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Here's the introduction to a tale of wonder.
I fell asleep at the side of a river and somehow woke up with a mortgage and a day job. The world changed and nothing makes as much sense as it used to any more. All the rules I learned as a little girl no longer help me get by in the world. I do my best, we all do don't we? Try and be kind, pay our bills on time, look forward to the weekend, all the things we do. Then a little story hopped by. A story about a friend of a friend "doing well in crypto" and I confess, dear reader, I scoffed. But the story winked at me and caught my curiosity. I followed it, one question at a time, one tantalising answer at a time. Hop. "It isn't all nefarious". Hop. "Yes the money is real, he bought a new car". Hop. "It is easy to get started, here, open the app store on your phone...". Hop, hop, hop.
So it began. I put aside my usual hobbies of needlework, novel writing and gardening, and watched about a hundred and fifty million videos (with a search bar open to decode all the acronyms and jargon) and started piecing it together. This is a whole other world. You probably already know that, I can sense you nodding. After all, right now, this place is a little hard to find and you were already here! But if I can find it, others can too. I hope so. It is amazing what's happening, how cool and fun it all is. There's so much creativity and innovation, it's exciting! I haven't been this excited in decades.
I live in Australia (that's a whole different type of weird too), in the sub-tropics so I don't really own any socks and none of our windows are ever really closed (we have mild winters). I'm fifty by the way. It's older than I'd like but not so old that I've given up. For my birthday we played golf and got a puppy. He's nearly ten months old now (he still chews anything he can get hold of). His name is (@benthedaxie on Insta if you feel like it) and he's the star of our household. I'm rubbish at a lot of things, but I enjoy writing. So I thought I might write about this journey and share my confusions and fumbles along the way. The explaining things will be in another (more structured) blog, I hope it is useful to other newbies as they come along. I've sure been grateful to the people who've already helped me along. This blog is more for our entertainment and as a kind of journal.
Day one was Monday 13 September 2021. For some reason my notes are mostly about wallets! Hot and cold wallets seem to have been the big talking point for us. There are a lot of arrows to things like "seed!? Keep !" LOLZ. There's also a note in a box "printed money has a serial number." Yeah. I guess that's one of those things you know but don't consider. I remember how that day I told that little factoid to every one I met. Not a single person was interested. At all. But for me that was the moment the lightbulb went on and I was able to build a bridge between the banking system I know and use in the fiat world and the (then) essentially imaginary world of cryptos. With that concept, Bitcoin (and the cryptoverse) stopped being a fairytale to me.
As I write this it is the evening of 30 September here, end of the month. I haven't kept good records of my first trades. honestly it was a storm of button pushing and confusion and later going "Pretty sure I lost about $200 yesterday." I was only going to put $200 in to start with "no need to go crazy while we're learning." Yeah, well ... let's just say that I learnt about fees and gas the hard way!
portfolio" (such a grandiose word for so tiny and pitiful a thing) tonight is 45%BTC, 45%ETH, 5%SUSHI and 5%ADA.
Thanks so much for spending some of your time here. I'd love to hear from you. What were your first two weeks like? Do you remember your lightbulb moment? What was intimidating at first? (Hot Wallets! Feel the Fear!) What's your favourite wonderful thing?
