My life story on bitcoins and altcoin/shitcoin mining and trading 2009-2017

Cryptocoins, their birth and how i was so close to becoming filthy rich
It all started back when as you probably know by now if your a cryptocoin investor and enthusiast like me, that bitcoins(BTC) or rather the elusive unknown programmer or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a digital payment system that was created because of the crash in the global markets in 2007 with a desire to create a method of paying developers on a popular developer forum i am led to believe, although i never witnessed this happen or find the time to follow this up, shame.

In 2009 when i first started looking into buying bitcoin, who would have known this little invention or payment system in October 2008 which was when he or it launched the coin, would grow so powerful and rapidly become mainstream if not already mainstream in 2017 or the coming years.

Where did cyptocoins and the route to potential riches all begin for me
Well not too good at first i can tell you that much, was around 2008/2009 can't remember the exact month, i was informed about this coin on skype and like many others, thought little about it, i turned a blind eye to it's potential at first, after all i was in the process of putting a large sum of money into another risky investment, yes i know your going to call me stupid. Yes, remortgaging my house was the dumbest thing ever, come on where was i going to find money to invest, i am a mere mortal with a day job working as an electrician on an average income, i was sick and tired of seeing people with money and coming from a fairly poor background, i wanted to be the one to take the risk and gamble a little, for those who are interested i put in around £67k into a startup that has to this date never returned me a penny, with no way of getting my money back due to the nature of how they managed the company or didn't manage was more to the point.

Anyway.. I had done a little dabbling on stock markets in the past and thought i knew all about investing, oh how i was so wrong.
This of course as you can imagine led to sleepless nights, arguments with the wife and kids. i basically had to tell a little white lie to keep this a secret from the now wife, so i told her that i have only invested a £5k and that didn't get taken lightly either i can assure you, so you can imagine what it would have meant to tell here i had put in £67k into a technology invention i knew very little about or the people behind it. That part of my life has a whole story in itself.(won't go there right now)

Whilst i was blinded by this so called invention by this so called company(won't mention their name unless someone buys me a beer) or some would say conned into buying shares. Meanwhile in the background, this little, very unknown cryptocoin goldmine was growing from a tiny seed into something really huge that no one could ever of imagined possible. Around this time i was sent a link through skype, which led me to a website where i could buy these bitcoins in batches of $27 which was the minimum if i recall this in turn gave you a hefty amount of BTC. (can't remember the exact figure) Gulp, oh man, i have all this money wrapped up in this other crazy investment that friends were telling me to stay away from and on top of that place a small, yes i know, small $27 payment to some random website which told me i have to wait for something like 2 weeks to receive in a process that i was totally unfamiliar with, as payments were also completed via bank draft or check. And i didn't do this, what.. oh shit.
I started to go thought the payment process online where i was about to buy these bitcoins when i was distracted for what ever reason and felt uncomfortable putting any more of my money into and other internet scam. or what i thought was a scam, how wrong was i.. how wrong, things could be so different now, fancy cars, nice house just the ability to go out for dinner once in a while would be nice. give up the crappy day job. and take a vacation would have all become a reality from one small $27 payment i didn't go through with, (why oh why did i just not complete that transaction) I still don't know to this day, maybe i just didn't feel it would go anywhere, but damn, it really gets me now, especially that i was that close to clicking that damn purchase button.

Bitcoin or BTC for short has come a long way from the person-to-person transactions that took place back in 2009 or that is today now traded in so many exchanges such as bittrex, poloniex, coinbase, and other older exchanges many of which are now closed down. Before this method people would just send each other bitcoin through their wallets offline using the qr codes or addresses via wallets on their mobile devices, as more and more people got to know about this, there was a fear of governments trying to catch these people by setting up meetings to catch people in the act. At this point, the price of bitcoin was beginning to rise and the community was loving it more and more for it's decentralised, secure, method of transferring wealth to one another it was becoming the gold 2.0 rather than a cash system.

Wasn't until bitcoin went from like $3 to over $200 it caught my eye once more, i was like what, this is bitcoin, i could of had thousands of these but didn't, i felt that gut wrenching feeling in my stomach. Who was going to believe me after i has cocked up my first big investment.

My luck went from bad to worse
I wasn't going to be defeated, i had many ups and downs between 2011 and from losing this 67k investment, well i didn't know i lost it at this point, so felt like i had to wrap this up in cotton wool and not think about anything else, this was to be my demise from losing my job in September 2011 i still hadn't paid enough attention to the power of bitcoin, of course i knew it was there, but kept ignoring a friend who kept telling me to invest in some this time round as it was going to go through the roof, at this time i think bitcoin was in the region of $30 or something after all i kept telling myself it wasn't going to get any higher, again how wrong was i.
You have to remember all this was new, buying and selling bitcoin wasn't easy, without the second party willing to part with their bitcoin and you handing over cash to a stranger that lived sometimes hundreds of miles from you and vice versa with your cash. So again it never happened.

Time for change
By the time it reached $200 i had taken notice thankfully(idiot), i decided to purchase a couple of bitcoins from cyptsy and crypto trade exchange after i had already dabbled in buying equity in exchanges on another exchange that later closed and disappeared with my money and equity, i mentioned on reddit that we needed some kind of crypto police not sure if anything ever came of this though.
Crypto trade was another i lost money with, had around 0.5 bitcoin on that exchange. Right about this time the Chinese media started singing and dancing about bitcoin as an alternative currency and Baidu was now accepting the bitcoin cryptocurrency and talk of some other big shopping sites like amazon taking payment along with some other shopping sites, the price of bitcoin hit an all-time of high of $1,147.25, and over $1,200 in some exchanges, on Dec. 4, 2013. However, bitcoin fell towards the end of the year well for the rest of 2013, ending at $757.50 by December 31st. I now wasn't going to be deterred, i was becoming a bitcoin enthusiast at last and finally realising its power.

