A little strategic planning and it can happen to you, but of course, there are no guarantees!
This experience is definitely is NOT normal, so please don’t assume this will happen to you.
In 2021 I was caught up in all the FOMO of the bull market. (Kind of like what many of you are experiencing right now)
I had a friend who knew a guy (yeah, we all have those stories) — who became a millionaire off about a $2000 investment in Safemoon.
Safemoon eventually busted, lost trust, and tanked hard, but he had long sold off and taken his profits)
This story was real enough to me — this friend was my business partner, so him saying he knew someone personally, I took it seriously.
I wanted to get in on the opportunity for big gains (who doesn’t?), so I spent a bit of time watching youtube videos about how to sink my crypto into a new type of coin — smart contract tokens.
Smart contract tokens pay a dividend for holding and staking, but instead of being custodial and provided by a platform, it is built into the contract of the token itself. They are usually built on ETH or BSC, but can now be built on BTC too. (This concept isn’t so new anymore)
To be clear, most of my risks at this time ended up as losses, across the board.
I stuck $20 into Eclipse, Bonfire, Elon, and about 4–5 others.
All of these lost. I turned about $200 into $10 at the end of that effort.
That is what bull market fomo can do. It can loose money!
HOWEVER, one token gained so much as to cancel out ALL of my losses, and put me $20,000 into the green.
I stumbled on SHIB, and I thought it looked interesting, so I did some digging, and found a surprisingly large following around it.
Most tokens had smaller footprints and only a handful of online cheerleaders.
But I noticed something immediately about SHIB.
SHIB ARMY.
There is almost a cult popularity around the token.
Why?
Honestly I never was able to figure that out.
However, that matters very little. I don’t need to rationalize everything. I understand a little about groupthink and cult phenomenon.
The important part — I took note of the irrational popularity, and decided that this would be a sure bet to gain value at some point.
My thinking was that the popularity of a meme coin functions on the same psycho-emotional level as POGS, Pokemon, Trolls, Beanie Babies, etc.
Rationalize it too much, you’ll miss out on getting while the getting is good.
I missed out on Doge gains completely and I was one of the naysayers telling everyone how stupid I thought it was.
So this time, when a large group of people were taking creative aim at Doge, and creating a large following on the fumes of memes and 5h!t talking to Doge?
Ok. I’m in.
I stuck $20 into SHIB.
It was complicated. I had to use a bridge to exchange funds, buy BSC, then use BSC to buy SHIB, sending to their token address.
This was BEFORE SHIB was ever listed on any mainstream exchange.
I had about $20 worth of SHIB in the spring, and I held it for a couple weeks.
Price increased by 10x within two weeks.
It was now sitting at $200 or so.
I almost took my money out and went out for a nice weekend.
But I didn’t.
SHIB price fell again, and my value was around $50 or so, and I debated selling again, but decided screw it, I only came to party.
The only reason I put money in there was to profit nicely, so there is no point in going home with only $50, even though its technically a fantastic return on $20.
I am soooo glad I waited.
SHIB rocketed up again in the fall and my balance went to $20,000
You can actually see on this chart where both events happened.
My $20 turned into $200 right before summer, and it turned into $20,000 in the fall.
I wanted to hold on so bad, but I sold off, and pulled out the $20k.
Shib continued going up, and I could have made a little more, but I was happy with my choice.
Somehow, though definitely not planned, I ended up selling very near the tip of that spike.
I wish it was that easy every time!
I was not a pro trader, knew nothing about prognosticating on candlesticks.
This was pure dumb luck and a little gumption.
SHIB has surprisingly held a following, though I no longer hold any of it.
It has never returned to the heights of 2021.
I wish I had taken screenshots back then, but I wasn’t creating content yet. So, sorry for the story without my usual screenshot documentation.
Cult Value
The cult following has held on until today. Much like Doge. But that no longer impacts my choice to hold SHIB or not.
Now that SHIB has a gigantic marketcap, and considering that it’s total supply is mindbendingly enormous — its hard to drive value spikes on it.
And hard to imagine these kind of runs will ever happen with SHIB again.
Not saying it can’t still happen, but it’s all about math.
. Bitcoin = 21 million total supply.
. SHIB = a cool quadrillion.
Think about it.
I don’t expect SHIB to take off again unless a Rothschild buys it and decides to bet their entire farm on it.
I am still looking for opportunities like this, but I am always going to exercise caution and not invest anything I am not willing to loose.
At my current risk level I would never stick $20,000 into one of these coins, for instance.
$200 …..maybe.
It’s all about what you are comfy with.
And now, thanks to new “no code” tools, I think AI can help me build the bots I want.
Not just trading bots, but bots that look at new coin listings, monitor for sudden increases, market queues, etc, and automatically stick a $50 into the pot for me, to see what happens.
Come to think of it, you might be able to build one of those yourself if you are good with no-code software.
I am currently trying to conceptualize building my own trading signal based bot with Make.
Thank you for reading!
