Since 2016 after being forced to close my magic trick company by the suppliers enforcing a pricing policy that priced me out of the market after 13 years in the trade I was in a bad place, I was facing the possibility of bankruptcy which would be 100% worse due to the arrival of my daughter in 2013.

With the help of my partner I managed to struggle on but things were getting harder by the beginning of 2017. That’s when I remembered I had something stashed away that I last saw as menial and not worth much at all.

Quick Flashback

Back in 2012 after much back and forth with a crypto nerd friend I finally decided to get on the crypto bandwagon, in the guise of purchasing a bitcoin miner. Now I did actually purchase the miner in 2012 from Butterfly Labs (Guffaw) for a little price of $175 (I wasn’t that convinced it would make money)... and after much worry, about the validity of the company I finally did get the miner about a year later in 2013. I fired it up and managed to mine 1.13 bitcoins in a short while (btw customs kept the miner for 4 weeks due to not being able to identify the item, this cost me about 1 bitcoin in mining time grrr). At the time this mined coin was worth just about what I payed for the miner and the difficulty raised so sharply that running the miner further wasn’t economical, so I put the miner on a shelf and left the bitcoin on a wallet for a rainy day!

Back to the Future

Fast forward to March the 3rd 2017 a few days before my daughter’s birthday. I was annoyed that I couldn’t buy her a gift; i had to again rely on my partner to be the better parent!

I saw on the tinterweb that Bitcoin was trending, straight way my mind thrombled the words "cash that thing"... That thing was 1.3 Bitcoin, stored away on an old PC. So on march the 3rd 2017 I decided to fire up the old machine and open my wallet. At the time Bitcoin was priced at an average of $900 to $1000, not a bad haul for a $175 investment. Then my crypto nerd friend stepped in once again telling me about alt coins (he had said about alt coins in the past but in my mind I was thinking "if there is more than one then all will be devalued"... how wrong i was), anyway I digress, he mentioned about crypto exchanges and that there are many alts. So I though, why not have a look and see what this world of mystery had to offer. I was inundated with a shed load of abbreviations that I had no clue about.

Now at this point I could have cashed in my bitcoin but after a YouTube marathon about alt coins I learned about Ethereum. I liked what I heard so thought; why not try sending the 0.3 btc to an exchange and see if I can make a bit more. I immediately saw a large increase in my dollar worth (within a day) but I still had to cash in my BTC to get my daughter a present. Problem was that what I didn’t know, you need to identify yourself and wait for the big wigs to authorise you before you can withdraw your money. I was scuppered. Turns out you need to submit all sorts of identification documents in order to get authorised but that’s not all, it takes time. As stated on coinbases website it should take about 2 days. But I got in the crypto exchange market at the wrong time!

Turns out it took a little longer to verify my account so that I could withdraw my money, 3 months to be precise due to the massive influx of new buyers. Now the downside of this was I didn’t get to buy my baby girl her birthday present but if I had withdrawn my money I would have had about $2000 in total.... As I couldn’t withdraw I actually ended up worth $14,000! All from the one little black cube from butterfly labs.

So now I have a new plan. To use my crypto investment to pay my mortgage in full within the next 10 years (although at the current rate I may be able to do this within the next 2) don’t get me wrong I’m not ploughing all my savings and spare cash into Crypto, instead I’m sticking with whatever comes from that initial $175 mining investment. (Oh and on my daughters next birthday, now I have the ability I shall be making up for previous years lack of presents from daddy and will cash in a ‘little’ ;)

A big thank you for getting me in the crypto world to master Ruzzi and an even bigger thank you to my better half for helping me so much through the tough financial times, as Del Boy Trotter says “this time next year, we WILL be millionaires!”