Don’t Waste Your Time And Potential Just Waiting For Things To Come
When I discovered bitcoin in late 2012, I “fell down the rabbit hole” as people say, and I spent the next few months trying to learn everything I could about this new technology. However, I fell into a trap that many other cryptocurrency people did at the time as well. I was a college student at the time so without barely any income, I was saving every last penny I came across to buy more coins. My life become obsessed with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and to this day it is as well to an extent. The trap I fell into was to treat crypto like a way of life, not an investment and hobby,
Every day I would log onto bitcointalk and reddit, reading everything I could, and partaking in useless arguments that got nobody anywhere. I stopped pursuing other passions I had and devoted all my time into the crypto space. This would be fine and well if I was a programmer, but I was merely a speculator arguing about prices and what the potential held. Every 5 minutes I would check the price on my phone and soon I forgot to start living life and going after the things I wanted in life. I was a junkie waiting for his next bit of crack, in the form of news or new company announcements regarding cryptocurrency. I was still going to school, but I was giving it a half assed effort and as soon as the class ended I was back on the forums again, reading all the various new posts.
If you weren’t there in those times, especially when we were hitting all-time highs, reputable people were predicting crazy prices per coin and it was easy to get swept up in the hype. I kept thinking to myself, “well I can stop trying in other parts of my life because I have x amount of coins and as soon as bitcoin hits 10,000 a coin I won’t ever have to work”. This is how my life went for a while. I kept piling up and I kept getting drawn into the hype. It wasn’t until the mt gox crash and the subsequent price crashes, that I actually started to realize that the future wasn’t definitive. It hadn’t occurred to me at that point that there was a chance that bitcoin or crypto in general could fail.
These days I still hold almost all of the bitcoin I hold, but I treat it as a long term investment, as I would stocks in a brokerage account. I still check the price daily, but I am no longer obsessed like I was. This is how you should treat your holdings, not as the only thing you rely on in life, but like supplements while you are pursuing and working on other projects. There is a possibility that all of us who are invested will end up wildly rich, but this idea is no better than the idea that we will win the lottery when we buy a ticket. It is something we cannot rely on. Interest in a hobby is not an excuse to not better your life in other ways, by working hard and pursuing other passions. If cryptocurrency is the only thing that you have, you should look at finding new things to do that make you happy. Don’t let your time and potential pass, by just waiting around for the price to rise or fall. Treat your effort and time in the crypto community like an investment and a hobby, but don’t let it rule your life.
-Calaber24p
I could hardly sleep and definitely had dreams about steemit the first few weeks I was signed up...
They are now nightmares! eek!
Just kidding. :)
@calaber24p
I second this. My story is bit different. I invest in blockchain in general. I am not checking my account, more than 5-6 times a year. I buy and hold.
Blockchain is here to stay and change everything around us
How do you invest only in blockchain?
Great post @calaber24p, I'm very new to this world of crypto (2 months more or less) and definitely was starting to get obsessed with the subject to the point that I even thought about quitting my 9-5 job and investing all my savings in BTC. I started to find out that this world is very absorbing and I was starting to pay less attention to my surroundings at work and my personal life, I had to smack myself several times to realize that there are other purposes and other dreams to pursue that are physical and we can't just let them slide by. Now I'm investing my time in learning more about Cryptocurrencies but my purpose is to spread the knowledge and educate our community because it is still a new magical phenomenom that people don't have the idea that this exists and I'm distributing my free time in learning how to make residual income with trading and investing in the mid-long term future that BTC and crypto has for humanity.
Greetings from Colombia!
I feel Steemit might be a bit of a rabbit hole, too. I'm spending all my extra time reading about it and trying to figure out how it works. I keep telling myself I'll go back to living in my life in another month or so. :)
After watching the recent Bitcoin/crypto reactions to Brexit, I believe yes, particularly, long term, good crypto is an excellent choice as an investment vehicle.
Accumulate it, in the same way you may like to accumulate gold, silver, property, or any other long term asset.
I will see you there, and when I do, we will be known as gentlemen. ;)
Treat your effort and time in the crypto community like an investment and a hobby, but don’t let it rule your life.
This is such an important sentence! Invest in anything you believe in and do researches about it as much as you can. But don´t let it rule your life.
I was skeptical in the beginning ,and never been one to get caught up in digital or cyber addictions. However this is a good warning to heed. No one wakes up one morning and decides to become a drug addict
Cryptocurrency has a certain allure. It is easy to get caught up in it, to the point of being an addiction. However, it is very important to not miss the bigger picture and have a life as well.
Interesting post. It is very easy to get addicted to the potential in this technology but treating it as a hobby or long-term investment seems to be the most logical way to treat it.