My journey into cryptocurrency has been nothing but crazy!
You’ve never truly lived till you risk your life
The journey begins
I was a writer, putting random things on my Facebook profile. My Indonesian friend reached out to me to write a short novel. I wrote him some pages and he liked it. He wanted to send me some money, that was the first time attempting to receive money from abroad. I did some research on how to receive payments and I stumbled on Bitcoin but it made no sense to me.
On a hot evening in October 2016, few days after completing my university industrial training that I saw a post by Salim on our department’s group chat about something called Bitcoin — A financial instrument that you could invest in and make massive profits or so I thought. I had some disposable cash I made on commissions from selling imported fancy wristwatches for an older friend, so I hit Salim up
"Hey bro, what’s bitcoin it sounds techy I’m interested"
He sent me a couple of blog links to read, all of which were passing the same message of how much money I could make from buying bitcoin. Never put all your eggs in one basket, I tried it out with #3000 ($10), he told me to create an account on Nairaex — an exchange website where you place an order to buy or sell cryptocurrencies. I made a transfer to Nairaex’s bank account, submitted a screenshot of the transaction and after 30 mins (pretty slow transaction time by recent standards) I was sent #3000 worth of Bitcoin to my Jostpay wallet. I was pretty hyped, came back the next day to see the naira value increase to #3400 OMG! It’s damn real. I tried selling it back to Nairaex after all the charges and I got a a bank credit of #3200
I still had no Idea what bitcoin was truly all about or the tech behind it, I only cared about the money or rather that was the motive I was made to believe
I bought more bitcoin and started "investing" them in Ponzi schemes and HYIPs (A brilliant scam called High Yield Investment Schemes that promises daily returns on your deposited bitcoin). At first I made some money and lost it all, Damn! Bitcoin was a scam after all — I said. I started reading much about Bitcoin, it’s core underlying technology- the Blockchain and how it truly works.
Satoshi Nakomoto? Cryptocurrency? Ethereum? Blockchain?
The Discovery
What a majestic scam I said to myself, but hey the force was with me and I kept getting sucked into this crazy thing. I was pulling all -nighters consuming all forms of articles and books, driven by anger and pain then I discovered something crazy. The global economy was hit by a financial crisis in 2007–08 which was caused fractionally by the monetary system the whole world was running on — Cash and Credit. An anonymous computer programmer or a group of programmer (nobody knows exactly who he or they are) called Satoshi nakamoto published a research paper detailing a new payment system called Bitcoin, a form of money that has a limited supply of 21 million i.e there will only be 21 million Bitcoins created and it can be sent directly from Person A to Person B over an open network without the need of a bank or financial institution. This open network called the Blockchain comprises of people who voluntarily participate and validate transactions made in the network whereby each transaction is time stamped. This network was built for trust in such a way that the voluntary participants compete against each other to validate transactions by having their computers solve certain puzzles, whoever solves the puzzle first creates a new block (think of this as a folder) where the transaction will be stored and broadcasted to every other participants to verify and have it on their records. The puzzle solver also gets a reward for his/her efforts which is currently 12.5 Bitcoin (1 Bitcoin is $7300), so every other potential puzzle solver equips themselves with powerful computers to stand a chance to win rewards. There are 2 types of participants in this network 1)Nodes and 2) Miners
Nodes are people running a computer software that verifies and stores all the transactions taking place in the blockchain till present while Miners are both nodes and puzzle solvers.
Hold on, I could send bitcoin to a friend in Canada and he’ll receive it within 2 minutes? Amazing! I had a clue of what it was all about, I couldn’t sleep anymore as I unraveled new mysteries I never thought I would have encountered for someone studying Forestry and Wood Technology. I never knew the government printed money at will, controlled the monetary system, determined where I could send my money to. My mind couldn’t get enough as I kept on studying.
The Blockchain technology Satoshi Nakamoto created to power Bitcoin is a decentralized data storage system which no single person has control over. Imagine a class of 100 students working on the same assignment on google docs, whenever someone types a sentence the other 99 students see the sentence and if they click a “I accept this" button that sentence is saved forever and cannot be reversed, Yep! that’s a simple illustration of how Blockchain works. A lot of questions came to me, why do we need a decentralized database? Does this mean databases are centralized? The answers blew my mind. Apparently whenever someone performs any task on the internet, let’s say a google search, a command is sent to a database somewhere and the response is what shows as a new page on your computer — This is called a Client- server network . Stay with me! The servers are piles of computers in a warehouse somewhere that stores data, the client is you/your computer and when you search something on Google, you are actually requesting for it from the server. This happens within seconds and over the internet. Okay cool, why do i give this up over a decentralized rubbish? That was what I said too! Till I watched Snowden, a true life story movie of a CIA agent that leaked classified information of how the almighty US government was spying on it’s citizens through chats, messages, webcam using data from the top tech companies including Google. I grew paranoid, what if the same was happening to me, is this what happens with money too? OMG! I need my data in the hands of an entity the government can’t compromise.
