From Bounty-Hunter to Investor: The 1-year Journey
Talking about the cryptomarket nowadays can be a double-edged sword, especially in these last days. Even for the most ardent believers in the cryptos, this past week has been a violent thump in investor loyalty, both from daily traders, and of those who are just HOLDing.
If there is one lesson we can draw from this recent sharp fall, and also in comparison with previous years of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the like, it is that it takes a lot, but truly a lot of patience to invest in cryptocurrencies. If it was already difficult to withstand the extreme volatility of this market in the past, the year 2018 showed us that you can’t always rely on chart-reading, or the history of ups and downs.
It takes patience.
I entered the cryptomarket relatively late, by mid-September 2017, just before the historic high of Bitcoin and the whole world opened their eyes to this new and inexperienced market. I started small, did not have much money to invest and so I took some parallel roads to get my hands on some BTC and ETH: I started as Bounty Hunter. Bounty Hunters are people who accept digital jobs (from the simplest job, such as sharing a Facebook post on a given project, to more complex ones such as business plan translations of hundreds of pages) in exchange for cryptocurrency.
As I was fluent in English, I slowly started to get jobs as a translator of projects that wanted to expand to the Brazilian market. Receiving payments in cryptocurrency carries a very high risk/reward ratio: in some projects I was paid in currencies that are not worth anything anymore, while in others the currency came to value more than 500%.
The formula that worked for me always involved this common denominator: patience. Watch the market go up and down for days, weeks or even months, stay cool and not get carried away. Put a specific price target, and wait for as long as it takes until you get there. In the meantime, participating in crypto discussion communities, taking more jobs, studying the technology, making contacts, attending conferences and summits. The secret is not to stay put.
Nowadays I am living in Malta, the European capital of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. I am enrolled in the Blockchain and Smart Contract Programming course at the University of Malta, attending international conferences as an investor (the last one was Malta Blockchain Summit 2018). I also manage the group “Criptomoedas Brasil” on Facebook, with almost 9,000 members.
Talking about this market is not easy; it can often be an unpleasant adventure. But I am passionate about the cryptocurrency’s technology, and the gigantic opportunities they bring to today’s society: transparency, immutability, decentralization, to name a few. There is still a lot of room for growth, and we are just in the beginning.
Fasten your seat belts.
This article was translated from my original article in Portuguese posted on the Novadax Blog.
