Let me start off by stating without shame or embarrassment, that I am by most standards, and especially as a natural born United States Citizen, dirt poor. With half of my life already over, I have nothing substantial to show for it, despite years and years of work , and lost jobs, and more work, and more lost jobs. I live now for each day that I am given, as best as I can, and make the absolute most out of opportunities when they happen to come along, much like the time that I will continue to be living (temporarily) in Indonesia, which that alone took a year of working shitty, odd jobs and saving every penny, just to make happen. Now that I've made that very clear...
I've been itching to get in on this cryptocurrency craze very badly, since the day that Bitcoin hit the $5000 mark. I remember vividly, I was sitting awake, early into the morning, in my little apartment in Denpasar, watching my girlfriend and her daughters sound asleep at my side, when I read the news of Bitcoin's new peak. In that moment I had this overwhelming urge to contact my few, great friends back home in the states and urge them to get some money invested, because I can just feel that somehow, this train was going full-speed-ahead. I also felt the sorrow that comes along with knowing that I, myself, am completely broke, beyond the exact amount of budgeted money that I needed to survive in Indonesia, as well as protect my girlfriend and her daughters, but I knew that I couldn't even spare a mere $100 at the time, and so I let my feeling of urgency pass, and continued to watch Bitcoin rise toward the sky over the next couple weeks.
Well, fast forward time until just about four days ago from the time of this posting. Being temporarily back in The United States so that I can stock up on my necessary medicines and hopefully work a few odd jobs over the course of a month before heading back to Denpasar, I suddenly found myself with a couple hundred dollars that I could spare, to finally get myself invested in a cryptocurrency. So, without any experience, and having researched and learned as much as I could in just the course of a day, via reading articles and watching YouTube videos, I decided to go with Coinbase, and initially put my $200 into Bitcoin. That is when I learned my first lesson. I should have verified my Coinbase account directly to my bank account right from the get-go, instead of making my first purchase with my debit Master Card, because I was charged a service fee of close to $5. While service fees are likely not a big deal to bigger investors, they are a very big deal to people with very limited funds to invest, like myself. The only apparent benefit of using a debit Master Card was that my Bitcoin would instantly available in my wallet, right there in Coinbase.
This brought a very satisfying feeling to me. I could look at my very own Bitcoin balance just buy opening up Coinbase on my browser or even the app on my phone. I only had a very small fraction of a razor thin slice of the grand cryptocurrency pie, but hey man, at least I was in the game! That's when the feeling inside grew even stronger, so I spent many more hours, combing the web and skimming through YouTube, soaking in as much information as I possibly could in a short time, to find out about other altcoins that may become profitable in the near future. I started looking at graphs and charts, and learning about market cap, volume and supply. I studied at least five different altcoins that were all under $5, just to see if there is one that I believed in, to move some of my Bitcoin balance over to.
My friends, this is when I first set my eyes on what I had a gut feeling to be a very possible winner, both in the short term, and to hold onto for the long term. From the moment that my research began about Verge XVG, it wasn't long before I knew I needed to get some, and I knew that I couldn't wait too long to do it, and at just about a penny and a half per coin, it was ideal for a broke guy like myself. This set me out on a new mission, to find a company like Coinbase, but one that offers Verge (XVG) in exchange for Bitcoin. I decided to go with Bittrex, and so it wasn't long until I had a verified account, which was as easy as submitting front and back photos of my I.D. along with a freshly taken selfie. This is where my next costly lesson came into play. It was time to transfer some of my Bitcoin from Coinbase to Bittrex. This was very easy to learn, simply copy and pasting the correct receiving address and just go-for-it! Well, that's when I learned my next lesson, that just to make that transfer, it would cost me a fee of about $16. Shortly after that first transfer I learned that even had I transferred more, the fee would have been the same, and of course, instantly I was kicking myself for not having just transferred more to begin with.
The transfer took about thirty minutes to complete, and then there I was, all set and ready to use the value that I had of Bitcoin in my Bittrex wallet over to Verge, also in my Bittrex wallet. Fortunately that transfer only cost a fraction of a dollar, and now I was the proud, excited owner of about a thousand Verge coins. If you're thinking at this point that intrigue probably didn't stop there, then you'd be dead-on correct, because now that I owned Verge, I began hours more research into this particular coin. Everything that I read, including a recent tweet from John Mcafee, made my belief even stronger in the long term potential to make unimaginable amounts of money from holding on to Verge coins. Add to that, during the hours that I spent on this research, Verge was already beginning to climb in value, hitting right about at $.02 when I knew immediately that I need to get more of my Bitcoin value moved over to Verge, while it was still at such a massively low price, and so I did just that.
As I sit here writing this post, right now, Verge coin has hit $.045 in value, having broke a record of cracking $.05 just about an hour ago. Even when you include the fees that I incurred during all of this process, as I am a newbie in the cryptocurrency craze, my initial $100 that it took to get me, now a total of 4680 Verge coins, is worth $200. Even with my early, hard learned mistakes, I have double my money with Verge coin (XVG.) Doubled!
So, where does the future of my minuscule yet relevant dip into the cryptocurrency world go from here? Well, that is the very question that I am asking myself as I write this. Do I leave everything as is, keeping about $95 (at current value) left in Bitcoin, $35 in Litecoin and $200 in Verge coin? Or, do I transfer the rest of my Bitcoin over to Verge coin, in hopes that we are not even close to seeing the potential for Verge to grow high to the sky? One thing is certain, that no matter how much of a correction that Verge coin goes through before rising again, I will be holding on to every last XVG coin that I own, well into 2018.
Thank you for reading, and an up-vote would be quite nice of you, if you enjoyed any part of this post, hearing of a newbie's tale of a journey into Verge. Also, I leave you with this question... Will you be investing in Verge XVG?