My Summer of Crypto

It was almost one year ago that I purchased my first (fraction of a) Bitcoin. June 2017. I was living and working in China. A friend of mine in Germany, a craft beer enthusiast, told me of his plans to debut a few of his latest home brews at a small festival we would both be attending in July.

I read the small advertisement he posted on the event’s webpage. Prepayments for the open-bar were preferred, to help him with the initial costs of brewing and transporting all the beer. He left his German bank account details and a few cryptic addresses labeled “BTC,” “ETH,” and “LTC.”

I was happy to support my friend’s venture, so I decided to prepay. But unfortunately I didn’t have a German bank account, and transfers from either my American or Chinese bank accounts would be both expensive and complicated.

“Do you have PayPal?” I asked.

“Unfortunately I don’t use PayPal anymore,” he answered. “But it’s ok. You can just pay in cash at the camp.”

“You know, this is the first crypto payment I’ve ever received!”

I was excited as well. I had heard about Bitcoin in 2013, and nearly bought some in 2014 to send as to another friend, a writer of e-books who wrote for free but accepted Bitcoin donations. Unfortunately the time the barrier of entry had prevented me from doing so, and the idea of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general remained relegated to the peripheries of my mind. Until now.

It had worked so perfectly. “Here’s my address.” “Sending the transaction now.” “Received.” And we could both see the digital proof of the transaction’s success.

(A quick aside — the Bitcoin I purchased to pay my friend is worth around $125 at current prices. It turns out that was an expensive beer!)

Now, a year later, those three letters, ICO, causes many in the crypto space to look upon a project warily, immediately wondering about scams or ill-conceived coins or tokens. But in mid-2017 it was a magical term. We were fresh off of Brave’s BAT ICO, which had raised tens of millions of dollars in mere seconds. The returns were said to be almost inconceivable.

So what was this Binance? A new exchange. That sounded good to me, as I’d had to resort thus far to a combination of exchanges, none of which suited me. In China I had used the now-defunct Yunbi, which had worked well for purchasing ANS (NEO), but left me with a feeling of trepidation with each transaction. Bittrex was another option, but the Reddit forums at the time were full of stories of inaccessible or frozen funds, or lost money during withdrawals (especially of the indivisible NEO), not to mention the high fees.

Binance’s website was scarce, but their white paper made sense to me — a token that would give us a discount on fees — and again, that magical ICO phrase. So I did what any other naïve (and, maybe, lucky) investor would do, and sent over my Ethereum.

July through September of 2017 saw me traveling often. From Asia briefly back home to the US, and then bouncing around Europe for a couple months. All the while, crypto was on my mind.

In Hong Kong I journeyed up to Victoria Peak to admire the views of the city before settling into a hipster cafe to continue reading the Bitcoin white paper.

During the camping event in Germany — while enjoying some of that Bitcoin-financed home brew — I was sitting by a campfire when another early adopter friend of mine came running: “Did you see? Bitcoin exploded!” I logged into Binance on my phone to check the price, and grinned at him. “We’re rich!” I joked. Little did I know, this little 10% increase was nothing compared to what we would see over the next six months.

Hiking around the hills of Lisbon’s old town, ducking into a cafe every 30 minutes to escape the August heat, I drank an espresso or a beer and loaded up Binance again. This was the time of the no-fee trading on their BNB markets, so I was determined to practice my swing-trading. In the course of an after I would drink two coffees, two beers, reach three different viewpoints of the gorgeous city, and make ten or twenty trades — sometimes feeling like a genius, sometimes an idiot.

Wherever in the world I moved to, crypto was becoming a hotter and hotter topic. News was breaking daily, and the 24/7 markets were constantly on the move. Binance became my constant companion, a direct link to those green and red candles that both told me what my investments were worth and told me where to look to find the very latest news. If I saw a coin had increased or decreased in value by 20 or 30% in the past 24 hours (a common occurrence), I would quickly check their Reddit or bitcointalk thread to see what was going on.

The summer concluded the way it began, with that classic combination of beer and Bitcoin. Another friend and I had met in Brussels and spent some time sampling the many delicious beers to be found there. We had been keeping track of who paid for what, and on the date of my departure flight it turned out that I happened to have paid a higher amount. Again living in different countries, a bank transfer was not ideal, and I had no need for euros in the near future.

“No problem,” I told him. “You can pay me in Bitcoin.”

It was only three months after my first purchase of Bitcoin, but already I felt like an expert. I could discuss and debate the benefits of blockchain over a traditional database. I knew the different features of most of the top 10 coins and had opinions on most of their viability. I knew the ins and outs of how to interact with the crypto space, from news to purchasing and trading. And even my day trading skills had grown from a near zero to… well, I’m still no expert, but they improved, thanks to my near-daily dose of Binance charts.

Of course, that was just the beginning. Since that summer I’ve seen numerous ups and downs, felt elation and fear, FOMO and FUD. But the key is that I have continued learning along the way.

As the anniversary of my first Bitcoin purchase approaches, I can’t help but wonder where the summer’s journey will lead this time around.

(Are you interested in investing in Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies? See my other post here for my thoughts.)

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