I already hear you guys calling me out and shouting names. ‘Paper hand’, ‘FUD noob’, ‘boomer in love with the elite’ anything else? Let me clarify something: I am with crypto for more than 4 years now and it has caused me many sleepless nights and a lot of worries but also was reason for dreams, hopes and excitement. I am still a believer in bitcoin and while I do not think it will replace fiat money (come on guys, get serious), I strongly believe it will establish itself as a renowned asset class on the same level as gold and am expecting a 500 USD ATH 8 years from now.

What got me here in the first place? Am I really a cheat?

When the last bull run happened, I was already experienced with stock and ETF trading. I had a clear trading, or rather investment strategy that involved holding (hodling wasn’t a word back than) a stock forever (literally until after my death) with the goal being to get a nice bonus on my retirement pension from dividends. In the rare cases in which I did trade, I followed the golden rule of never selling at a loss, either waiting for the position to go back green or prepared to lose it all (hasn’t happened so far).

But crypto really f*cked me sideways. There were so many exchanges popping up, so many ICOs, such a speed and volatility in trading, such hype around each and every next big project barely delivering a whitepaper. I was excited and scared, but the good kind of scared, the one that makes you want to go into the dark room despite all reasoning while feeling all tingly on your whole body.

When things started coming down from 19k USD, I couldn’t resist anymore and jumped on the wagon ‘buying that juicy dip’ at 10k. It held that level for a while with swings in the 8k to 11k corridor. The big rebound I had been hoping for did not happen. Feeling let down by BTC, I was promised great riches by ‘altcoins that still had potential’ and made the biggest of three mistakes leading to a catastrophic result. I started ‘diversifying’ my portfolio. Jeez, I was buying 100 USD worth of Monero, 100 USD worth of MIOTA, 100 USD worth of XEM (belonging to the NEM blockchain, whatever that is?). What was I expecting to happen? I went further and invested into shady projects like SophiaTX because they were saying things like ‘SAP integration’ and ‘Ernst & Young partnership’ in their AMAs. Every time someone asked about their business model or product, they didn’t want to give information justifying that with protection from copycats. Great AMAs those were and what a huge red flag this would have been in the stock market! But in crypto, nobody seemed to care.

Summing up, I bought 0.19 BTC (for 1,777 USD) and 5 ETH (for 2,943 USD). If I had simply held on to that, I would have been looking at a net worth of 32k USD at the new ATH formed this year. But all ETH were gone, circle traded for tokens, losing ground with every trade until there was no ETH left.
My best decision back then was holding on to 0.12 BTC. I had these sitting in my accounts for four years now, not ever touching them and considering them a total loss until the 2020 bull run started.

I also started building back some other positions from scratch and was confident to make crypto give me back what I had lost, even if that meant hours and days of writing blogs and playing Splinterlands. Ok, there could be worse activities but it’s not as much fun as it could be, when you MUST do it to achieve a financial goal and instead could/should be doing stuff with your wife and daughter. At the same time I constantly felt bad for having burnt thousands of USD, we could have used for our family’s future.

Why sell now?

Mainly, because I didn’t want to. I feel the same kind of overheated excitement that I felt 3 years ago at the beginning of 2018, checking crypto blogs and feeds hourly, looking for new projects I want to get involved in. Remember, I said that after the crash from it’s ATH, BTC traded in a 10k corridor for a while? Instead of rewinding, at the end of that corridor it all came crashing down a second time to 6k, then 3k. I feel that 40k is the new corridor before history repeats.

Remember all the public awareness, all the mentions in media (in 2018 there even were questions about BTC at ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’!). Go watch some mainstream media, it’s just the same. Remember all those investors late to the party who claimed ‘altcoins that still had potential’? The same is happening now with DeFi which ‘can still yield impressive APYs for true hodlers’. Hell, even all those social media airdrops are back, this time for BEP-20 instead of ERC-20.

I have been through the cycle once. Those 4 years of time spent in Cryptoland have not been wasted. I learned a lot about trading, how markets work, how blockchain works, how the community works. The big difference to 2017 is that this time, I feel educated enough to trust my guts and they are telling me, winter is coming.

The BTC I held on to, the positions I had rebuilt, the worthless alts slumbering in dozens of accounts and wallets regained some life and earnings from other sources were still looking pretty good today, even after all of that recent bloodbath. So that, after 4 years of crying over spilled milk, I was in a position where (in terms of fiat), I was able exit the game with a significant plus.

I just couldn’t take it mentally to foresee another crash and not having taken any action beforehand.

Where does that leave me?

I mentioned that I had 0.12 BTC held back, which were the main position in my portfolio. But I also held on to KCS, some NEO and a small amount of BNB. After liquidating everything, I am looking at 9,629 USD worth of stable coins sitting in my accounts at Binance and KuCoin. I recently also cashed out 350 USD earned from using the Brave browser. What I also take away from my 2017/18 crypto journey are some participation certificates from Modum who terminated their Modum token with a token burn, exchanging the tokens for participation certificates of their company. No idea how much these are worth, though as they didn’t get an ISIN for them yet.

That puts me at 10k USD earned from my crypto endeavors vs 4750 USD initially invested. The profit I have taken from coins and tokens even covers my second crypto investment Splinterlands in which I had put 3320 USD when the game was still in Beta. I am still holding on to these cards and currently my collection is valued around 8500 USD using market prices. Not bad, considering it is a free ride now, right?

What I did not sell

I did not touch any Splinterlands NFTs and I also did not sell HIVE and WAX. Because I am actually using these platforms and enjoy the dApps running on them. (Also because HIVE would require a 13 week unstaking process before being able to sell but I didn’t intend to power down, anyways.)
Both HIVE and WAX are positions worth about 500 USD each in my portfolio (difficult to say with the recent swings) and all of this was earned by engaging in the platforms and communities. I’m determined to hold my stake their and will continue to contribute and consume content on these chains.

Is this Good Bye?

I certainly do not hope so! My exit is based on mere financial reasoning. It is one thing to talk about ‘true hodlers’ and ‘BTC to the moon’ when you are 18 years old invested with 150 USD. It is another thing to blindly hold on to a declining investment when you are 33 years old, married, father and in debt with your bank for a mortgage.

This does not change anything in my attitude towards crypto, though. I will continue to write a blog every now and then and I will still be floating around the Splinterlands, HIVE and WAX.

Should my prediction come true, I may buy back in at 25k USD feeling pretty damn smart about what I did there, when we take off to 180k. Should the bulls be correct and we are never to see a 25k BTC again, because we are headed straight to the moon… well, then I am just thankful for having exited with a plus (not many manage to do that!) and having learned so much about finance and technology over these past years. Who knows, maybe my (now) free Splinterlands cards will make me a millionaire?

Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience. Do your own research!

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