My crypto journey: I made a few screw ups (so you don’t have to, hopefully!)

Hey y’all, I figured I’d share my crypto story and some tips I’ve learned along the way. I got into crypto in the summer of 2017 and my main investment was LTC. I thought I was too late for Bitcoin (spoiler: I wasn’t) so getting the silver to BTCs gold seemed like a good idea. Then in fall/winter my LTC nearly 8x’d. I was checking charts every 10 minutes, I figured “if I could do this with one coin, why can’t I do it with more?” So, I took my ltc and traded them for a ton of different coins I “researched” (on Reddit): BTC, ETH, ARK, NEO, VEN(now VET), XRB (now nano), REQ, OMG, and ICX. In December-January all of these things went certifiably bonkers. My 4 figure investment was high 5 figures and I was glued to charts, thinking about how my 200 IQ will let me retire in like 1-2 years. I didn’t wanna lock in gains either because “I’m not paying 30% of tax on this, that’s crazy.”

Now, as most of you know, the 2018-2019 bear market was brutal. I went from being in the green to being underwater on damn near everything. My portfolio plummeted back down into the low 4 figure range and most of those alts died or never truly recovered to those previous highs. Still I held some (VET, NEO, nano, OMG) and consolidated the dead ones (ARK, ICX, REQ) into ETH. The more research I did, the more I became a believer in ETH and bought whenever I felt was a good entry point for years.

Then the market started to change and pick up in 2019-2020. An uptrend developed but a nasty new FUD was going around called COVID-19. I thought about flocking to stablecoins for a few days and finally wound up tethering at the low and lost several ETH. Still, I continued to accumulate and eventually the alts I still held started to rebound as everything did during the recent bull. This time I knew better and set exit points for prices and went green on almost everything (fuck you, OMG). I gambled on a few micro caps and when they did their 5-10x I didn’t get greedy and swung it back into ETH. Now here I am with my portfolio being 75% ETH/BTC and the rest being a select few alts.

Things I’ve learned:

•Reddit alone is not Research. This place and coin specific subreddits are useful but are usually echo chambers. Getting on a GitHub/telegram/slack and looking at the teams white paper or professional website are great tools.

•Over-investing and over-diversifying maximize risk and diminish returns. If you want to create most gains, go heavy into a few coins you really believe in.

•HODL doesn’t work for everything. Outside of BTC/ETH, the top 10 has been a merry go round for the last few years and there’s no such thing as a sure bet in the space.

•Make price point markers for yourself and stick to them! It will be hard but it will alleviate the chronic checking of charts and locking in profits is never bad. Ruminating on coulda woulda shouldas will drive you nuts.

•Finally, diversify your assets. Being all in on crypto is like rolling up to the casino and putting everything down on one roulette number. Having other investments and sources of passive income will let you stomach the risk of crypto much more easily.