A short story of my life and how it all started and how I got into crypto currencies

So here I am, sitting in my university room and writing this post at 1 AM. Since I now have some free time I thought why not share my story about how I started.

It all started back in 2010 when I was fourteen years old.
I had just befriended a guy named Glenn. I was introduced to him through a mutual friend on Facebook. We were of similar age group and had lots of common interests.

Usually most of the talk was about gaming and running ISOs and homebrew software on our firmware hacked playstation portables. ( Still remember I ran OS 5.00 M33-6 by Dark Alex(cool name))
I gradually started reading up on building PCs mainly because the craptop I had at the time wouldn't run GTA(Yeah desperate times make me look for solutions), Had just started saving for my first PC build which would happen almost two years later.

I also remember signing up for PTC(paid to click) websites where you would get paid 0.01$ for every advert you clicked on.
The name was neobux.com and I think it might still be around. Signed up for almost 20 sites. Some didn't payout although many were legit.

So anyway, basically a 14 year old kid browsing the internet looking for ways to make some pocket money. Other kids at school didn't have a clue about any of this so couldn't find anyone to discuss this with over lunch break. Did talk a lot about video games tho.
Wasn't really into the standard History, Math , Hindi(was pretty bad at this), English lessons although I did pretty well without putting in too much(almost none) effort.

A few days later Glenn told me about bitcoin and how it is internet money and told me to take a look.
I did a few google searches and tried to read about it. There was complex text regarding Blockchains and SHA256 encryption and stuff which was way out of the league for a 14 year old. Almost everything went over my head.
Bitcoin was under a dollar at that time.

After that it was mostly reading about computers and the internet and other random stuff. Hell I was on 4chan too.

Next few years went into tinkering with my PSP and learning how to solder properly.

Below is a picture of my PSP while I tried to fit in sound reactive LEDs in the trigger buttons.

Did succeed too. Here's a picture of the end product. Pretty Dope. Soldering on those surface mount components was extremely hard(and painful, I burned myself multiple times).

Eventually I forgot about bitcoin...for a while.

Now lets fast forward to 2012

So, over the past two years I had saved up enough cash to get myself a decent computer(mainly for games heh).
By this time I had just completed grade 10th and was set to move to grade 11th.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Grade 11th is considered a big thing in India. With a large majority of students going to coaching classes after school. I call them brainwash centers.
Many kids started going there ever since grade 8.
They would go there after school at around 3 in the afternoon and return back home at 7 ish. Then repeat this cycle until they finished their schooling. Basically a good way to kill your valuable time at an age where you should be learning a lot more than just math and physics problems and trying to get into the top engineering colleges. Engineering has become a trend in this darn country. Mainly Parents and the ecosystem to blame.

Although I'm in an engineering college myself as I write this, however its more like a hobby for me. I generally like tweaking things and making stuff. Enjoying most parts of my undergrad degree.

Anyway back to topic.
The year is late 2012
I've just built myself a brand new desktop after more than a year of reading and learning everything about computer hardware. So a flashy new Phenom ii x4 powered computer with 8gigs of DDR3 memory and semi transparent CM Elite430 case sits on my desk(Which was half destroyed since I was pretty bad a soldering as most 14 year olds would have been.)
The GPU was a GTX 550ti

Here's a picture of it:

So after quenching my thirst to play the latest games on max graphics settings I was now ready to read more about bitcoin.

Finally found a guide on how to mine bitcoin.
Installed cgminer and put it to mine some bitcoin into a pool I had joined.
By this time people had got ahead and were using FPGAs for mining already.
Eventually I read more about hashrates and how different hardware gave different hashrates.
Turned out I had an Nvidia card which back in the day was bad at mining so I sold my almost new card and begged mom for some money, I got the funds and bought a brand new Powercolor HD6950.
The special thing about this one was that it could be bios modded and unlocked into a HD6970 and so I got a HD6970, the fastest AMD card at the time for a much cheaper price.

Now I booted up cgminer, wrote my first batch file and started hashing. After a few calculations I figured out I wasn't making much so started to read around for alternatives.

Enter Litecoin and other altcoins(mainly dogecoin) based on the scrypt algorithm rather than SHA256

I stumbled upon litecoin and how it had a new algorithm(scrypt) that was limited to GPU mining only.
So I now started mining some litecoin. The results were much better. Was making like 10$ a day doing nothing.
One thing led to the next and I found myself switching to new coins everyday.
Settled on Dogecoin and mined it for almost a month. Prices surged and the next thing I knew, my PC was paid for with all the Dogecoin. I had just achieved ROI! Breakeven in 2 months!!.

I didn't know how to operate bank accounts and how to convert my bitcoins into fiat money.
I finally found a website that converted bitcoins into flipkart.com(an online shopping website) gift vouchers. So basically the only way for me to cash out was this.

I traded all my dogecoin and litecoin and a few others for bitcoin. And converted them to flipkart vouchers.
The next week I had bought more computer parts and a brand new graphics card, A cheap but efficient Radeon HD7750.

Repeat the cycle for another two months and I broke even again. Spent the money on yet another graphics card.
This one was a beast, The fabulous Radeon R9 280x MSI Twin Frozr with 3gigs of GDDR5.

Everything was going well but then disaster struck....

Mt. Gox collapsed. The price of bitcoin started a rapid decline and hit rock bottom. Mining was no longer worth the effort.
So I shut down my rigs. It was now 2014 and my 12th grade board exams. So studied a bit and got a decent score.

I had about 0.9 BTC with me in my multibit wallet.
Held onto it throughout the depressing price trend from 2014-16.

Got back into Crypto currencies in February of this year by trading bitcoins.

As of today I'm in my final year of college.
And have been a pretty successful trader on localbitcoins:
https://localbitcoins.com/accounts/profile/jaideep1000/
Traded over 60 BTC in 5 months which is about 1.1 crore rupees(around 170k USD) of trade volume.

Still planning to get back into mining but going mega scale this time. Mining is a fun activity to do imo, its fun building PCs and optimizing them.
Have set a few things in motion for a large setup. Lets see how it goes.

Had I kept the initial rigs running all this time, It would have paid off big time.
All a learning experience I suppose.

Cryptos are here to stay and starting to penetrate into the masses. Good time to buy and hold(or rather HODL) long term.
I'm talking like 5 years.
It's a risk worth taking. Even if I lost everything(although unlikely), I'm still young and can make it back.
I'm pretty decent at my undergrad course so there's always a backup option
Lets see how things play out.

Must say I'm proud to be an early adopter !

Sorry for the extremely long story. Don't usually do these posts.
Will edit later and make it look cleaner. Its now 2 :20 AM and I have a class tomorrow so need to get some sleep.

Looking to spend an hour everyday before sleep on steemit and share everything I've learned over the years.