Yesterday I made my first real error on the block chain. And it cost me 650 euro. I’m always extremely careful and double check everything before I make transactions but I missed something. I tried to split ETH into ETH and ETC tokens and forgot there was a balance difference. I was up till late just sitting behind my computer pondering my own stupidity and I got so tired of it all. I felt like writing.

My first investing lesson

I took some pills to help me sleep but I got up early this morning anyway to see my balance was of course still empty. I have been a crypto fan since 4 years now and I bought my first bitcoins just a couple months before the biggest rise to all time high in the end of 2013 after reading so much about it. After acquiring my first coins I told my brother about it (he was a banker at time) and he promptly wanted to invest. I was ecstatic, I convinced another person to invest in this amazing new thing. I helped him setup his wallet and he bought 5 BTC. He made 2500+ euro profit and sold his last coin on the peak of the climb. He never said thank you, just pocketed his profits and never looked back on BTC again.

I on the other hand sold some on the way up, just to get my investment out. But as a lover of the technology I kept most, because I thought one day this will be the future. Of course the price crashed as everyone knows. But if you believe in something it’s hard to let go. (this must be in some rookie how not to invest book I reckon). But I got my investment out at least so It didn’t bother me too much.

The first time I mined

In December 2013 I also got into mining. I never had or have owned a real mining rig. I was just fiddling about with my NVidia card having fun and learning. At the time there were new coins coming out every day and everyone was hoping to mine that one coin that would make it big.

I mined some shit coins like Leafcoin until I saw something cool. DOGECOIN. I started mining it straight away. When you sync the dogecoin block chain of a new wallet you will see my mined blocks really early in the beginning. I’m still proud of the achievement. The Dogecoin community was really fun to. I followed them for a long time seeing them do NASCAR and all kinds of cool charity projects. I also told my best mate about Dogecoin and he bought some. Cool thing is he still got his (and so do I). We make jokes about it when we get together for beers and BBQ.
>“The dogerocket is just making a slingshot manoeuvre close to earth so more people can board the rocket on its way to the moon”

and we laugh allot about it. Much wow.

The first time I heard about Ethereum

So fast forward a bit and here comes Ethereum. Once I learned about it I couldn’t stop reading about it. Now this is cool stuff. A programmable blockchain! I’m having nerdgasms left right and center. Not because I’m a programmer but because I could see the potential of this technology. I invested. More than I ever did before.

They say don’t invest more than you can lose (and I didn’t) but enough to make it seriously hurt for me (for others it might be pocket change). This was the first time I believed more in a new technology than bitcoin. And it was great at the start. The community was awesome, the ethereum foundation seemed rock solid. The atmosphere on the forums was fantastic. Just thinking about ethereum and its potential made me feel a warm and fuzzy inside.

The hard fork from frontier to homestead must have been the biggest non-event ever. And it was perfect in a way. What a smooth transition. I was watching the developers on google hangout and it was like…well..that was it. Congrats guys. Bye. This technology proved to be solid. And it was. Then the shit started.

The first (and last time) I invested in the DOA

Simply put. The DOA would be this small investment company that would help programmers develop software on the Ethereum block chain. Nobel stuff and very helpful for the growth of Ethereum. They basically held a Kickstarter and the goal was to raise $500.000. A reasonable amount, but these cunts managed to raise 150 million dollars instead. Crazy money.

But it was all safe, because the money went into a contract and it was secure and controlled by the BEST of the industry. Including the man himself. Then Satan appeared.

It took Satan 3 seconds to figure out that there was a mistake in the contract. Satan of course is also known as the Hacker. He drained a huge portion of the Investment fund into another contract. He would have full access to the funds in this contract within 4 weeks.

The price of Ether tanked. Too much uncertainty. Too much shit. Several solutions were proposed to get the funds back to the original investors. But all the proposed solutions came with a price: once you start reversing contracts in any way on the Ethereum network it’s no longer Decentralized.

From the ethereum site:
> Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

I was in favour of the hard fork for ethnical reasons. People invested money to make the Ethereum platform better and the money was Stolen (not invested badly by the DOA, which would have been a shitty reason to reverse the contract). So it made sense to me to fork and when consensus was reached to do the hard fork I was pleased. We could finally leave all this crap behind and move forward again. The fork worked perfectly and it was easy enough to reverse the DOA tokens back to ETH. Ethereum proved itself once again. For a week everything was stable again.

Than another bomb dropped.

The first time I heard about Ethereum Classic

When you hardfork a chain you basically create a split called chain A and B. The idea is that everybody will start using chain B (with all the fixes) and chain A (without the fixes, also known as the original chain) would just wither and die. This is exactly what happened, chain B was getting used by almost all the parties, and things were looking very stable again. Order had been restored.

That is until Poloniex (an exchange of crypto currency) decided out of nowhere to allow people to start trading tokens from Chain A, also known as ETC (ethereum classic). What a mess for Ethereum. Not that I don’t understand Poloniex. I mean business is business. And if you look at ETC volume on that exchange it’s been crazy. They made good money. But it’s a mess for Ethereum and causes more uncertainty for the future. And this one isn’t going away fast I think.

The first time I got tired of crypto.

After losing money by my own mistake yesterday I just feel drained. I’m tired of reading about the battle between eth and etc. Tired of reading about the block size debate of Bitcoin. Tired of the yelling and screaming of all the parties involved. Tired of the inability of the community to strive for stability. I’m going away Friday for a long weekend with my girlfriend to France. I think it would be good for me to step away for a while because I’m getting to involved in things I can’t control and it’s bringing me more stress than enjoyment. Steemit has been a breath of fresh air for me in this regard, because i feel by writing i have some control, and I’m grateful for venting on here. And who knows maybe I reached someone who feels the same.

You are not alone.

Mark