With bitcoin now starting to gain traction i started to position myself into mining, i had already lost my job was about to lose my second property i have worked so hard to hang onto for the last 10 years of my life, which like many people i planned to use as my pension in later life, i was forced to sell in 2012 for a ridiculously small 24k profit as you pay mostly interest at first with a mortgage, after paying off some of my second mortgage to the banks. grrrr..

The next phase of my investments
A i mentioned earlier, i put aside £17k to pay off some of my current mortgage to lower payments this made buying btc easier, i then proceeded to spent around £2000 on a gpu mining rig. Huh, by the time i had woke to this as an option it was really all too late as bitcoin difficulty was way too high, Asic miners were the in thing and had really got their teeth into this mining game, not deterred i started mining alt coins or shit coins as they were so called for that next big opportunity, Litecoin was a potential candidate but kept struggling to get above $3-$4 but this didn't matter anymore as this is where it went from bad to worse, I was mining for about 6 months 24/7 with these R9 290's (double dissipation) Gpus, mining as fast as i could, this was to be my demise again, i over looked one very important lesson, VIRUS SCAN.... Oh shit, it came to this one shitcoin by the name of zcoin or something like that, up until recently i still had the virus in a zip file just for a reminder of this event, this wallet or virus which had a clever bit of programming built into the wallet was ready to steal all my wallet.dat files and remove any coins i had, meaning blackcoin, white coin, dogecoin, flappycoin, litecoins, infinitecoin, mooncoin, marscoin were talken, millions of coins including all my 4 bitcoins the list was of about 70 altcoins, mintcoin, rddcoin, mooncoin, peercoin, feathercoin, even had what i thought was a potentially great coin called fluttercoin and vertcoin, so many others the list goes on, i was that desperate i even remember purchasing a small amount of peercoin on ebay for about £15 what a joke this was, all gone in a flash with this one little virus.
By this time i was at breaking point from this madness and didn't want to be a part of cryptos anymore. So i switched off the machine, deleted all the other wallets with small amounts in them and gave up on the mining completely, sold all but one of my gpu's to get at least some money back to pay bills and kept all but one gpu for a gaming rig and went back to exchanges to try and redeem myself from this disaster with some of the money from selling the gpu's earlier.

Back to the exchanges once again
I purchase about 200$ worth of bitcoin and began to learn trading. looking for other potential investment opportunities i found banktothefuture(BTTF) with CEO simon dixon (

) and crowdcube another UK investment crowdfunding site, i put some of my profits and cash into some of their ventures this is still going etremely well brought some shares in shapeshift, unocoin, uphold, i then stumbled on storjx coin, would of loved to have purchased more of this coin at the price about 2500 sats by this time and joined slack later which then moved onto rocket chat, i had enough BTC if i recall for about 15k sjcx, was trying for that goal of 30k but failed, price went up too quickly so cashed out some of my storjx to Etherium keeping 5k storj and aroung 60k siacoin(sc) @ around 60sat to try and get back on the horse with 103ETH under my belt i thought i was safe at $20 a pop, but i was too impatient as bitcoin was going mad, btc was rising and as you probably know me by now, my itchy fingers got the better of me, with the thirst for that big one, i wanted to keep trading rather than sit on the fence, so sold all coins in Etherium(idiot), went back to Storj when the price was around about 15000 sat, sold Sia coin(sc) when it was about 100 sat, watched the chat rooms in slack and, Storj moved from the over populated slack to Rocket Chat to learn every detail i could and started farming with the GUI, prices started to rise and done some good trading with this along with bitcoin, so managed to build up a nice 2 bitcoins lead in 6 months ish. Now bitcoin in 2016/17 started to get wild, didn't want to let it go, kept losing with the wild trades i made. shorting etc.. Lost more than i gained so decided i wasn't going to lose it this time, so dumped half of my coins into my next venture.
Ethtrade, a great little investment platform from the Philippines, they do a lot of work for charities and for anyone looking to invest, go ahead and follow my link, unfortunately after a short but sweet ROI had to sell out my portfolio after just 5 months due to licencing issued, Ethtrade are still trading and taking investments, just not for people from certain geographical locations mainly USA and some others, i think its mainly only Asian countries now and a small selection of other countries that can invest on their platform(real shame).
With this being a problem for me now, and not deterred and confident for some great returns now i was in a better place, i preceded to look for other investment options and moved 50% of my bitcoins to bitconnect.io which so far has proven to be a great place to earn money, i should be now sitting on a nice gain over the next 239 days of my investment that i am locked in(not keen on this idea mind), if all goes well and bitcoin doesn't rise too much in this time i should do very well indeed.

Move over crypto coins its Token frenzy time
Now with the rest of my bitcoin from Ethtrade once i get it returned to my wallet, i plan to put more BTC into tokens and coins not because i think they are gong to make huge gains on the exchanges anytime soon, but rather long term investments while i can continue to concentrate on gaining more ROI from btc and still keep safe (i hope) with tokens and once again i find myself today, i fell right into the lap of steemit.com, using my old account i opened some time ago with free coins, i was pleasantly surprised to find they are now worth around $70 for doing absolutely nothing or just telling it how it is. Give it a go!!

Your help and feedback
I would love to hear you stories and feedback on potential token investments i can take a look over. Meanwhile, thanks for taking the time to read my story, i have tried to keep it short and sweet.

Thanks and wishing for a more lucrative future,

Hasher

To be continued...