A Journey Through My First Year in Crypto

Reflecting on what happened through this crazy year I spent doing crypto.

I thought I had a uni assignment due tonight so I was working on that, halfway through I checked the deadline again and saw that it got pushed a week further. So I did what any normal person would do, forget about that shit until two hours before the deadline. Now that I have some free time, I thought it would be a good idea to jot down some thoughts on my journey so far.

Almost a year in crypto and still poor, sigh. WAGMI was a fucking lie. But jokes aside, I decided to share my experience so far hoping that it will either help you or make you laugh. So here goes nothing.

How it started

Believe it or not, I didn’t find out about crypto because I heard that people are hitting 10x’s on random shitcoins everyday. I heard about crypto in like 2017 through some people in school because Bitcoin was pumping, but I never really looked into it because I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to comprehend it and all I cared about was sports & chilling with the homies. But it was always in the back of my head labelled as this “cryptography money thingy”. Fast forward to the start of 2021, I was chilling with my roommates at the time and one of them was listening to a Raoul Pal podcast with the Winklevoss twins and I kept hearing them talk about Bitcoin. So I thought to myself, I’m literally doing nothing useful at uni, just finessing my way through, so might as well read up about this Bitcoin thing, no harm right.

As I started reading some articles about Bitcoin, I kept seeing this Ethereum thing come up. I was like wtf is Ethereum and why is it always mentioned. So I went to the Ethereum website and that’s when I really had my mind blown. Not when I was reading the explanations, I just read the explanations to act like I’m doing something useful when in reality I didn’t understand shit. The real mind-blown moment was when I went to the Dapps section and it showed all the different applications and what they can do. I was just sitting there so confused thinking to myself all this stuff just exists in this weird place on the internet, like you can just lend, borrow, bet, sell art and nobody knows about it. Then I clicked on Decentraland, and as I was walking through the 5 fps world of decentraland, I still had my mind blown because it instantly reminded me of Ready Player One. Of course, it doesn’t even come close to the OASIS but I still took it as a proof-of-concept of a metaverse actually existing, and I found that really fucking cool. A digital world where people can conduct economic activity completely independently. That’s when I entered the rabbit hole. With every new article and every new whitepaper I read, I just kept digging deeper, I couldn’t stop for some reason and I’m someone who used to fucking hate reading with a passion.

A funny story. While I was reading all this, for some reason I didn’t realize all the alt coins could be actively traded, I thought only Bitcoin could be actively traded. So through the Ethereum website I found a link to a solidity devs youtube channel where he basically runs you through solidity and making a smart contract etc. I sat through 3 Youtube vids and acted like I understood what was happening when in reality I don’t even know the first thing about coding. I only did that because I wanted to ask him a question and thought incase he asks me something back I should probably know some stuff. Little did I know, my question was so severely retarded that I would rightfully get left on read. I asked him something along the lines of “hey I had an idea, what if you make a sort of stock market but instead of stocks, people can trade all of these other coins”. LMAOOOOO.

So I took getting left on read as a sign of my stupidity and started doing some research to quickly find out that people have been trading alts for years. Idk if there’ll ever be a dumber moment in my life.

Learning the ropes

After I found out you can trade these coins I instantly got hyped, I was like I read a couple whitepapers, I know what these coins do, this is easy money. Bear in mind, my extent of knowledge of investing was doing a 2 month online course which taught the absolute basics of traditional investing, and reading the first 5 pages of the little book of common sense investing. Armed with the with this mountain of knowledge, I did what any intelligent investor would do. Go to CoinGecko, go to filters, and sort by highest % gainers of the day, pick the first coin, and just ape. This is where I found some coin called XBASE, I can’t find the chart now because it doesn’t exist anymore but it looked like a heart rate monitor. It went from $0.00004 to $12 then back to $0.00000013 then to $8 then back to $0.000034 then to $10. I was like holy shit, this is the Valhalla play. If I put in some money at $0.0013 and sell around $3 (just to be safe) I can make around a 2000x. So if I put in a $100 now and just wait it’ll become $200k soon enough and then I can diversify and chill. Easy W right. You can probably guess how this story ends, the $100 went in and never came out, but I still don’t know how they made the chart look like that. Probably the patented Coingecko glitch.

So that was my first lesson. Majority of crypto from the trading side is a game of smoke & mirrors. The goal of most people is to sell you dogshit that looks like chocolate. As soon as you fall for the bait and take a bite, you’re in for a rude awakening. Being advertised as the land of the 100x’s is the perfect way to bait thousands of dumb people like me into buying rugs. Always be on guard.

