My Crypto Awakening

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Cryptocurrency -a new tech disruptor that has been the talk of most financial media agency for the last few months (specially during Q4 of 2017).

How did I got into this new trend? Well, it didn't really moved like a bull market but overtime my interest grew and grew.

Early Days

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I think the year was 2014 or 2015. I started hearing about Bitcoin on some online publications and media outlets. But the thing that really gave me interest into this thing was the Netflix documentary The Rise and rise of Bitcoin.

This documentary really gave me a comprehensive look at this new technology and the early players (or should I say investors) in this platform.

Back then the price of 1 Bitcoin (BTC) was nowhere near the price as of the time of this writing ($6,936.30 as per CoinMarketCap).

Impression

Even though the documentary was comprehensive, like most of us, I was skeptical back then whether I should invest heavily on it (time and money wise) .

Though I was skeptical, I did invest a little back then, about a couple of dollars into a Bitcoin wallet.

Overtime, that BTC holdings that I have grew but so do my needs :) . Unaware of its future skyrocketing rise, I used some of my BTC holdings in paying my phone bill needs :(.

HODL

Back then, the only thing I know of how to increase my BTC holdings was to buy and hodl (the crypto term for hold or rather, hold on for dear life :) ).

It did grew. In fact, it was the time that it grew about 300% percent that I realized this new trend is really something!

Best Practices

It was a couple of years later that I got to know more good practices when it comes to acquiring and raising my cryptocurrency holdings or portfolio.

Doing HODL was simply not enough (reason being that if the coin steeply falls in price, you lost your gains during its bull market).

When I got into technical analysis of the cryptocurrency market, I realized how much value this digital currency can bring to many lives. Having learned alot about financial market strategies, I realized that cryptocurrency offers a strong alternative to how we earn and make a living - a good example is Steemit :)

Challenges

My enthusiasm to cryptocurrency was not a walk in the park though. Aside from immediate family nagging me about why I put a lot of time in learning Cryptocurrency, the next challenge is - me! How do I balance my life such that I don't end up putting so much time into this technology and regretting it in the end? How do I apply patience such that when the market goes up, I don't go with the FOMO (fear of missing out) but rather research the background of the coins that are shooting up such that I don't get trapped in a bull trap.

BTC is a bubble

Well like the early days of the web, a lot of people are skeptical or worse, believes that this thing will have an end soon.

I can't please everyone. However, as a technology enthusiast and having done my DYOR (do your own research), I'm convinced that one day, cryptocurrency will be as important as the web is now in our daily lives. Used cases and new cryptocurrency coins gives me ways to how we interact and how we do our financial matters as opposed to say, 10 years ago.

These is why I believe, cryptocurrency will live longer than what others expect and will even flourish than the fiat (real money) we currently use as means of buying and selling commodities.