Where were you when BTC was at 6 dollar?

Ah no it isn’t worth mining 1 BTC every two days. No Bitcoin (BTC) will never go above 6 dollars what are you saying? We have all been there but some have been there harder than others.
I was at university when the BTC craze started. I owned 100s of them in 2012. There was nothing like it out there. I mean you could call up and ask your Goldman Sachs equity holder about BTC and he would just stare blindly down the abyss. It took only 6 years to get the future here. To get The Pied Piper flux going and for the world to reinvent FOMO.
FOMO is “Fear of Missing Out”. Bitcoin did not start like that however. Bitcoin was one of the first decentralized currencies (now more a commodity than a currency) to take effect. Bitcoin was firstly adopted by dark net users as a medium of exchange: BTC for drugs, guns, hitmen or whatever else you wanted to buy without leaving any traces back to you, the consumer. It was the Paypal of the dark era.

1- You did not have to verify your identity to buy BTC.
2- You were not waiting hours on end for BTC to process.
3- BTC was a novelty, it was different and akin to its roots “a dark crypto” with no regulation and governmental power to trace your tracks.

Yeah BTC was really at 6 dollars in 2012 and I was buying loads of it as I was seeing the European Union slowly disintegrate and people starting to voice their disapprovals. Citizens of the EU had started losing faith in their own currencies, their own governments and institutions. Greece was left to fend for itself (not entirely true but it was not in the best of places), Portugal and Spain were salvaged by the European Central Bank and the European Union saw an uprising in the rightists movements.
Institution: 1. Establishment (foundation) or organization created to pursue a particular type of endeavor, such as banking by a financial institution.

It wasn´t FOMO that was driving BTC up, it was the distrust in the system. People fed up with traceable transactions, fluctuating currencies and the lack of a powerful political figures started looking at alternatives. After the adoption of BTC in the dark net community, the regular folks started looking at ways to make money. BTC started shooting up and by March 2014 it was already at 450 dollars.

You may ask if I still have these BTC laying around. My answer is no. I lost access to my wallet some years ago and was never able to obtain my old HDD. Is there regret? Sure. There will always be regret because you found out about something so fascinating, so technical and so futuristic it was almost too good to be true. At 6 dollars a BTC no one could have seen where this was going right? Well, a select few did. The future had just arrived some years too early and it took years for people to start believing in another form of system.

I am not going to dive into the technical aspects of BTC or other crypto currencies as I believe they have been well covered by the STEEM community (or even more so reading their websites). We need to have more “alive” posts. Posts that make you think, ask questions and/or laugh. There are too many posts trying to pump the value of their coins. If we continue down this path we will eventually close the lid on STEEM. Getting paid to post, upvote and comment should not be done so by any means possible.

The crypto currency market is a fascinating thing but we must not forget what drove the world to the largest financial crisis in history in 2008 (largest in real money terms). FOMO is driving up a lot of useless coins. ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) have had some very interesting projects but along with some of these we´ve had an array of projects/tokens/coins with no real value. People fear missing out on the next “Bitcoin” or “Ethereum”.
The corporations we distrusted, the ones we wanted to turn our backs to in 2008 because of their sheer greed and power now control most of the BTC and ETH in the world. The few corporations are the controlling ones. It is all great because we can all make money fast in the short run. Shares aren´t even attractive anymore because you must wait years to get a decent ROI (Return on Investment) if any!

I am not stating that the current cryptocurrency market is a bubble (it will eventually be one) but I am saying we should all be careful about our feelings. Remember Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street), he got thousands of people to invest in penny stocks. Penny stocks were usually sold outside of the major market exchanges at extremely low prices with a small market capitalization but no real liquidity – no money no assets.

Now we are all investing into projects we have barely even heard about. Our friend buys some “X” and we all follow suit because we don´t want to be the one in the group without any “X”. We are not dealing with penny stocks. The market capitalization with some of these projects spread wider than corporations that have been in the making for centuries in just a matter of days. There are new ICOs every few weeks and we are all funding them with a blind eye (Hey! Not all but you know what I mean right?)

Personally, I do not like where the Ethereum market is going. Smart Contracts are a fascinating new addition but the network has bottlenecked the past few days due to ICOs of Status Token, Civic and Bancor (150 million raised). The use of gas and how much you need is not the easiest to understand for the most of us in the Ethereum network. I do not believe that the future is in Ethereum. I believed the future was in Bitcoin but dropped out short. The crypto market craze has just started.

Just invest in what you think is right. What you believe in. Take some time apart and research.
Consider projects you might find interesting but do your own due diligence and research. Research their whitepaper (Whitepaper is a guide to how an idea or project will be implemented with questions answered in a step by step summary) and ask questions on here, reddit and wherever about any upcoming ICOs.

NEVER INVEST MORE MONEY THAN YOU HAVE

ALWAYS RESEARCH BEFORE YOU INVEST

ONLY BECAUSE JP MORGAN IS BACKING IT, DOESN’T MEANT IT WILL BE A SUCCESS.

RESEARCH.THINK.SLEEP.DO

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF FOMO