I am a computer engineer (computer architect) and wanna entrepreneur. I lost $20K in crypto-trading but still believe in the revolution and want to build a DAO in future.

Today, I am going to share my crypocurrency journey. 

I started mining Litecoin in March, 2013 on my laptop when I was a graduate student. On that time, GPU mining for Bitcoin was still profitable. Litecoin was few cents worth and Bitcoin was a two digit currency and started its ascending to $1240 (MtGox). Regulators were skeptic and Bitcoin sounded like illegal (Silkroad). Every news in China used to make BTC swing like pendulum (10-100% swing). 

As time goes on, I bought and sold 20 gpus from AMD HD 5790 to HD 7970, burnt two HD7970s,  mined with powerful cpus like AMD fx8350, phenom x6, bought  ASICs.

I have mined 1200 LTC, 4.3M BCN ( current price $12K), 5 BTC, DASH, DogeCoin, WorldCoin, FeatherCoin, PrimeCoin even crapcoins like MAXCoin, ChinaCoin etc with GPUs. I had a failed attempt in buying early stage ASIC miner built on Avalon chip through Bitcoin forum ( bitcointalk.org). I also received coins in group ASIC mining (bitcointalk.org) with KNCminer and cloud mining. I traded almost all early stage exchanges: MtGox, btc-e, bter, BitFinex, Okcoin, Cryptsy etc. Man, I had onetime 3000 LTC and I knew it would be more than $20 someday. But could not keep them.

I used all these mined coins for trading (frequency of trading is close to day-trade or short-term trade). I also used to buy BTC at CampBx, convert it to LTC at btc-e and trade there. I had the opportunity to trade, PnD and chat with legendary Fontas,  davidpate (litecoin millionaire), Charles Lee (LTC founder), Sunny King (PPC founder) etc. 

In the meantime, I became obsessed with the idea “how monetary system works”. It intrigued me how revolutionary, the concept of bitcoin is in creating money and how friction-less it is in transferring wealth between entities. I used to read every CoinDesk and BitCoin Magazine article for few months. I was a moderator for Worldcoin and Quarkcoin in Reddit. 

Eventually, I got addicted to day-trading cryptos. One day, I would gain 150 LTC (@$3). As price fluctuated I even lost 1000 LTC in a single day that I gained by trading for months. In my trading period, I have bought 20 BTC, 600 LTC and few other coins from CampBx, MtGox, Ebay and recently, Coinbase. 

I used up my last 1500 LTC in trading futures (LTC spot) in OKCoin. 

After that, I kept mining BTC with two Antminer S3 until last August 2015. I sold minted BTC on regular basis to cover up loans. Timing can’t be worse, I sold BTC on average $300.     

I still mine coins (e.g. BCN) on my computers (48 core, 28 cores, 8 cores)  just for fun. I love the crypto-community, revolution and keep learning concepts. I would like to build a DAO in future. 

TLDR: I paid my tuition to learn crypto trading in hard way. However, mining cryptos and being member of the community has been a great journey.