin but it has been a catalyst for growth. Back in 2009 I was still in college and as my hopes grew in launching my career, the economy was collapsing. It was a reality check to say the least. I had hopes of starting a non-profit to educate others on the benefits of microfinance and was working to create an internship program to coincide. That never happened for a variety of reasons and because of the job market, I had to take any job I could to pay the bills. I did a lot of soul searching. Eventually I moved on to a job bookkeeping making near minimum wage. This is where I learned about the more tedious side of business; Accounting. It was at this job, around 2013, when I first discovered Bitcoin.
It was reminiscent of a few things I’ve stumbled upon in the past. Back in highschool there was an alternative network to MTV called Fuse. They had an afterschool program called IMX (Interactive Music Exchange). It was like TRL but instead of voting you could buy “shares” of a band using fake money. The show lasted two years and seemed rudimentary, but it was my first experience investing in a market. A similar idea came around in college surrounding sports and quickly fizzled out.
In the early days it took much more technical knowledge to buy, store, and sell bitcoin. After a few months of learning about it via forums, I started sharing the idea and my Coinbase referral link with college friends on Linkedin, my family, and my employer. The only responses I did receive were met with backlash about how it was a pump and dump, it was a fraud, etc. I would get laughed at regularly talking about it to friends. I even tried to convince the IT guy at the accounting firm to start mining with me. No luck. I tried to get my parents and family members to invest. Again, no luck. It peaked in 2014 and quickly fell. I thought to myself, they were right. It’s all a fraud. I sold half of what I had and sent the other half, .2 of a bitcoin to a cold storage wallet.
Fast forward two years, I was lucky enough to land a consulting job at the “Google of hedge funds” as Project Coordinator in Facilities. I still had parts of me that were more idealistic and continued contemplating how we could improve our economic systems. The culture was intense but I was surrounded by some of the more profound and reflective thinkers in finance, and maybe any industry. It was incredible. After moving on and taking a new job with a stronger focus in Project Management/Construction, a friend reached out in May of 2017 and told me to take another look at Bitcoin. By this time Ethereum was a hot topic.
Initially I fought my friend, parroting back to him that it was a fraud, pump and dump scheme. I was offended he would suggest it. I was angry. He insisted it wasn’t like that and I needed to look into it again. Within a month or two Bitcoin’s price doubled and ethereum moved from $70 to $300. I was hooked again. Ethereum seemed the most interesting to me and thought, “this is my second chance at this”. After about two months and some help from a colleague I met at the hedge fund, I sourced and built my first Ethereum mining rig. I also started a newsletter educating others about the knowledge I had from 2013–2014 and what has changed since then, ie. What is Ethereum? The newsletter grew to around 40 people and was comprised of colleagues, friends, and family. It was a lot of fun. As the price skyrocketed from $1k in May to $18k+ by end of year, it felt amazing. I had a couple of guys from the newsletter that went in on some more hardware in the beginning of 2018 to help build the 2nd mining rig. It was around that time that Paradigm Dynamics started to feel real.
Riding off the high of a 20k Bitcoin and then the collapse to less than 10k, ultimately down to around 3.8k was difficult to accept. I, along with many were convinced it wouldn’t go that low; but we also knew the risk. Thankfully, I didn’t quit my day job. During the bear market of 2018–2019, I lost A TON of bitcoin value trying to trade and the newsletter stopped. I learned some really hard lessons. It was frustrating and it felt like I was supposed to know better. This is where emotional awareness comes in; and I can talk about it and teach it to others, but is still difficult to put into practice. It’s risk vs. reward and that’s hard to assess in a speculative market. Often times the emotional high of prospective gains vs. fear of loss is unbalanced. My entire life became off balance and eventually had a near death experience that changed everything. I hope to share more of these personal experiences in the future but I want to mainly focus on the timeline of my relationship with Bitcoin and where we’re going with all of this. I was able to recover in late 2019 and found myself again hopeful for a return of the Bitcoin bull market that is expected every four years. Since then it has grown to over 60k and crashed 50% very quickly. New investors and the market in general is being tested. I believe there is too many factors pointing to the continuation of the 4 year cycle. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I see a strong correlation to this cycle and 2013, the first bull cycle of Bitcoins existence.
If there’s one important thing that I found true through promoting Bitcoin; it’s that you can’t expect others to see what you see or understand what you know. You can’t let that stop you from sharing. The plus side is that the conversation with people who do share the vision can be extremely enlightening. I’ve done less with trading recently and have focused more on educating and preparing others for emerging blockchain technology. My goal is to continue learning and teaching about this growing industry. I fully believe it can change a lot of things for the better and already has in my own life. Bitcoin is the future and blockchain technology is changing the world as we know it.
With this post, the newsletter has officially returned.
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