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How Crypto and Blockchain Technology has Impacted my Personal Finance

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@abh12345
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My response to the initiative posted recently by @theycallmedan which asks "How has Crypto and Blockchain Technology Impacted your Personal Finance?"

If you plan to take part, make sure you are posting from https://leofinance.io/

I'll start by answering the question in ten words or less:

Very little so far, but I live in hope!


In 2011 I bought what was at the time, a pretty hot gaming rig. Neon blue lights, huge fans and two graphics cards 'cross-fired' for, when I finally got the damn things working, some pretty slick gameplay. I let the local store build the machine for me and on walking out of the shop the owner asked me:

Are you going to be mining Bitcoin with that?

I laughed. What are they, 2 cents each? Naa, I'm going to be playing Battlefield 2 and chatting up girls in video chat rooms. Epic fail.

Move on to the beginning of 2013 and following a nice pay-rise and back-pay, I've got a little money to invest somewhere and chat to a school friend who is doing well as a financial advisor. I mention investing, and Bitcoin, and he laughs stating there are no regulations behind Bitcoin, and he wouldn't touch it with anyone's money. I choose to invest in some stocks, some of which (the ones I chose) I still hold today at around 90% down on investment.

It's now 2016 and following a failed investment in a cheap jewelry shop on an Island in the Balearic Sea, I have another small bundle of cash to invest, and most of that goes into chasing loses on the stocks mentioned above - throwing good money after bad I think it's called?! I did however create a Steem account on my mobile before posting once, not really understanding what was going on, and then landing a job which took over my time - until early 2017...

I'd been following @stephenkendal (where is he now?) on Twitter for a few years as he was drawing pretty graphs relating to some of the stocks I held. Around the beginning of 2017 he branched out to Crypto and I saw STEEM was scoring well on his metrics, which reminded me I had an account on this blockchain. I invested a little (moving ETH/LTC from Coinbase via Blocktrades to STEEM), wrote a few posts around work commitments, and started learning more about the technology and the characters on the network.

The bull that charged for most of 2017 before finally being skewered in the first weeks of 2018 was a real eye-opener to cryptocurrency. The money some accounts were earning, sometimes via methods I didn't agree with, was insane, and I too earned a fair amount (for me) over a few months at the peak of the last cycle. Enough actually to cover a relocation to Reunion Island with an ex-girlfriend.

Good views at the top, and a long way downnnnn - link

She had found a teaching job there, and my plan was to chill, drink plenty of local rum, and blog. I would say I took about $5000 out of Steem over this period, and although the job/relationship/etc didn't work out, we did get to enjoy sightseeing on this island and in Mauritius before calling it a day and flying back to base.

maa FATE is yet to be decided - Credit to @osm0sis - link

So, I did get to enjoy some of the Crypto earned during the last wave, and not just watch it all fall back to the lows of previous years.

Back at base, in the sunshine with cheap living, I managed to continue the life of scraping by off crypto for another year and a half before finally throwing in the towel and heading back to the UK to get a 'real' job. I certainly wasn't free, but it felt good to be writing and producing what I wanted on my own schedule.

The timing on the return to the UK was about right though and it allowed me to recoup some of the STEEM cashed out, and add a fair amount to it, most of which is now in HIVE tokens.

When it all went to shit on Steem, most of my tokens were moved over to HIVE but I did manage to resist a 100% swap and kept some back. Although, if only I'd waited a week and not sold half a BTC to power up 25000 HIVE. (BTC has doubled and Hive has halved since that trade)

Anyway, it's this small collection of (mainly) BTC/ETH/LTC that has been growing nicely over the past few months. I'm not getting excited yet though, as HIVE is still yet to get out of the blocks and is by far the largest holding. LEO and Splinterlands cards are second and third - I can't imagine what my PFA friend would say if I presented this to him!

As with other posts on this initiative, I guess it's more of a story of my journey so far, and not so much about personal finance. This finance is looking better on paper, but what I'd really like is to at some point convert some of it to bricks and mortar. A complete cash-out today would be a fair start on that, perhaps the deposit and fees paid for, but I am hopeful that holding steady for now could deliver a lot more next year, and so that is plan right now.

Cheers,

Asher


If you are not a member of Hive just yet, click the link below to connect through one of the many interfaces and start earning some tokens by telling your cryptocurrency journey so far.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta