A super newbie in the cryptocurrency world

How do newbies who don’t even have basic investment knowledge survive in the cryptocurrency world?

Bitcoin, I only heard the name in the news at first, and I just knew it was a cool thing, and at that time I felt it was a new payment method. At that time, the most popular non-cash payment methods were still credit cards and checks. Payme, FPS, Googleplay, and various QR code payments were still on the way to being born.

When I heard about it again, it was the end of the last bull market. At that time, I was having dinner with a friend, and he mentioned to me that he was buying BTC. Then, with his help, I successfully created my first exchange account and bought the first batch of BTC in my life. Then I studied virtual currency by myself and started to lose money. At that time, I couldn’t understand the charts, what was a bull market, what was a bear market, I didn’t understand, that’s right, I was a super pulp novice who hadn’t even formed a blank sheet of paper.

During the Super Pulp period, I was exposed to many different ways of making money, which allowed me to learn more about virtual currencies, but also made me realize that there are many traps.

1: Cloud Mining

This is the first method I know of to obtain virtual currency. Create an account on the cloud mining website, and then use virtual currency to purchase different plans to give you more computing power. This method allows people who don’t know how to mine to easily obtain virtual currency.

CryptoTab:

This is the first mining APP I have come into contact with. You can download it on your phone and start mining with just one click. However, it is very troublesome to press it every fifteen minutes, and the basic computing power is very slow. I thought about buying the speed-up function, but since its acceleration function has a time limit, I have to press the mining button almost every minute and every second after calculation to really get my money back, so I didn't buy it in the end. And I didn't use it again after using it for a few months.

Different cloud mining sites:

I have come across several cloud mining websites, but many of them are scams. These websites generally have several common points: if you recommend others to join, you can get extra rewards. You will get free computing power after creating an account, and different plans are also provided. It is normal to withdraw money in the early stage, but it will gradually become impossible to withdraw money.

The most profound experience for me was when I saw many people discussing the same cloud mining website A in several different groups. Seeing many people discussing it, I felt that it was safe. I linked to the website. The website design was very technological, and they also released photos of their management and cooperative organizations, and they also released the types of mining machines they were using. So I created an account and got a small amount of free computing power to start mining.

Later, I transferred some BTC to increase the mining speed. Of course, the speed also increased, and the withdrawal was very fast. After you apply for withdrawal, you will receive a notification from the exchange that the money has been credited to your account in about 20 minutes. After trying for several times, I deposited money again to speed up the process. However, after a few days, some people discussed that the withdrawal was a bit abnormal. Some people applied for withdrawal and waited for several hours but did not receive the money credited.

When more and more users encountered this problem, after a day, the website could no longer be found. The link only showed that there was no such website. Different groups cried out at the same time, and many people said how much BTC they had deposited. Of course, my principal was also zeroed out. This time I regarded it as buying experience, and lost money because of greed.

Not long after, someone suddenly said that a new mining website was found, and said that this website was the younger brother of cloud mining website A. After that, I saw various discussions in different groups again. However, a few days later, as expected, this website also disappeared. And this time I was just a spectator, watching them cry again.

2: Private Message

While researching more ways to make money, I joined some groups and communicated with others to see if I could discover some ways to make money.

During this period, I received a private message. After saying hello to the other party, I discussed with him our respective methods of making money. Later, the other party said that he had used my coin-making project, but because the return on investment was very slow, it was soon useless. Instead, he used another staking mining method, and he only needed to put USDT in the hot wallet to easily mine ETH.

At first I refused, but later I found that you should not tell others the mnemonic phrase and private key in the hot wallet, and the risk is not too high, so I tried it. At first, under the guidance of the other party, I only put in about 200 USDT. At first, I could receive ETH every day, and after a few days, I quickly earned back the principal of 200 USDT, so I transferred more USDT to the hot wallet, and thus received more ETH every day. In the end, I put in more than 2,000 USDT in total, but soon I found that the USDT in my hot wallet was suddenly transferred away, and it was suddenly used to participate in a special event.

I immediately contacted the other party to ask why this happened. The other party said that this was a special event of the website. He had tried it himself and got a reward. You only need to enter the specified USDT in the designated area to retrieve the USDT and the ETH of the task reward. I calculated the money I needed, which was basically half of my savings. Since I felt that this gambling was very dangerous, I did not carry out this task. Of course, those USDT could not be retrieved in the end.

Then I checked some information on the Internet and found out that there is a way to transfer the funds in your hot wallet without using mnemonics and private keys. This is the contract. It turned out that when I signed the contract with the website, I had been trapped by the other party. This was the time I lost the most money.

３：GAME FI

Making money by playing games is actually what I have wanted to do since I was a child, because I want my family to understand that games are not necessarily just a waste of time. Therefore, I started to research and join the GAME FI category, and gradually got to know different games. During the research process, I also came into contact with centralized exchanges such as PancakeSwap.

I have come into contact with about ten GAME FI projects, some as large as MOBOX, and some have already ceased operations.

I would look for different GAME FI videos to watch and learn how to play the games. I even made a profit from some games, but it turned out that GAME FI was very different from ordinary games, which made me lose my capital in the end.

The biggest difference between GAME FI and ordinary games is that the game currency of GAME FI will be affected by the market. Whether it is the atmosphere or the copycat sales, it will affect the market value.

Take MOBOX as an example. MOBOX is the first GAME FI I came into contact with. When I first joined MOBOX, the rarer NFTs were more than 300 BUSD each. At that time, the game currency MBOX was about 8 to 10 USDT each. The game was still very popular at that time, so the price of NFTs and tokens was also very high. I made profits again and again and bought new NFTs to increase computing power, and I spent more than 1,500 BUSD. But with the bear market, all prices are now only 5 to 15% of the original price. I don’t know how long it will take to get my money back.

Now that the bear market is over, MBOX circulation has obviously dropped, and it is not easy to trade successfully. So in the end, I also chose to give up this game.

4. Decentralized Exchanges

The first time I came into contact with this kind of exchange was because I was learning about GAME FI and dual-currency financial management, so I got to know this kind of exchange. The first decentralized exchange I came into contact with was PancakeSwap, because I needed to use it to exchange some GAME FI game coins.

PancakeSwap let me know that there are still many unknown tokens in the world, many of which are game coins of GAME FI, and some tokens of new projects. But unfortunately, many tokens cannot even be traded normally for various reasons.

The most profound experience of using PancakeSwap was when I earned about 500 BUSD. This was because I joined a dual-currency mining pool, which was composed of BNB and a GAME FI token, ETERNAL. The GAME FI project was very famous at the time, so the token value was very high. After I added liquidity to the mining pool, one day I found that the value of my holdings had increased, which made me feel that it was better to close the net first, so I finally withdrew the liquidity and left with the income.

But after a while, I was itching to see that its liquidity and value continued, so I exchanged ETERNAL and BNB again to add liquidity. But not long after, the GAME FI project collapsed, the value of ETERNAL plummeted, and my funds were once again reduced to zero.

This experience made me realize that I must be careful when investing in projects and pay more attention to changes, because the market will continue to change and every change can affect your money.

5. Others

It was a bear market at that time, and the world economy was hit hard, and both the stock and cryptocurrency circles suffered heavy casualties. So I decided to temporarily withdraw and wait for time.

During this time, I got to know the website NOISE, which is a website like FACEBOOK. You can earn BCH by sharing your life and interacting with other users. It is a very good website. Later, when it moved to a new website, I still used it, but I didn’t understand the new website’s method of earning BCH.

On the old website, when someone likes your post, the system will give you a small amount of BCH, but when the amount reaches 0.01 USD, it will be automatically converted into BCH to your account. However, some people use BOT to like each other in their accounts to earn BCH.

In the early days of the new website, the way I received BCH became unclear. Apart from the BCH support from other users, sometimes I did not post anything but suddenly received BCH when communicating with others, and sometimes I posted something but did not receive any BCH. Later on, these situations became less and less obvious. In addition, I started to know LIKECOIN and MATTERS at that time, so I slowly moved my life sharing to MATTERS.

After all the events mentioned above, I gradually understood what others said: "One day in the real world is like ten years in the cryptocurrency world" and "Virtual currency is a high-risk investment product".

After I came into contact with virtual currency, even my friend who taught me how to open an exchange account was surprised, because when he was still using the exchange to buy and sell BTC, I had already made preliminary contact with various fields. Of course... I was also badly hurt.

Today, several years later, although I am not an investment guru or an expert in the cryptocurrency circle, if you ask me to share my experience with other new investors, the following are my current views on virtual currencies.

[Virtual reality and reality are actually separated by a network]

The things you come into contact with in the online world are actually the intersection of various actions of various people living in the real world. Therefore, each virtual currency and project is created by different people. There are good people and bad people in the real world, so there are also good people in the virtual world. So whether a project is good or bad, you must first understand it clearly before taking action, unless you want to be like me and watch your money fly away.

[Attitude first, technique second]

Now I still don’t know how to analyze charts. I still don’t know how to judge M bottom and W top. But a calm mind is more important. No matter in stocks or cryptocurrencies, once you enter the market, if you are not calm enough, it is easy to make wrong actions due to price changes.

In addition, if you have the skills but lack the mentality, you may constantly hesitate about the decisions you make and end up missing the best time to act again and again.

Therefore, as an investor, mentality is actually more important than technology.

[Self-collection > Trust others]

In the investment world, please do not trust anyone blindly. If you want to know something, please collect different information on your own. When communicating with others, do not blindly believe what others say, especially projects or methods that claim to make money efficiently. These are often traps, and discussions among multiple people are not necessarily safe. They may be carefully planned by scammers.