The Last 15 Months of My Life in One Chart

Introduction

I should probably clarify something. The fact that my story refers back to an ethereum chart shouldn't be regarded as a pitch for ethereum, any more than an article about a road trip I took should be regarded as a pitch for the brand of car I was renting at the time… even if I really liked the car and ended up purchasing one of my own upon my return and take pride in washing and polishing it of a Sunday morning. What I mean to say is that I'm not a spokesperson for anyone and I'm not shilling anything. I've been in and out of other coins too, it's just that this particular one has served as the backdrop to my story over the past couple of years.

Bitcoin background

I first heard about Bitcoin while researching something at work back in 2013. It was the height of the European sovereign debt crisis and the Cypriot depositor bail-in. Back then Bitcoin was still under $100 and I came across two very distinct use cases for it in the same afternoon. The first was as a hedge against the shadiness taking place in the EU, the second was as an anonymous payment method for assassinating greedy bankers and EU bureaucrats on this thing called the dark web. I went “hmmm”, but looked past it.

Enter Vitalik

Cut to a year later. I had missed out on Bitcoin's meteoric rise and fall, had managed to actually purchase a bit and then started hearing things about some strange Russian programmer kid who was building something called ethereum. You need to watch the video of him first presenting it at the Miami Bitcoin conference in 2014. Particularly the slide where he lists some prime candidates for disintermediation. I watched it back with a friend recently and it was fascinating to see that all the blockchain features he lists in his "a little bit of history..." slide are now live on the ethereum network, just three years later.

Cut to 2016

I'm an idiot, I habitually take my eye of the ball at the most crucial moments, so I missed the ethereum crowdsale. Later on, during another one of my 6-month rabbit holes, I even missed ether being listed on exchanges. Then, in February of 2016 when I finally came to, comparing the price of litecoin to that of ether, it was obvious to me that ETH was massively undervalued. I promptly began cashing out of the litecoin I had accumulated during the infamous Chinese ponzi and getting into ether.

I quit

That May I did something completely out of character for me. I quit my job without having anything else lined up or any real plan as to how to proceed. Not because crypto had made me rich I might add. I'd moved to another company since first coming across Bitcoin and was eventually promoted to manager there. This basically meant that all the fun stuff I was doing before, which was hugely educational for me and actually contributed to the company, was replaced by me sitting behind a desk making sure other people did stuff. That and attending management meetings in which we all took turns being bullied by a boorish ignoramus of a CEO. His own exit strategy involved an upcoming top secret IPO that I was assigned to work on. I was promised shares and a bonus but that feeling I had about ethereum, I got the same thing in reverse when it came to the company's prospects of an IPO. The more I looked at it the more I knew the company was never going public. So rather than wasting my summer there, I opted out. I regard this as just as much of a trade as getting into ethereum was. The IPO never happened.

The DAO

The DAO was like the first version of this ICO madness we're seing now. The guys behind it seemed to be on the ball. What they were trying to build seemed like a good idea. But again, something didn't sit right with me. After talking to a few of their guys on Slack I decided not to put any money in. It just felt a bit rushed to me and I was also concerned about Slock.it's own relationship to the DAO.

With more and more of the available supply of ether locked up in the DAO, I watched my holdings double several times over as the price of ether spiked. Then, as suddenly as those gains were made, news of the DAO hack hit and it all came tumbling down again. In hindsight I'm surprised that I was so cool about it. Basically, I think I'd already made my mind up about the potential flakiness of the DAO, and the soundness of ethereum's vision, so both the sudden rise and the sudden fall that followed it didn't change my long term outlook.

The fork

Feeling a bit nonplussed and meh about it all ended up being quite an interesting vantage point from which to watch the whole fork debate. I wasn't biased other than towards wanting the ethereum experiment to continue. Watching it play out from that angle was hugely educational. I'm a lurker. I don't say much but I'm super interested in what other people have to say. When big things happen, emotions run high. Word choice tends towards hyperbole and fewer concessions are made. It's like the resolution of the conversation degrades. And it's weird, it never really returned after the fork. After ethereum made the DAO investors whole again and violated that sacred immutability, the tabloid-level narrative you encounter on forums and troll boxes became all about mETH the scamcoin. The corporate coin. The backed by a proof of Vitalik coin. The higher it goes the more the trolls cry doom. In my opinion, what you're seeing when you look that that long ranging period of sideways price action from the summer of 2016 to March of 2017, is essentially the market digesting and working through these notions.

Something out of nothing

A hard fork was always going to be contentious. It was a weird time, I remember having to explain to my fiancé how on one fine day we had come into possession of as much ethereum classic as we had ether and how this was possible. Where else does something like that ever take place? And if you were following the conversations in the community, it was by no means a forgone conclusion that ETH was to end up being the dominant chain. I vacillated for a while and ended up selling most of our ETC for ETH and BTC from the bedroom of our Athens Airbnb in August.

Another long slumber

After that I pretty much checked-out. I had some smaller positions in a few coins I was toying with but I mostly just let them sit there and focused on making a living as a freelancer. It wasn't until March of 2017 when my fiancé casually asked me what ethereum was doing one evening that we realised it had jumped up to the heights it had touched during the DAO.

Where we're at

Since that day it's been a struggle to keep up with everything. I spent the first few weeks playing with some of the dapps that have come online since I last checked, reading white papers and getting familiar with new crypto youtube celebrities that have sprung up. This very fringy thing that would cause people to go silent and hastily change the subject a couple years ago, is suddenly on everyone's feed. And it's like any little rhyme or reason this space formerly had has now completely disappeared. There seems to be no such thing as a bad trade or investment anymore. Useless coins are pumping to the moon. ICOs backed by little more than a typo-ridden white paper (seriously guys?) are selling out in minutes. It's freaky. Me and a buddy of mine spend a lot of time texting the word "scary" back and forth to each other as our holdings multiply in value in a completely improbable and utterly unsustainable way. It's nuts. I eventually gave up updating the screenshot for this post 'cause recent spikes have made it so that you can't view the chart in its entirety anymore.

I'm not a good trader

As far as where we're at is concerned, I have no clue. I expected to see prices like these several years hence and I certainly didn't expect the tulip mania to hit so soon. One thing I have learned though, and I think it might be pertinent to many of you out there. Reviewing the timeline that led me here has cured me of any delusion that I'm a good trader. Every single decision we make is a trade of sorts. I've made some good ones, I've made some bad ones. But in a bull market it's stupidly easy to make a good trade. If anything, the best "trades" I made over this past year have involved deciding to hold tight and not to trade. That or they've been lifestyle type trades. Basically, what I'm saying is we'll see who the good traders are in a decade or so. For now, I'm just trying to keep my cool, to stop checking the bloody charts every five minutes and to try to actually make something productive out of this (perhaps) brief respite from worrying about the next red bill that crypto has afforded me.

Thanks for reading

@failbetter