I don’t remember the first time someone told me about bitcoin. I think I was probably 16 or so, and I didn’t give it much thought. I do remember thinking the concept was intriguing at the time, although (like 99.99% of the population) I didn’t want to convert any money into it. My main problem with not wanting to buy it was I didn’t know how I would spend it. I couldn’t think of a store that would accept it, and (even though I did like the idea of it), it didn’t make much sense to me to have any.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then in 2015 or so, a friend of mine started showing me youtube videos of a teenager that put a dollar into bitcoin when it first came out and had earned over 100,000 a few years later because of it. I thought it was crazy that its price had risen to 300 bucks per coin. I also remember thinking that the ship had already sailed to buy some. It was too expensive. There was no way I would spend a couple hundred on something that had already reached its maximum price level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next time I heard about bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) was January of 2021. In that 6 year span, it had apparently risen to 50,000 dollars in value for one coin. Someone I worked with told me this. They also told that there were more cryptocurrencies than just bitcoin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My coworker told me a story of someone who put the entirety of their stimulus check into dogecoin and had made over 500k after sitting on it for just a few months. I was shocked by this. I couldn’t imagine putting 600 bucks into something like that. It was just too much money to risk. And I never gamble, I hated it. But to have returns that big, just hearing about it started to produce a faint flickering in some deep part of my brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He then told me another story of someone who sold off the entirety of their assets (their car, their house, everything) and put it into a crypto called Ethereum Classic. Overnight, (or so my coworker claims) that person became a multi-millionaire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naturally, I was floored. An older coworker of mine, overhearing the conversation, stepped in and told me that investing money in crypto is too much of a gamble. In his words, you might as well go to the casino and put that same amount of money down on a blackjack table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, even after agreeing somewhat with my older coworker, I started to follow crypto trends. I watched as Bitcoin reached 55k, then 58k, then 60k. My focus also started to shift towards altcoins, mainly ethereum. After hearing about the technology behind it, how it supports Non-fungible tokens, and how it has a much faster transaction time than Bitcoin, I became intrigued. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I even started to talk with my older brother about this, who’s in finance. At the time, in March of 2021, he told me to be wary of it. Maybe ethereum could be something worth investing in, but there was really no way of knowing which way it could move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite all of this, I ended up taking the plunge with a friend of mine, and invested quite a bit of money into ethereum on a Friday in May of 2021. I had never done anything like it before, and it was hard to peel my eyes away from the peaks of the crypto charts. In just 20 minutes, I had made over 500 dollars. I was hooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That night, I went to sleep, too excited to even shut my eyes really. My friend and I talked about how in five to ten years, ethereum could overtake bitcoin, and we’d both have hundreds of thousands of dollars. I knew it was absurd, and that there was zero chance of that happening. But there was still a part of my brain that kept lighting up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then in the morning, I opened up my crypto app and saw that I had apparently fallen 850 dollars negative from what I had initially put in. Overnight. While I was dreaming about making it big with my friend, not only had I lost the money I had gained the original day, I had fallen 850 below what I originally put in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I tried not to panic, but I still couldn’t peel my eyes away. I would literally have to turn my phone off, put it in another room, close the door, and start doing homework to not think about it. Unfortunately, a few days later, China banned crypto, and Elon Musk made the announcement that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I watched as the negative 850 in my account turned into negative 1200, then negative 1500. Then negative 2000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s hard to describe how I felt at that moment. I quietly withdrew the money I had remaining from my crypto assets, turned off my laptop, and just sat there. I had never done anything like that. The most money I had ever gambled at a casino was 12 dollars, and that was in Vegas. I had literally bought round-trip plane tickets and a hotel room for my girlfriend and I to go to Vegas, and the most I gambled there was 12 dollars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I had put way more than that into crypto. And just like that, I lost a tremendous amount (to me at least) in a few days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve realized this post is getting a little long, but there is a brighter side to it, which I think will be an interesting part two. All this talk of crypto has been a nice little break from my Machine Learning tutorial. Anyways, thanks for reading! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t remember the first time someone told me about bitcoin. I think I was probably 16 or so, and I didn’t give it much thought. I do remember thinking the concept was intriguing at the time, although (like 99.99% of the population) I didn’t want to convert any money into it. My main problem… Continue reading The Future of Money<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/3"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/zachsblog6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}