AskSteemit: What is something you wish you had known earlier about cryptocurrencies?
Hey everyone!
There are a lot of new people joining Steem lately and so many in here that have been around for a while, many also before Steem existed.
I personally did a lot of mistakes in the past when I stumbled upon cryptocurrencies. I used to mine a lot of GPU only coins in the beginning with a few GPU's, I knew that many of them would go up in value but compared to many of the GPU-farms it felt like I was getting too little daily returns. I wanted to increase it in any way I could, back then there were no proof-of-brain coins like Steem today, you either had to invest your fiat money or spend a lot of electricity and wear-and-tear on your GPU's to mine them.
There was of course also trading. Exchanges made it possible to trade your way up by costing very little to trade from coins to coins (in most cases 0.2% per trade). Boy was I not prepared at how stressful trading would be though. Over time I learned that the less often I traded the more I had the advantage to increase my value in crypto thinking that most of the currencies I was trading with were going to go up long term. That kind of removed a risk and gave you an advantage, but before that I used to trade coins daily. Small profit changes and you'd take the profit and put it onto another coin. The waiting was the worst part, many didn't move for weeks/months - you often felt the need to trade a coin at a loss cause you thought another one would go up short-term to make up for it.
It would have been nice if many of the coins were able to be mined in other ways such as by providing work or a service for them, but as someone that couldn't code it felt impossible. I really think that in this regard Steem often gets underappreciated, here you can earn by providing something of value to the community. It doesn't even always have to be contribution as long as you are good at creating content, drawing attention to yourself by other stakeholders and/or just being a good commenter - you had a chance to be rewarded for your time. That is what got me hooked on Steem ever since I joined and why I have high hopes for this currency in the future.
I figured out way too late that the best method of growing your investments was just to hold. Take profits when you receive a lot of them and other than that just hold it out. This was of course before Tether existed - so converting to fiat made it a lot more complicated if you wanted to just keep your profits for some time to buy back later. Things have changed a lot since then.
What is something you wish you had known about cryptocurrencies earlier?
I wish i knew that it is hard to earn... I quit my job and I can't sustain myself from cryptocurrency as well as I did with my fulltime job. ;_; ... But ah well, perhaps soon or later.
Hello. Sorry to hear about this. You shouldn't have rushed to quit your job. You should have combined the two to see how it works.
As for me, I hired a manager to oversee my business wile I concentrate on Steemit.
This is a new industry that's is yet to be completely accepted globally. So people should not be carried away in earnest. Don't give up your regular job because of cryptocurrency unless you have already made so much money that remain on your usual job is seen as uselessness.
Thanks
@eurogee of @euronation community
if you can, everything is a matter of perseverance and hard work
Quitting your job was a great idea but it was probably way too early, one step at a time! I work freelance and do less and less work but only after I’m able to make up for it.
I've came in contact with crypto currencies around mid 2014, a little late really and i started to follow them closely, technology wise, since i've always been interested in tech and i'm a programmer in training right now, but i didn't really have money to invest into cryptos back them sadly.
Then, thankfully in early 2017 when bitcoin was around 800$~ i managed to get 0.3 btc, which is actually a lot in my country and started trading and getting some profits, then the amazing bull run of late 2017 came and while searching for coins to get into i found steem and joined the platform :-D (a great decision so far if you ask me) and that leads us to today i guess... surviving the bear run with a smile!
I wish i had invested in Ripple when it was at 0.01c :-P even thought i don't really trust them because they are stinky banksters it would have been a nice profit!
I came in contact this year in Jan 😥
I really wish I had known before (at least about steem) . But hopefully I'll be able to look back and say I was around when steem was just 2$
We are still the early adopters! Not a lot of users will be able to say they where able to get some Steem @ 2$ lol especially with hiveminds and SMTs coming.
wish i had known about crypto when they were giving bitcoins with android apps for free, wish i had collected some... nowadays i must be a millionaire
@acidyo Similar Stuff with the trading. I would move in and out of altcoins too much in November to jan and fomo alot.
I later decided to pick a few coins and not touch them at all. Keeping them in cold storage on my nano ledger hardware wallet has worked at this and thinking long-term. I also started writing altcoin reviews on steemit to reinforce my own research and understanding of the projects that I invest in as well as my commitment to and excitement for them.
