My crypto journey has started about a decade ago when I heard about bitcoin from a friend of mine. He himself was not invested at the time, but he was curious about it hence shared the information about bitcoin while we were mainly discussing about making money passively. Frankly speaking, my first impression was "What a brilliant way to scam people by making them exchange their money with what they claim to be digital assets!" A couple of years passed by, and I completely forgot about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
My first bitcoin purchase happened in 2012 on COINBASE while there were heavy restrictions and limits as to how much money could be spent to buy bitcoin. I had a few other options to purchase bitcoin from, but Coinbase came up on the top of my Google search with the keyword ‘bitcoin purchase’ and it seemed somehow more legitimate than other sites, some of which later turned out to be scammers. At such an early stage of development and not so many people even know what bitcoin is, buying bitcoins surely required some guts and risk taking. Not to mention that the price volatility was significantly worse than how it is presently. I ended up buying 5.2 bitcoins (I think the price was somewhere around $2200 per bitcoin at the time). Imagine I kept that 5.2 btc with patience till now with the initial investment of $11,440, it would be well worth over $120,000 now.
Nowadays you can easily find videos and articles online about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and even on TV; however, the situation was so much different than now back in the days, and my confidence level gradually decreased as I was not able to find any major news about how the society and people’s perceptions towards bitcoin changed. After holding the purchased bitcoin for a little over 6 months, I sold all of it to take approximately 10% of profits from my initial investment. After taking a thousand dollars in profit, I was fairly happy that I did not lose any money but rather made some money off of it (which I think was the silliest investment move I have ever made). Since I got rid of all my bitcoin possession, I did not bother to look back at it for the next year or so.
Stay tuned for My Crypto Journey #2 (Active Bitcoin Trade)!