This emerging tech could be used for a wide range of things e.g governance, voting, data storage etc. but cryptocurrencies are the first applications. A cryptocurrency is a digital asset of value that can be used as a medium of exchange and it is built on the Blockchain using cryptography (this is basically a method of securing and protecting data) with bitcoin being the first cryptocurrency. A young guy named Vitalik buterin was fascinated by this tech, looked into it and created a slightly different Blockchain from bitcoin’s blockchain called Ethereum- a blockchain that allows you to build applications on it’s platform at lesser resources and cost. The cryptocurrency used to pay for transactions on the ethereum blockchain is called Ether.
The crazy adventure
Late November 2016, I bought 1 Bitcoin at about #290,000 from an OTC trader in a whatsapp group (I wonder how I never got scammed). Early January 2017 Bitcoin blew up, I sold off for profits and I felt like a genius investor. Mid year 2017, I bought some more Bitcoin & Ethereum then the bull market came in and drove bitcoin up to $20,000. Jesus Christ! I just made loads of money. I turned into a motivational speaker and started preaching the gospel of bitcoin.
So I ventured into altcoins trading, it was fun & exciting and I was so crazy about it. I knew the price of the top 50 cryptocurrencies on coinmarketcap offhand. I was making a killing in the market, I branded myself as an expert trader ‘Every one is an expert in a bull market’……..Giving people trading tips with no professional trading experience but who cares they were all making money from my signals!! A friend and I started a small hedge fund / OTC market place Coinoyo.com, we accrued capital from small investors and traded it in the cryptocurrency market at 10% monthly ROI with over $25,000 under our management.
Then darkness came, the market had a downward spring which I was unprepared for, all cryptocurrencies went red and lost tremendous value. I thought the market was always going to be green and one of my exchange accounts — Hitbtc (you should probably stay away) was hacked with over $5000 gone into oblivion. It seemed like I ran out of luck and the universe turned it back on me, investors wanted their capital back and I totally lost my grip and confidence. It was such a hard time imposed on myself due to negligence, ignorance, anxiety, lack of proper education, lack of a mentor, misinformation etc. We had an agreement with the investors to pay back overtime, shut down operations and I went into the trenches.
The Reformation
I was under the radar for a whole year studying the true knowledge of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology and its real use cases. I took online courses by well vast individuals in the industry on the technical aspect of Bitcoin, Ethereum & smart contracts. I also took a professional trading course and got certified by the Wyckoff stock market institute. I watched tons of YouTube videos, read loads of books. I figured out all the mistakes I had made, so i started teaching my fellow mis-led buddies of what this revolutionary tech was truly about. I sought out well knowledgeable personalities, I attended tons of conferences. I would travel miles to Ibadan and Lagos to connect with people. I met so many experienced industry leaders like Nathaniel Luz, Team lead of Dash Nigeria and Chris Ani, co founder of cryptohub and also Senator Ihenyhen of infusion lawyers. I came across an article that showed how a cryptocurrency “Dash" was solving real problems in inflation ridden Venezuela. The local currency — bolivar was rapidly devaluing at an inflation rate of over 100,000% and Venezuelans were turning into a more reliable currency. Dash was used to pay for goods, services and even for remittances from fellow Latin American countries. I had my mind blown and it looked like something that could only happen in a utopian society but it was real. The whole Blockchain & crypto space was purely based on speculation but here’s a crypto project being used for a real life use case. I started looking into Dash and joined the Dash Nigeria team as the Head of Product & Merchant Adoption where I worked from May 2019 - December 2019 and I contributed heavily in making Dash one of the cryptocurrencies with relatively high use cases in Nigeria through business development and marketing activities. I fell in love with some other projects such as Decred, Aeternity, Waves, EOS, BOS etc. all building amazing stuffs.
A picture of me speaking on the future of Cryptocurrencies at the coincola campus meetup
Money has existed has far back as civilization itself but history records its transition from Trade by barter to — Commodities such as salt, cowries, weapons etc. to — precious metals e.g Gold, Silver, Brass etc. to — paper money to — plastic (Credit cards, Debit cards)etc. to — Digital money e.g USD, Euro, Naira you transfer from your Banking apps to — Now cryptocurrencies. Money evolve as humans evolve also, you best prepare for it. Cryptocurrencies are relatively new form of money gaining mass adoption everyday and its best use case so far is cross border remittances! You can send or receive money from abroad within 2 minutes, amazing right?
The journey has been rough, challenging, super exciting and most of all I keep learning something new everyday. I’m a misfit and the cryptocurrency & blockchain ecosystem is where I fit in perfectly trying to contribute my efforts to fight the broken system. If you’ve watched Star wars, I am soldier of the rebellion army!!
Things to know before you come in the crypto
1) The Blockchain technology is a land, cryptocurrencies are just houses with different designs built on it.
2) Seek proper education before jumping into this space. Take your time to learn, Have fun and don’t rush it.
3) There are no certain experts in this space the industry is still quite young, be careful who you follow.
4) Cryptocurrencies are not guaranteed investments. Do not invest any money other than your spare cash, the market is quite volatile.
5) Learn, unlearn and relearn!
If you made it this far, I hereby declare you a fully armoured crypto knight!!
Thanks for reading
Have fun 👌🏾
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