I Cashed Out 5+ BTC In 2 Months In 2016...

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Fear of missing out, or FOMO is a remarkable, terrible and awesome thing at the same time. It all depends on how you see it, and which side of the fence you are. The term is usually reserved for those who spend everything they have to buy the latest thing or experience without any regard for their financial future. I recently stumbled across something I wrote back in 2016, about 2 months after I had joined Steemit.

One thing lead to another..

  • I checked my history.

Before going into that though, I want to elaborate on certain things and I want to share a little bit of my background story as it will give you a better understanding. I am a former freelancer who started to provide various services on different marketplaces in an attempt to earn something extra. I was looking for a way to earn money online, and as a former salesperson, Fiverr and SEOClerks eventually brought my attention. My journey obviously contained trial and errors but I quickly adapted and I could rather easily implement some of my skills. It didn't take long before I started to have decent results and this went on for several months.

As time passed by, I learned new things and I could offer more services. Orders started to pour in and I quickly leveled up on both marketplaces. Even though I haven't been active on any of these marketplaces for more than 3 years, I am still the proud owner of Level 2 accounts on Fiverr and a Level X account on SEOClerks. That's a level you reach by being picked manually by the staff, so I was obviously rather good at the things I did. Long story short, I started to focus on SEOClerks instead of Fiverr and I decided to try something entirely new. I launched a brand building business which became so successful so I started to work full time and I also published a handful of different ebooks/products to generate even more leads and sales.

While this might sound like something truly life-changing, it was nothing like rainbows and sunshine on a daily basis. It was hard work, stressful and lots of anxiety. To work without any form of safety net such as a monthly paycheck is horrifying. I had to rely on incoming orders to afford to live, and even though some months were greater than others, it was also rainy days so to speak.

However, due to this experience and due to how I had to work for a living, literally, I ignored everything I had heard about cryptocurrencies. I made business with money. Real money I could spend in a store or money I could pay my rent with. Some bogus toy-coin wasn't something I had time to play around with.

Fast-forward a few short years and I eventually stumbled across Steemit. A co-worker of mine told me about it and as someone always interested in making something extra, I dived straight into it.

  • Steem, SBD?
  • Crypto?

This was definitely not my cup of tea, but I knew how to make posts. I had done that for years and if I could earn something extra for sharing stuff on Steemit... Well, why not?

I won't go into any major details about this, but one could say that I had great results. I was lucky when I joined Steemit in 2016 and as someone who had zero interest in crypto, and someone who loved hard cash, real money, I obviously cashed out more or less everything I earned. I used Bittrex and sold whatever I could. Anything I earned made my life easier in some ways, so I didn't care about the price or value of the tokens. I cared about having more money in my bank account, and I was eager to cash out as much as possible before this whole thing eventually vanished..

Yeah, I was certain of the fact that Steemit would crash and burn because how on earth are people willing to pay me hundreds of dollars for a single article? - That's literally the mindset I had. I didn't understand how things worked and I was not about to find out either, because I loved the fact that I could use my earnings in real life. I could treat myself with something extra in my daily life due to the money I made off of my content on Steemit. I was not about to miss out on that opportunity...

This Is What I Want To Talk About:


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I joined Steemit in July 2016, I was lucky and I cashed out more or less everything I earned. What I noticed when I looked at my history on Bittrex earlier, was that I had cashed out more than 5 bitcoin between 2016/07/22 and 2016/09/21. That's 5+ BTC in 2 months.

I couldn't find all the transfers but I found some of them:

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I sold my BTC through some weird anonymous website where I sent BTC and got money to my PayPal account after several hours. I had no idea what I was doing but I didn't care. All I cared about was to up my balance on my bank account. The amount didn't matter, as long as I managed to increase my balance.

  • Which I did.

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During that time, around late July, Bitcoin was worth about 650 USD. I later on realized that the place where I sold my BTC for money to my paypal account was some sort of "fraud", even though I never got scammed. I always got money for my bitcoins, but I didn't receive the full value for it. I could obviously not do anything about it at that time and I actually didn't care much about it, as I still was able to get money for content I always had been sharing for free elsewhere.

The taste of free money is awesome, but then I realize that I would have had more than 5 BTC today if I had kept my cool, done some research and if I had not ignored cryptocurrencies to begin with. I don't even have to spell it out for you.. You know what BTC are worth today.

If I had sold those BTC today, I would've had 75% of the money that is required to be a millionaire in Sweden. That would've been life-changing in my world.

Have You Done Something Similar?
For How Long Will You Hold?

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9 comments
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Imagine having 5 BTC at this current prices, oh boy! You're damn rich but what do we know? Ignorance is something and if you look around so many people still see Crypto and blockchain in the light you used to see it in the past. I guess it's saddening when you look back at 2016 because at then it made no sense to get free money after the torture places like fiverr put us through.

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That is very true. I was ignorant and it eventually led to me selling 5+ BTC for pennies compared to the value we see today. However it gave me a better understanding of things, I saw potential and I became interested in crypto so I guess it's just all part of my learning curve.

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Yeah I guess it's all part of the learning curve really, now you've grown quite well and understand how it eventually works. Hopefully the future can be better

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The future is looking bright, it's only a matter of time before we see green numbers in the charts for both LEO and Hive.

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Sad story.
But... this can get even worse.
Imagine reading the same in November 2021.
When BTC ATH's are recorded numerous times in a SIX digit area.

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Yeah, onwards and upwards. It's all part of my learning curve. It's not the end of the world or anything, but I wouldn't have been sad to have those 5 BTC today.. ;)

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A friend of mine generously offered to donate me 5 BTC because he was so into crypto and because he wanted the network to grow. At the time, the total value of the coins was somewhere between €500 and €1000. I thanked him for his generosity but turned the offer down because his finances were in much worse shape than mine at the time. I just couldn't accept that valuable a gift from anyone who was so much worse off than I was.

Had I kept the coins in a cold wallet, you know how much money they'd be worth now, and this is only the beginning of what I believe will turn out to be a violent parabolic run to a six-figure price point at the end of next year. I cannot really fault myself for not stacking up on BTC back when I was first introduced to it in 2013 because it's counterproductive to beat yourself up for past ignorance. Bitcoin's value proposition is much more clear by now than it was between 2013 and 2016.

But what I really regret is not looking into altcoins in early 2017 instead of Bitcoin. Hell, buying a couple of hundred euros worth of STEEM around the time I was introduced to it just to start off my blogging career would've yielded stunning returns by early 2018. Also, Ethereum was only worth something like $30 a coin on the first months of 2017. Buying a little Ether just to try it out in 2015 would've yielded life-changing gains by the summer of 2017 let alone January 2018.

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