First Interactions with Crypto

My first interaction with crypto was back in 2013, I and a friend found out about bitcoin mining. We didn't really know what bitcoin was, but we understood that if we give our computing power to this system via a mining pool, we get some bitcoin. So back then we did some math and realized that our energy cost is way higher than what we get out of mining. So, we mined a few days, since it seemed fun, but essentially I thought all I did was stealing money from my parents.

Back then I didn't realize the potential of Crypto

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The Darknet

For some reason, I have always been interested in drugs. I learned that alcohol is a really bad substance at the age of 14-15, although you can have a lot of fun with it, you feel like shit after drinking and I was feeling a little more stupid after I drank.

One day after a Friend of mine came back from a year in America and told me all kinds of stories, I opened my mind to drugs. My friend, took some shrooms, he didn't take an amount, where he could have felt anything, but that caught my interest.
I am a person, that is using Google for everything. I just love to search for information.
So back then I found a lot of information about drugs and found out some really interesting things.

According to a good amount of research, Alkohol the drug I didn't even know as a drug was the worst of them. The most harmful drug seemed to be the most used one, this made me curious.
I heard a lot of bad stuff about drugs and my whole view on them got shattered by the things I found out. By the end of the research, I knew I would want to try Acid (LSD) and maybe MDMA one day. I was talking to my friends about it and one of them told me about the darknet. You were able to send drugs to your home basically without any risk due to postal secrecy. We as naive teenagers made use of that way to early, so when I was 16 I overdosed on 360µg Acid, but that is a story for another day.
I experience the freedom of crypto and learned how to use Bitcoin

Disclaimer: I am not promoting the use of drugs. I am just telling a story about someone.

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Investing

When I got 18 years old, my parents gave me a bank account with 1800€. They always told me I should only use it when I really needed it and that I am supposed to be really careful with it.
So because I already knew about Bitcoin, I found about Ethereum really fast, it took me weeks to fully understand it.
This is when I realized cryptocurrencies are extremely interesting and may be part of our future.
I still didn't invest, because I was reading a lot about, how it could be a Ponzi scheme and the DAO hack scared me.

So, I always had huge goals in life and still have. I never wanted to be forced to work in any job, just because I needed the money. I always knew I wanted financial freedom, because of that I thought a lot about money and came to the conclusion I should invest my money.
I was willing to invest 1.2k and despite the fact that it was almost all of my money, it is not a lot of money. You can earn 1.2k rather fast and because of that, I was willing to take a bigger risk/reward ratio.

Back then, out of my view, Crypto was perfect for that and after I had done some thinking, I wanted to buy Ether around 10$. This was at the beginning of February last year.
The problem, I didn't have any way to buy crypto and the verification on Kraken took forever, so by the time I was able to invest my money, Ether already had a huge Bullrun and was sitting around 40$.
This was how I got into other coins. I was thinking something that already multiplied by 4 can't sustain this momentum and was searching for other currencies with bigger growth potential.
This is how I found out about Steem and realized the full potential of crypto, which I will discuss in my next Post.

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I hope you enjoyed reading this story

~ ßears

Image sources:
Drug harm scale: https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm
potential quote: http://www.inspirationalquotesimg.com/095908/you-have-the-potential-to-make-beautiful-things-yes-you