You can't get rich overnight in crypto, and my timeline during the mania was that I would. You need to HODL for at least 2-3 years + to start making substantial gains. At the end of the day there is a million times more opportunity to get rich in this market then in traditional financial markets though if you do some research and pick sound projects prepared to ride the lows and highs and wait it out.
This Bear Market has been a great period for all of us to sober a little and actually start doing the research and reading whitepapers. As the market becomes more competitive and saturated it is important to pick the best projects with the best teams, business plans, marketing strategy and working platforms/development. There is a lot of junk in the market today and the bear market has flushed out a lot of the shit projects as well as the weak hands.
Exactly! I lost over $5000 in FOREX after building it from $500 investment. I think FOREX is highly manipulated.
@eurogee
Owk I am quite excited about this right now coz you just made reference to something I had always wanted to ask but didn't find the right person or right time to ask until now.
I have seen in one of. @surfyogi's post where he made mention of using lots of electricity to mine bitcoin back then and infact, the untiliy providers had to question him because they felt he was using much more electricity than required for those living in that area. And I also saw in one of @taskmaster4450's post some time ago where he talked about the movement of a bitcoin mining plant to Malta or something like that because those in the town were complaining of the excessive use of electricity by the plant (don't know if I am using the right terms here coz I am quite confused about this).
Now my question is, when one talks about mining crypto or bitcoin using electricity, what does it actually mean? How is that possible? What are GPUs? I am new to crypto and infact steemit opened my eyes to the world of crypto so these things tend to get me confused when I hear about them on the blockchain...
Thanks for your anticipated valid response.
GPUs are graphic processing units,simply grabhic cards which are used for gaming and graphic designing work,cgi, animation etc and coin mining is still a mystery for me too.would love a reply. How electricity is related hmm i am not sure but i think because of the amount of electricity powerful gpus uses and the cooling system it requires, the pc needs to be a beast to handle coin mining,its not the job of a daily ordinary pcs.
What I truly wished I had known, after early attempts at mining, was that this would be a long-term ride and it would be a more stressful rollercoaster due to the constant fluctuations which often happened for no reason.
Also, I wished I had known earlier that this wouldn't be an opportunity to invest in and be tied down for a long time with investment. When joining the new money world, we decided to join with a classic fund setup of 8 years. I think the investment ride would have been much more fun if shorter sprints, something like 3 years. We would definitely have acted differently if. I understand our situation is slightly different because we initially approached tokens like traditional (startup) investing but we didn't really know better.
Some more years to go. It's all gonna be fine, keep calm and HODL, right?
My big lesson was that I'm poor, so I should not do the same things as people who have hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more).
All of the HODL talk is amazing, but for me, I honestly wish I had put more money back into USD when I had the chance. I ended up selling a lot of Steem Power at low prices to pay necessary bills. If I had sold some steem and just put money in my savings account back when prices were high, I could've avoided some financial stress now.
From now on I'm going to reduce to a stable 1,000 tokens of SP powered up and convert the rest to USD to pay debts. It's more reasonable for financial safety this way.
I think people should understand when they are in the bear market and when everything is about to explode.
If you are in the bear market - it's super profitable to trade. Because it's jumping up and down...
But If you see lot's of good incoming news - It's good to just let your crypto lay there and not touch it! Before it reaches new heights.
I've turtled some of mine too and not touching them at least for a year.
But I still trade time after time, just not forget how to do it :d
While I never actually got into the technical side like you did, I do wish I would've taken out a huge loan to buy as much bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin as I could when I started back in 2015.
My wife often agrees with me about that :/
@shayne
That’s a really easy thing to say looking back but there is no way you could have known for sure that you would have made money. It would have been a pretty foolish move, I’d be thankful for the brains to have not done that, even if it would have paid off. Or if you disagree, do it right now because it’s essentially the same kind of risk.
I’m using that feeling to motivate myself to work a little harder so I can get some more crypto before the next explosion....without going into debt!
That's why they say hindsight is 20-20.
Of course it's not a risk I would take now, just as it wasn't one I would've taken at the time. In the context of looking back at past history, however, yes, I wish I would have taken out a massive loan to get my hands in as much crypto as possible and lived in a van on the streets until December of last year lol
I wish I had known how to hodl back in 2016 instead of just withdrawing as soon as it doubled my investment. :P