Good ole' investing
Summer of 2017: An old family friend was visiting from out of town and through our informal discussion of finances and investing, he mentioned to me that he had received a few bitcoins from a friend he made at Burning Man. It sounded cool but I had no clue what he was talking about. I signed up for a crypto exchange but didn't delve further into it than that.
Come 2018, I was entering my second-year faculty program at the university. During that summer, I worked as a bellboy for a hotel at Winnipeg's international airport. I saved $2000.00, which I put into a tax-free savings account from my bank, and figured l was well on my way to becoming Warren Buffet. During idle times at work, I would read self-development books from the likes of Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris, and one particular book that sparked my initial investing journey - Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich, (https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/). I learned about investing fundamentals and how banks REALLY work. By keeping your money inside their system, it allows them to loan/re-invest it as they see fit, maximizing their returns and minimizing your own!
After reading IWT (I Will Teach), I realized that my bank's massive 0.01% return on invested funds would likely not net me the retirement nest egg I was seeking. Not only that, my bank would be taking a huge cut in management fees, anywhere from 1-5%. That can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over time! Shifting the funds to a self-directed account on Questrade, (https://www.questrade.com/self-directed-investing/), I purchased my first exchange-traded fund or ETF. I put it into the classic S&P 500 fund, which historically retrieves around 10% returns. Now we're talking investments baby.
The hell is a cryptocurrency?
I craved more knowledge on investing. During graveyard shifts, I would listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Scouring Spotify for self-development speakers and discussion, I found one with Andreas Antonopoulos, (https://aantonop.com/). His words would begin to pry open my perspective to the world of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain. He described a "money-technology" that could fundamentally re-arrange how the world operates, from a person-to-person level, a person-to-technology experience, and the way a person interfaces with the rest of the world.
For those that don't know, bitcoin is a digital currency or "cryptocurrency" which was designed after the 2007-2008 financial crash, to act as money and a form of payment. Transactions are maintained by a decentralized system using cryptography, which puts them outside the control of any one person, group, or centralized entity. So the big reason it was created was that it removes the need for third-party involvement (aka banks) in financial transactions. It becomes a little more complex when you try to understand how it all works. This is where the term "blockchain" comes in.
A blockchain is a system in which a record of transactions (or ledger), especially those made in a cryptocurrency, is maintained across computers that are linked in a network. "When a transaction takes place on the blockchain, information from the previous block is copied to a new block with the new data, encrypted, and the transaction is verified by validators or called miners in the network. When a transaction is verified, a new block is opened, and a Bitcoin is created and given as a reward to the miner(s) who verified the data within the block—they are then free to use it, hold it, or sell it."
I ended up purchasing Andreas' book off amazon, The Internet of Money, and through reading it, I realized how money was more than just green paper and an old person's face. It's a form of human energy, it is a means of expression. You can put money to work for you, as investments, you can use it to express gratitude to the ones you love by gifting them a present, you can gain knowledge you wouldn't necessarily have been privy to without it, it can be used to form trust. It can be used to find entertainment. Money has endless expressions.
I train Brazilian jujitsu, and the last place I thought where I would meet someone else interested in magical internet money was on the sweaty mats of my gym. My training partner had recently emigrated from Sri Lanka and was studying to become a pilot. After controlled amounts of trying to break each other's limbs and choke each other out, we chatted about school, future life plans, and finances.
Cryptocurrency came up, and we started to exchange what we knew about it. He offered to help me set up some new exchange accounts. We set up my monitor to my laptop on the dining room table. I set up a Coinbase account and immediately started to learn about the different cryptocurrencies they were offering, from XLM (Stellar), XMR (Monero), and LTC (Litecoin). I had no idea what the differences were between them, however, Coinbase was offering small amounts of each if you learned about them and answered a questionnaire - so I followed suit.
Again, I pursued no further crypto investing. I had still not purchased a single cryptocurrency yet. Incredibly coincidently, a few days later an old high school friend who I hadn't spoken to in years messaged me on Facebook. He asked what I was up to and we started to talk about money, investments and of course, he asked me about cryptocurrency. "That's WEIRD, I set up my Coinbase account a few days ago", I told him. We dived deep into the technology, the pump of 2017, and how he had captured some rather large profits already. Although he was doing his crypto investing through Greyscale, a holding company that provides users exposure to Bitcoin as a formal security, thus avoiding the buying, storing, and safekeeping process of said Bitcoin.
Conclusion: Just the beginning
At this point, I had first-person accounts, listened to hours of podcast episodes, and read books on the power and potential of blockchains and cryptocurrency. I STILL had yet to take the real plunge into investing in my first cryptocurrency. It was radically unfamiliar territory, a new world, and perhaps I wasn't ready for what was coming, but I would experience something that would change my life as I knew it.