Since the surge of so called moonshots I have been monitoring the evolution of the coverage online and especially with friends and people I know. Friends of mine, who never invested in anything started talking about crypto - not Bitcoin but Doge and Safemoon.
To make things clear, I am not invested in Doge, but I think it has its place especially in spreading knowledge and media coverage for the crypto space. This was Doge's intentional use case all along. I wouldn’t touch Safemoon with a stick though. Anyway, all this talk reminded me of a student in 2017 who got basically rekt by such moonshots and people around me talking. This student was me.
So basically I had first touchpoints with crypto almost 10 years ago - for … reasons. Got back in 2016 for investment and started working in an IT company. One of my colleagues was into crypto, paid for his house with mining rigs and was a crypto millionaire already. This guy schooled me about the technology and how to research it, but left out a lot of the business side. He gave me some of his old GPUs so I could start mining - wasn’t worth it considering German electricity costs. With his help I made a little fortune for a student and started to feel the greed creep up my back. I started trading away my BTC for moonshots made money and saw my little treasure grow - until some day in December 2017.
My colleague offered me to invest in a coin he developed. He handed me a business plan and showed me photos of an office they were opening and his team mates. He wanted to leave the company we were working in together - first red flag here for anyone who is wondering. I went in with 30% of my holdings, also spent another 30% on projects he mentioned as 'safe going to the moon' - what a coincidence? One week later he did not come to office and when I checked my portfolio I was devastated. All of the investments where down 95%+. Turns out the colleague left the country with more than 50 million USD of people he scammed with his scheme and worked towards it for years. He was quite well-known in the European crypto environment and was a speaker at many events where he started to setup his network. Two weeks later the market imploded and I was basically where I started.
In hindsight there have been many red flags and yes, I should have done better research on my own. It was just that a person I trusted, because he was proficient and kind of a mentor showed me the world of huge gains and I got blinded. I learned from that situation and am back on track, but I see the same happening around me currently, where people use their 'expertise' to lure others into utter shitcoins and then drop their bags on them. Some of them being friends, even family members.
So my advice is to not trust anyone with a financial decision. In the end no one is liable and you might be left with bags of shit, which I am btw still holding to this day as a reminder. Research is vital and I would suggest everybody to drop YT Channels and other gurus as a source. Whitepaper, conference proceedings, GitHubis where the money is at. Try to get basic knowledge about the technology and a feeling of innovation in the papers. Also always take news with a grain of salt and avoid echo chambers like the currencies' subreddit. Verify and double check news independently and learn to read indicators on exchange before investing. I don’t suggest to learn technical analysis, because I think if you don’t go full in and study it for years it is some voodoo pseudo science, but you should be able to know basics like order books, volume, market making, RSI.
NOT FUCKING FINANCIAL ADVICE THO!
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