Bitcoin Lessons: Remembering What My Elementary School Teacher Said

... Part One

In October 2017, I went to stay with my sister for three weeks while I attended an EU business forum. While I was at her place, regal got listed on Coinexchange and went from 97cents at ICO to $33 within two weeks. This was very exciting for her as she had earlier invested $200 and was now able to cash out over $6000 in less than two weeks.

Needless to say, a fever of the possibilities of such an investment with such an explosive increase overwhelmed me. I quickly sold my engagement ring, having weighed the anger of my husband against the thousands of dollars we could possibly make, and I bought some Western coin. Western coin eventually yielded little above what I had sold my engagement ring for. And I am still trying to get my husband to stop talking about what I did.

Next I borrowed $2000 from some friends and bought some Hextra, some Bitbase, on the black market and $500 worth of ETHCONNECT.

Hextra yielded amazing returns of which I used some of the money to do lending while I used the rest to buy more lending coins.

ETHCONNECT eventually turned out to be a complete scam as we all know. Bitbase was a scam too but that did not catch my attention or give me any sense of premonition that a new order of lending coin scam incidents were about to become the norm in the ICO market.

I and my family were essentially blinded by the reliability of Hextra, the earnings we had made and the possibilities in earnings if one could get more cash to lend on Hextra. When Davor opened and also went to the moon with even higher earnings, we threw all caution to the wind, went all out and spoke to friends and family alike to raise more than $35,000 which we now placed on Hextra lending and Davor lending.

We also wanted to get in on time to grab a piece of the Hextra Gold that was to be released on December 25th.

When Hextra Gold was dropped on January 2nd, our faith and love for the Hextra team multiplied immensely. We wanted to find them and hug them and invite them out for dinner but we did not even know their names, their faces or even their office address.

We had signed legal agreements with our investors but we had no relationship whatsoever with the people whom we handed the $35,000 to. We did not even know their names or where they worked.

Come January 3rd, the Hextra team is on holiday and all the other lending coins also seem to be on holiday except for UNIX and Ucoin. UNIX fails to become another Regal (or at least another Hextra) while Ucoin turns out to be a modified scam (where you turn your lending earnings into Ucoin cash at $12 and then sell it in their exchange at 65 cents?).

Why were we so stupid?

1. Bitconnect had been on the lending market for about a year, so we assumed that Hextra, Davor and the rest would do at least 4 to 6 months and we would be able to recoup our investments based on their payouts at the time.

2. The windfalls from Regal and Hextra did not allow us to take full stock of the early scams that were popping up here and there through Bitbase and Western Coin.

3. Greed blinded us. Greed can blindfold you that's why it is so dangerous. Some Japanese guy made a video on ETHCONNECT that showed that the office they listed on their website was false, but we ignored the warning and went on to send our precious Bitcoins to their cul-de-sac wallets.

The slight delay in the listing of Electroneum made us think that non-lending ICOs were not as reliable as lending ICOs or as profitable.

1. We were investing in a business that we knew zero about and were not aware of the erratic changes that are synonymous with the Cryptocurrency industry.
   It always pays to learn first.

However, the major lesson here for me was a simple proverb that I had written several times in my Elementary school years: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. The one basket in this case was the lending coins ICO industry.