So, as the 1+ people (I know, impressive) that had read my first post may know, I was planning on making monthly reports on what I would be able to grow $500 into by investing and learning about Crypto.

Due to the many recent scams that have occurred in the past month alone, including the massive CoinCheck hack and the BeeToken ICO Phishing Scam, I've been very worried about the safety of my personal finances ($500 is still something okay, shut up) and the effect this could have on deterring new people from participating in the markets.

This lead me to an important pivot in the kinds of things I post online for everyone to see, and being fully transparent with my earnings and how much I have saved up felt like a big risk at this time. I've realized that it's better not to talk about size in public, for many, many valid reasons.

It's usually better to talk in percentages anyway, since you get more clout if you get 1000% gains then if you made $8k but you put in $100k to begin with.

However, I'm still about 60/40 on this whole income report thing, since it's super effective at inspiring other people and learning more about the space, but it might attract some unwanted attention that could make life much harder and much more paranoid. I initially got the idea from Pat Flynn's SPI Blog, and with the amount that he has reporting today, I'm pretty sure he has his fair share of malicious followers.

It would take a lot of support from others for me to continue doing this sort of thing (wink wink nudge nudge upvote upvote ;) ) since then the benefits would outweigh the risks.

Stay Safe Out There

• Use a password manager so that you don't have to fill in login info for all of the sites out there (and in crypto it's especially overwhelming)

• Try to keep your crypto on Hot/Cold Wallets, and only keep on exchanges if you absolutely have to (e.g. there are huge fees or you're holding short term)

• And remember to ONLY talk about SIZE with people you TRUST (that doesn't sound weird at all)

And on a final note:

Below is the draft report that I was about to submit instead

I just thought I would add this in because it was preloaded in my textbox and I didn't feel like deleting it

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Note: This is part of a monthly series where I start with $500 and write reports about how I've grown and what I've learned through experimentation.
The first post can be found here: link

Okay so I might have had a little headstart with the $500 experiment that I said I was going to put into Crypto in my previous post. I had bought the coins early to make sure it arrived before the new year, and held it while I learned more about the technology in December. Surprisingly, the value grew quicker than I had imagined.

The unexpected ROI in only my first month and the lack of data collected will mean this post might be a little shorter than intended. Seriously, I did not expect this to happen, but I guess no-one really knows what will happen in this crazy space.

Data

Fund NAV ~ $500 - $1500
$ P&L ~ $1000
ROI - 200%

IOTA

Movements

I haven't really traded much for this month, as I mentioned before. I used December 2017 as a month to introduce myself to Cryptocurrencies and figure out what I was getting myself into.

IOTA had been the only trade I had made, and that was only because that was the first project that I was exposed to, and a very exciting one too. I just moved the $500 of BTC that I had into IOTA just to store as I got more into the project.

It was a shock to me when I saw that the price of IOTA had tripled since I last bought it. I decided to hold on a little longer, and after a security flaw in the TANGLE (the technology behind IOTA, similar to how Bitcoin is built on a Blockchain) I moved it back into BTC.