After getting baited once, I took a step back and then instantly made my next mistake. I decided to talk to my friends. Now there’s nothing wrong with that if your friends know what’s up, but my friends were all studying for tradfi investment banking jobs. So I thought these guys probably know what to do, let me ask them for help. They told me just wait and don’t put more money in, just keep doing research and use this XYZ model I learned in class yesterday to help you. Part of this advice is still sound, it’s good to be patient and come up with a strong thesis after doing research but they told me this at the beginning of Feb 2021, when it was peak bull mania and people were making many multiples per day on the most absurd shitcoins. I wasn’t on twitter back then so I didn’t have any FOMO but I was sidelined through that entire mania phase.

The lesson learned here was that whenever you’re in peak bull mania, you want to be firmly on the leftisde of the curve or the rightside of the curve, do not middle-curve it like I did. Tbh I should change my name from LeftsideEmiri to FirmlyInTheMiddleEmiri because if I was truly leftside of the curve I would be making money. If I just threw money at some random coins which I read about I would have probably made money. But alas, if you could do everything in hindsight mistakes wouldn’t exist.

So nonetheless, I decided to take the advice of my friends and start picking a set of coins that I would like to buy. The plan was to keep saving some money every month and then put it in once I’ve made a firm decision. But where did I turn to get information on my investment decision? Yup, you guessed it, Crypto Youtube. The place where all newbies go to get pissed on by Bitboy, MoonCarl, and the other dude with the weird face. The silver lining here is that by some stroke of luck, I never found these 3 accounts, I did find other similar type of shillers but they used to mix in a couple decent projects with their dogshit shills. The biggest stroke of luck was finding the Finematics Youtube channel. That’s where I actually properly started learning and understanding DeFi. So after 3 months of Youtube and reading random articles I decided I have enough information to put money in. I saved up $900 and made the greatest trade of this generation, I went all in in the first week of May 2021. I had a couple days of price going up and then BANG, everything wiped. My $900 turned into $250 and I was like wtf am I doing man. I saved up this money over 3 months only to lose it all in a week.

A lesson learned here is of course don’t trust crypto youtube. If you want alpha you have to work hard to find it. If people actually had alpha why would they give it away to hundreds of thousands of random people on Youtube and not just act on it themselves to make money. But the other lesson learned is the importance of deeply knowing yourself. It is not only important for markets but life in general. In my case, If I was smart enough to look within and ask myself the hard questions, I would have probably realized to some extent that I’m pretty dumb and know absolutely nothing about markets. So going all in is not the best decision but just get your feet wet with a small amount, gradually learn, and then slowly put in more money.

The Lifeline

In the middle of my braindead Youtube expedition, I found a lifeline. A little backstory, I’ve been a fan of KSI & Callux for many years. One day I saw on my normie twitter that both of them were showing up on a crypto podcast. I was intrigued. The podcast was UpOnly. I clicked on the podcast and sat through some of it and the first thing that struck me was Cobie. You know how sometimes you can just tell a person is smart as fuck just by their demeanor and the way they speak about things, I got that vibe from Cobie. I didn’t understand wtf he was saying at the time but I just got the vibes. The podcast was at the end of Feb but other than half of that episode I didn’t see any other episodes. It was only after that May crash when I was sitting frustrated that I decided to rewatch that podcast. After that I went through the entire UpOnly channel and saw every single podcast they did. That’s how I found Crypto Twitter.

So KSI & Callux leading me to UpOnly where I found Cobie through which I found Crypto Twitter was my lifeline. Weird fucking timeline man. But to be honest, finding crypto twitter is weirdly enough the only reason I’m still here.

The main thing that drew me to spending hours and hours on twitter was the type of people. It’s filled with the type of people I love, extremely filterless with their jokes and extremely degenerate in terms of habits and tendencies, but incredibly smart people. Some of the sharpest people in the world. Everyday on twitter was absolute lunacy, one guy posts a video of himself snorting a line of coke of a girls ass while 100x lev longing some shitcoin, then another guy impersonating a cat posts some high-level take about why the market crashed, while another dude impersonating a couch posts an introspective take about DeFi, and then another dude who’s a blueberry posts meme lines on chart. Not to mention the fact that you get to anonymously interact with billionaires on a daily basis getting some pretty decent info. It’s in this chaos that I tend to find a weird sort of peace. I was on the verge of accepting the fact that I’m going to have live normie life with normie habits but I fortunately found this weird community of frogs, anime pfps, and animal impersonators which gave me hope. These people embraced themselves and just vibed in life while I was on the other side accepting that I’m probably going to have to live the normal life.

