Crypto Thousandaire

"They were drunk on youth, fueled by greed, and higher than kites."

- Jordon Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

My curiosity in cryptocurrency started back in 2014, I think, when I had heard, for some time, whispers in the darker corners of the internet starting to bubble up about a rarefied fake money called The Bitcoin was starting to make waves and people were starting to make money from it. After a bit of research I learned that it was something you could apply the right kind of technology to and pull this fake money right out of thin air. I was intrigued. As a youngish dad of twins I had been on the prowl for some easy money and this seemed like just the scam.

After further reading, I accepted that I was already too late - oh, what a fool I was. An article at the time wove the tale of an Australian Bitcoin miner who was facing the ever increasing challenge - the most basic tenet of Bitcoin - it gets harder to mine as time goes on by requiring more juice, better computers to do the work and get paid. Here, the work is verifying transactions, which of course is now relegated to finest back-alley server farms in China, all crunching away to dig up digital pirate treasure.

In a lot of ways I was right to give up, assuming that I was too late to the game and not able to mine this fake money out of the ether. Now just few years later, I see my error. I've never milked my own cows, so why would I think I needed to milk the damn internet? There's the rub - I slept on it, perchance. The opportunity, it seems, would have been to sink the cash I thought I'd sink into a mining rig right into the few cryptos that existed at the time. Hindsight is a bitch.

At the time, a single Bitcoin went from hundreds, to about a thousand dollars, then back down to hundreds. If I had the wherewithal to figure out how to buy it at the time, and was somehow able to hang onto it, I would've done ok. And yet, here I am - a Crypto Thousandaire, in spite of myself. I bought my first ticket to the rollercoaster last spring, added a little cash through the summer and into the fall, cashed out enough Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum to cover my initial investment, and reinvested much of the rest into a handful of other coins of varying returns.

Having hedged my original investment, now I'm just playing with house money and waiting for the whole damn thing to crash to burn. But until then, it's all Champale wishes and Cavalier dreams.