The Million Dollar Ethereum Message

Feb 10 2016,

Bitcoin was getting more and more popular.

I was not interested in buying crypto coins, but I was still holding some Bitcoin that I bought two years ago.

Then the following arrived in my inbox:

From: Patrick
Message: ”Buy Ethereum”

Patrick is a past partner of mine. He loves gambling and goes quite often to Las Vegas. He loses more money than he makes there. Of course, the house always wins.

I had not heard from him for ages. But I had heard about Ethereum. I read about it before, but I was not getting it… A platform that will power the internet? WTF?

The vision of Vitalik (that would be the Ethereum founder) was too much woo woo to me.
But it looked like Ethereum was gaining traction. That was all before the ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). There were new coins every now and then, but not the craze we have today.

I decided to pull the trigger and buy some Ether on Kraken:
2,500 ETH @ 3.7 EUR / ETH

At its peak, only a year and 4 months later, Ethereum was valued at around 390 USD / ETH
My unrealized profit at that point was 2,500 x 390 = 975,000 USD

Lessons learned:

You have to take risks if you want to profit. Usually you risk your money or your time, time is finite so it is better to risk your money instead. The lower the risk the lower the profit and vice versa.
You have to listen to the crazy ones. Listening to rational and serious people never presented any opportunities to me, since rational people do not take big risks and stay in a safe zone. Intelligence is also overrated.

H o w e v e r, I never made/realized the million dollar profit I could have made.

What happened? I will tell you in a future post with more lessons learned. Stay tuned.

And thank you Patrick.

Feel free to follow me anywhere @victorfigol and check out my websites http://victorfigol.com & https://sonotap.com