Guess this is fairly bad timing to post this with Bitcoin's fourth re-test of support, but I shall post it in any case.
How did I get into crypto? This is really tied to my passion for travel.
In December 2014, my laptop was in its last legs. While I could afford a cheap Chromebook, I am so used to Macs that I highly suspected buying a non-Mac would have been disastrous for my productivity. This was when I chanced upon this particular credit card sign-up offer - Chase Freedom card, where if I spent $500 in 3 months, and I would get $200. It sounded like it was too good to be true, except it wasn't. I signed up for it, and eventually got a refurbished Macbook Air for less than $600 out of pocket, after using the Chase portal to get even more cashback.
This was my introduction into the world of travel-hacking. In the first three months of travel-hacking, I made a lot of mistakes, like signing-up for less-than-ideal credit card offers. For instance, I signed-up for a 30,000 United miles offer with Chase, when there was a better 50,000 mile offer out there. Lesson 1: Google the best offers out there. In my first year, I was highly constrained by my limited spending (not to mention limited income) ability. There is a simple key to travel-hacking - the best bonus you can get is when you sign-up for a new credit card.
Travel-hacking really doesn't take long to give rewards. It was actually with great excitement, that in summer 2015, with less than six months of travel-hacking, I was able to take my first trip since graduate school started - a trip to Cuba, Colombia and Panama. Visiting new countries has always been a grand passion of mine, and the poverty-line existence that I led during graduate school meant that for some 5 years, I wasn't able to do that, because all the travel was between the US and Singapore for annual visits to home.
Over time, I developed more ways of charging all my expenses to my credit card. Things like rent, paying friends, tuition fees were all charged to my credit card. For a while, I was even able to fund an Amex bank account of sorts with a credit card, and get credit card sign-up bonuses in about 20 seconds ... in my pyjamas (RIP Amex Serve).
In my second year, things got even crazier. I started reselling iPad mini 2s at break even just for the points. While reselling is a good avenue for earning credit card bonuses, and even earning money, I didn't exactly have the time for that. All that, however, came to an end, when I went back to Singapore. My living expenses in Singapore were laughably low (<$500 a month), and reselling goods would have taken up more time than I was willing to invest. My only method for spending more money was to go for international conferences at the invitation of organizers, or using funding from my work, but even that was a bit of a drag. Imagine going to the same places multiple times, where you fly in the night before, spend all day at a meeting, pass out in your hotel, and then fly right out the next morning.
In October 2017, I spent three weeks doing library research in China. China has an epic firewall. While the epic firewall was really quite annoying, being cut off actually has some benefits. I had a lot of time on my hands to explore new things that weren't blocked by the firewall. I was reading about a new project called Refind by one of my favorite bloggers, Doctor of Credit, and how some of the things he signed up for pan out, and some of them don't. One of the things that panned out for him was signing up for Coinbase, whereby his sign-up bonus paid out in BTC actually ended up turning into a couple of thousand dollars (he signed up in 2015).
I have encountered Bitcoin previously, in an article probably four years ago, about this couple who were trying to travel around the world, paying their way using crypto. I have a terrible memory, but for some reason, that article stuck in my head. To add to that, I was on a flight to my friend's wedding in March 2017, and I sat beside an elderly gentleman, who mentioned that his son makes his living by trading cryptocurrencies. These things all converged that in my free time in China, I started researching into it.
In October 2017, I made the leap. Some of my passions have collided! As it turns out, I could buy Bitcoin on Coinbase using my credit card (at a 3% fee). The way I thought about it, I could basically buy Bitcoin, wait for it to rise a bit, and then sell it back, and pay off my credit card bill. This way, I can keep earning those credit card bonuses, and keep traveling. [sadly, in Jan 2018, it's no longer possible for purchases on Coinbase to process as a credit card charge, as opposed to a cash advance, so this avenue for earning points has died as well]
Funnily enough, the more I spent time watching Bitcoin prices move, the more I started reading into the movement behind Bitcoin, and the ideas behind Blockchain. While I do not understand the technology behind it, I really do like the philosophy underlying Bitcoin and blockchain projects. I think the balance is finally tipping away from the endless concentration of resources in the hands of the few, and we're slowly moving towards more efficient and decentralized distribution of resources.
So, that's the long story of how I landed up in cryptosphere.
How did you end up in cryptosphere?