Why after 18 months of investing into cryptocurrencies I sold (For now)

Hello everyone! I decided to write a blog today about why I decided to sell all my cryptocurrencies a few days ago, after I vowed i'd never do it...

For the record I'm not swearing off crypto & blockchain technology. I still believe it is the technology of the future, but not like this...

For starters I got into the blockchain investing in nov of 2016. I got heavily into it around March 2017 when I recieved my tax refund & had some extra cash laying around & boy what perfect timing! The market took off literally over night for me.

Made a bunch of money off Ethereum & with the success of my eth money I quickly moved onto EOS.

Things in the space moved very quickly after the China ban & trying to keep up with 1500 blockchain coins, tokens, platforms, ect was almost impossible.

When someone tells you about blockchain tech & the purpose of bitcoin its almost like this big giant utopia on the surface. Then when you get to dating the the thing you find out it's a much different person, for starters...

1. It's confusing & not user friendly... Much like what Ryan Scott said “Crypto software needs to become easier to use. It reminds me of the early days of the internet where it was difficult - and sometimes literally impossible - to get online. The only difference is that with crypto, we now have a very powerful tool to accelerate our progress that we did not have before: the internet itself.” He hit the nail right on the head here imo. I consider myself computer savvy & to this date I have lost several $1000 of dollars in sending coins to wrong places, not writing down the private key once on myetherwallet, you hear of all the different kinds of bad user experiences. Ypu even hear something crazy like 1/3 of all the bitcoins are lost forever it is estimated. http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/

2. It's really slow & expensive for smaller transactions... Users are reporting times of 16 hours to send on certain days. Also transaction costs as high as $6 to send $15 or $500. Costs reaching as high as $28 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/19/big-transactions-fees-are-a-problem-for-bitcoin.html

If you're going to get into a market you've gotta do it better & faster than you competition. Comparable to credit cards, bitcoin is slow, expensive, & stupid at this point vs the alternative in any banking 1st world country imo.

1. Security, what smart money in their right mind is going to stick a ton of money in the unknown with all the security issues, phishing email, links that download comprising viruses, & hacks that have taken place. The worst part is by the time you've found out it's gone IT'S TOO LATE! Take a look around & take a pick mining companies, exchanges, have been hacked, developer bugs, bitconnect, exit scam coins, ect there are tons of ways to lose your money in this thing! I have 900,000 reddcoins locked in a wallet & ive been trying to contact reddcoin (twitter, reddit, facebook, email) for months with no cs help in sight!

2. Decentralized? Again when you get into this thing you're promised this free world revolution where everything is fair & shared only to find out its a lot different out there than it's painted for you. Pump groups, insider exchange trading (I have screen shots), BOTS & algorithms I have to worry about , & my personal favorite the whales that have 1000s of bitcoins then short the futures markets & dump to accumulate more bitcoin. Now most of this would be frowned upon or even down right illegal in a regulated market, but since this is unregulated you come to find out utopia isn't all its cracked up to be...

3. Exchanges! LOL oh man where do I start!?!? My experience with exchanges have been a nightmare! I don't know about all you cryptoheadz out there, but most exchanges imo our less than desirable. Check some of my previous blogs Poloniex taking 47 days to get to a simple ticket. Cryptopia having my $10,000 transfer in limbo for 6 weeks with zero response for weeks. Many fb groups people reports as many as 81 coins being stuck in limbo & or the ltc & doge markets being shut off completely without any notice. Coinbase (Conbase) costing me $3600 on a trade due to a system error on exchange. Insider trading between employees & large groups on facebook. The list of shady stuff goes on & on with these guys... Why? Zero regulations! https://www.coindesk.com/3-south-korean-crypto-exchanges-investigated-over-embezzlement/
   https://cointelegraph.com/news/south-korean-prosecutors-raided-three-seoul-based-crypto-exchanges-last-month

4. Picking investments, icos, smart contract companies, forks, burns, masternodes, faucets, airdrops, ect... You damn near have to be a computer scientist to be able to tell which projects are legit and which are scams at certain points. If you don't come from a computer background without tools like telegram, discord, forums, ect you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to figure out which coins to invest into. Plus the space is 24/7/365 & is always constantly changing & people are moving from project to project. My buddy Noah always talks about dumb money in the market & its full of it because it's so hard to understand! Unless you're a self taught computer engineer from facebook like he is it's almost impossible to keep up with this tech for a new investor. https://medium.com/@noahruderman/thoughts-on-eos-249d22d47b7

5. Evolving, I know it takes time for tech to develop, but a lot of what im seeing in this space is copypasta & newer teams popping up copying ideas instead of everyone working together & evolving. I can't tell you how frustrating & confusing this is for a newer investor in the space...

So if you're a new investor looking on the outside in, is this something you would want to throw your money at?
I'm just gonna take a backseat from now on til I start seeing things evolve for the better, I wish all you crypto investors the best of luck & a good year!