The information you get on twitter is unparalleled, but only if you follow the correct people. Curating your list of followers is a long process, it’s a process of trial and error but eventually you will find the correct people. Not only did my journey down the crypto rabbit hole increase tenfold I also learned a lot about markets in general by just hanging out. Things like understanding what game your playing whether long term or short, finding an appropriate narrative based on that, making a trading journal to gradually improve your skills, and much more. It’s the small things you keep picking up along the way while having a good time viewing memes and drama in real-time.

Don’t get me wrong, twitter isn’t perfect. The more time you spend on it while your depth of knowledge of the space increases, you will realize a major part of twitter is also just a mercenary shill fest, so staying sharp and staying aware remains. It is important to understand the game of incentives. Whenever you read something, or if some anon tells you something, always try to figure out what their incentives are. Why are they telling you this? What is actually happening here? Then you gradually learn to take most things on twitter with a pinch of salt. The make or break according to me here is your personal intuition. It will change over time but if your personal intuition and vibe check radar is good then you should be good.

The Writooor Arc

If you look on twitter now, then it may seem like everyone is a substackooor. But this wasn’t the case earlier on.

At first my main interactions were mainly with threads and podcasts. While continuously learning more through twitter, I kept thinking to myself “how do I contribute value to this space” because I realized early on that this space is a meritocracy. If your work is good you will get hired, if you don’t do shit then people won’t care about you. My problem was that I didn’t know the first thing about coding, nor did I know anything about trading or investing. So how can I be of value to people here.

Then one day while doing an essay for Uni it struck me. I write 4000 word essays every semester for my political science major on topics that I couldn’t give a single fuck about, why don’t I start writing about topics that I actually enjoy learning about. That’s when my substack was born. Towards the end of June 2021 I posted my first substack article.

Other than finding a way to provide value to this space, I started my substack for a couple of reasons. One of the main reasons was to help people who are in a similar situation to the one I was in. I wanted to help people to not go through the same mistakes I went through. You are almost always going to get burnt going down the route I went down and that dissuades a ton of talent from staying in crypto. Another reason was to help my own learning process. When you write stuff, especially when you try and simplify complex topics you are forced to deeply understand the topic, then once you actually write down your thoughts you enter this pensive phase where you keep rethinking what you’ve written which makes you ask more questions thereby making you understand the topic even more. Lastly, I thought if I ever get good enough to a point where I can get hired, it’ll be a good way for me to make money which I can then use to gamble on internet ponzis in an attempt to secure financial freedom. FULL SEND BABY.

I currently have around 28 articles on my blog and if you go back and read them, you can sort of see my progression in terms of learning. The earlier articles are quite horrendous but I feel like I’ve gradually improved with time.

Over the last few months, the space has been flooded by a ton of more writers which I think is a good thing. Most of them are far better than me but I like that. Not only does it give me some healthy competition to look up to, but it also helps my personal writing as I pick up tips & tricks from reading other peoples work. Also, it helps drive the space forward in general by improving the quality of content that is put out on a regular basis.

The vibes of anonymous networking

Up until November I still spent all of my time on CT. Just learning & writing. But something people kept saying is find a group of friends who you can work with and run it up together. It’s always easier and more satisfying. This statement is very true but I could never find that group of people. This is where the vibes of anonymous networking worked to my benefit. I was always active on CT usually just shitposting and joking with the occasional tweet with actual info. Still the same btw.

One day I was down a couple beers and just vibing on CT when I started joking around with an anon by the name of cryptoZero. We started tweeting at each other back and forth for a while until one day he invited me to this discord group called Diamond Cock Dao. Joining that group only helped me level my game up that much more. I don’t really know why I was kept around because I have 0 alpha to contribute but they helped me step up my understanding of this game so much more.

After that I ended up talking to some other chads through twitter who have also helped me out a lot (Special shoutout to Raymond & BootyPleasure). That is when I fully understood that statement, making it with a group of friends is easier and much more fun than trying to do it all alone. Hoping to run it up soon with all my anon homies.

Looking at my status right now. I would say I’m in-between the beginner to intermediate level when it comes to overall crypto understanding. I absolutely suck at trading but I’m always lurking the discord, watching videos and podcasts, and reading articles to slowly improve my trading game. I’ve still barely made any money playing the markets but hoping to improve as time passes. The focus now is to continue to learn, continue to improve, and never stagnate.

If you didn’t learn anything from my journey I hope it at least made you laugh. I will check back in next year with an update of how things are going.

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If you feel like donating to fund my gambling addiction, this is my ETH address: 0x43A5D9C141125Cd67B9268ef28C7c6a9dC15F3c9

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