A story of greatness

This is a story of a boy named Stuart, a young crypto entrepreneur with big dreams of becoming rich.

Stuart was a young lad. Freshman year of college he was desperate to get money invested in the internet. The internet was like a parent to him, it taught him almost everything he knew. Stuart knew he wanted to make money through the internet. Stuart's friend in his dorm started making nearly $100-$200 a day from his wordpress created minecraft scam site. I know, right? (He would promise minecraft add-ons that would force an endless stream of surveys, that little kids LOVED doing)

Stuart was jealous. He wanted financial freedom from his parents having always been reliant upon them. He knew no way of doing it. Stu studied for weeks, familiarizing himself with wordpress and learning the basics of SEO. He created a couple of websites, a few of which were attached to his friends domain. They didn't really go anywhere, he never made any profit.
Then one night on a stoned rampage of the random subreddit button, he found Bitcoin subreddit. He had heard of it through people who had used it to buy drugs on the darkweb. He was still a bit of a late bloomer, joining the cryptocurrency world in the start of May. Invest in Ripple, Stuart thought, seeing the prices soar higher and higher, and having much higher margins to grow. Bitcoin was in a $1000 bubble ready to burst and ready to feed the altcoins. He put enormous research in to Ripple and how it can be of great use to future banking systems, and he just KNEW it was going to the moon. He took out $200 and boy did it (boom).

Ripple soared with greatness, growing to insane heights. Stuart, reaching nearly $1000 on his incredible journey, hoarded XRP but found it was only fair he could have a bit of fun with some of it. So he made is first mistake, and he started gambling at mBitCasino. Having played a little bit of Blackjack, he thought he could make some easy money and possibly even impress his parents. BOY was this man wrong! I can't say I remember a lot of that night, or that week, so i will disclose there was alcohol involved. So there goes say... $500 of it.

At this point Stuart was pretty sad, despite still being up from where he began. He asked his dad if he would like to invest, who said no, though was kind enough to lend Stuart $500.

WOW! A free $500 to invest right back in to crypto. Boy was he grateful.
He knew where it needed to go, too. Ripple had a little bit of a dip, and he knew it was gonna go back up. How could it not?

At this point Stuey needed to tell everyone. Ripple was a big opportunity. It had one of the most clear use cases of any crypto, and if it were globally adopted it would go through the roof. He became a frequent user of their subreddit, which was entirely hodl memes.
He also told his good friend, who is likely making smarter decisions than I am now.

Anyways, Stuart kept buying! Ripple is going down, he still feels it's a great opportunity! He got a job, started making decent cash and instantly rebuying in crypto.
He started diversifying too, buying a few monero, litecoin, and ethereum. But Ripple was still the main squeeze.

Around mid June he had maybe 5000 XRP. At one point his portfolio was nearly $3000!!!!!!

Then Ripple crashed. He started selling his Ethereum, Monero, and Litecoin to buy more XRP. It kept going down, it kept getting cheaper. I was buying a few other things too, like a few dozen waves and antshares.

He was SO excited. He felt like he was the only one who felt this coin (XRP) was going to succeed, and he was CERTAIN it would.

Until, he wasn't. Stuart sold almost all my ripple around $0.18 (I think). There was so much negative press about ripple, it had gone below $0.15, and he was tired of trading a coin that took weeks to change in value.

Having bought a lot of Ripple pre-$0.20 Stuart was still up, maybe $100. This put his total portfolio around about $1500. He bought some ethereum near its (previous,july) ATH, some ripple again, some Siacoin, Vertcoin, etc. They weren't doing too well.

Then he started winning in mBitCasino. he honestly has no idea how much is in there, but as soon as he won a couple hands I woke up the next day and his account was disabled. They forced him to do a KYC (know your customer- a bunch of annoying bullshit) for which they still have not reenabled his account.

So then he wanted to gamble some more. He just wanted to get back to $3000. More than anything. I played on fortunejack, lost some money, and eventually moved to freebitco.in. Around this time I also discovered Bitconnect as well as the massive hoarde of youtubers searching for referrals. I fell victim to this Bitconnect trap, putting in $200 when I first saw it.

All the while his altcoins were going down so he saw no harm in converting to a fiat lending program.

Afraid of gambling away the rest of his bitcoin, he put $1200 in to the Bitconnect platform.
Though this may not cost him as much as he thinks, this is one of Stuart's biggest regrets. There are so many youtubers who are desperate for you to buy bitconnect. It will continue to be sustainable as long as the price is going up, but Stuart doesn't expect it to keep going up, especially near bitcoin's pace.

Had he bought $1200 in BTC at the time, it would have doubled by now.

Then Stuart's dad gave him another $1000. This is when BTC was near 7-8k.

With about $1400 left Stuart made another oopsie, resulting in a pretty quick $600 loss. Bitpetite, around for a few weeks, showed up in his ads or something. He joined, and after seeing how it was so similar to bitconnect yet so much better I had to join.

One fundamental I forgot, do not invest if it doesn't have its own coin.

$600 in to the website, $30 withdrawn.

At this time he also sells his Vertcoin prematurely, at about 10% profits near $4.50

All of this time I could have been buying Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, Eth, literally anything.

We're not done, folks.
At this point, $800 left, he is searching for a good program to yield him interest. Cloud mining? Yeah, cloud mining. I purchased $600 in contracts on genesis mining about two weeks ago and have yet to see a payout.

I am now trying hashflare and have $130 in my poloniex account lol.

Since I do not believe there is a tax deduction for crypto losses, Idk how it is possible to recover.

LESSONS LEARNED
Don't be impatient, keep your cryptos when you buy them. Had I kept all my antshares, bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, monero, bch, dash, etc I would be up thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
Do not gamble, or do so where there is no KYC policy and withdrawing is not difficult.
Your best odds are with freebitco.in, though they are still bad odds and there is no way of knowing whether the game is actually fair. Do not gamble when you are depressed.
Be wary if investing in anything crypto related that doesn't have a coin.
Ponzi schemes yo!

That is the end of my crypto journey, thank you all SO much for reading.
Congrats for reading through my elementary school writing.
Let me know how I can improve my writing!

If ya like weird trap/electronic music check out my soundcloud!
https://soundcloud.com/stuart_griffin

BTC pity/sadness relief fund: 19Nyw56LXoR3d3sKQec5NSUw1EY5bxLWEg
LTC pity too: LX3sxJEdZyey9wzin7brakG9jQ6zSCp2qU
dogeeeee piteeee : DFqZw4EciTeofisMYbPYnVvydKf5ihbuCm

:)

TL:DR
Lost money learned lessons