My first month with bitcoin - summary from small fish perspective

Today I'd like to talk a bit with you about my first month with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world.

Not until a month ago I knew nothing about crypto and things related to it. Now it's not that much different, but at least I got some basics down.

Here I'll try to tell you what I did, what mistakes I made and so on, as objectively as I can. So you can learn on my mistakes.

Let's start.

I'll do that by saying that I'm not a particularly wealthy person and also adding in the fact that I'm from a country that has not that strong currency, my initial capital was quite limited.

Let this simple table illustrate my purchases.

DATE	USD	COIN	USD/COIN
2017-05-12	$208	0.11403871 BTC	$1823
2017-05-12	$52	1.68310083 LTC	$31

So as you can see at first I invested around $260. Not a lot. For $208 I bought some Bitcoin, the rest went for LTC. Had no idea what I am doing and so on, but LTC was rising at the time so I thought I'm being smart, haha. First lesson: do not buy during so called big green dildo. Second lesson: do not listen to your emotions.

DATE	USD	COIN	USD/COIN
2017-05-22	$132	0.06197560 BTC	$2129
2017-05-22	$260	0.11853572 BTC	$2193

Couple of days go by. Bitcoin is up like crazy. I decide to dig in more. So I do. Because of problems with wire I had to wait couple of hours between them and so I paid $64 more the second time. By this time my LTC is down considerably. Around 20% or so. Don't buy on green dildo.

I get a bit spooked by this. Meanwhile, I learned about other cryptocurrencies and decided to give them a go. So I did.

I snet my 1.68310083 LTC to Poloniex to do some trading for fun. At this point in time it was worth 43$ - considerable drop in price, so I of course, decided to sell... Yep, still no idea what am I doing.

Through @noisy post on certain polish site I learned about steemit and steem. Decided to give it a shot so I created an account here and decided to buy some STEEM with bitcoins I got from selling LTC. I bought 39.135 STEEM for $43. A little more than $1/STEEM.

STEEM started rising a bit then on 3rd of June I was around +15% on STEEM - sold 20.0 of it then. Oh how happy I was. So I got decided to also start trading with all my BTC.

Then the mayhem started. Or my retardness should I say. It's been precisely a week since I poured my btc to bittrex. And during this week I made exactly 97 orders on from my account. Most of them just at random.

I started with around 0.29 BTC. At best, I got to 0.37 BTC, at worst... Better not say. Now I'm up to 0.26 BTC. Yeah. Sucks.

I however learned my lesson. I stopped trading randomly, counting on luck. I joined a group called coinvestments, where people post different kind of signals for coins to buy. Encourage you to check them out - they quite good and free.

Either way. I invested $652. After a month of my stupidity and playing around, I own 0.26 BTC, which is currently worth around 760 USD.

I made around $108, which is 16.5% of my initial investment. Not that bad, but not good either.

If I wasn't stupid, greedy, cheeky little bastard and stopped where I should've, now I'd own 0.37 BTC which is around $1090. I'd make 4 times as much as I did, but... I didn't. Too bad. Lesson learned though.

Now I'm more cautious with my strategy and I adhere to certain rules, take advice from people from the group I mentioned earlier.

All of my 0.26 BTC is currently in BAT - BasicAttentionToken - it's very interesting project that is brought by inventor of JavaScript, co-founder of Mozilla among others. Really interesting project. Even though right now it's quite low (~0.00007800 BTC) and has given me a loss for now, I believe it will fly.

DATE	COIN	BTC-BAT	BTC	USD
2017-06-10	3338 BAT	0.00007802	0.26	$760

Plans for now? Hold BAT. Get some more money to buy STEEM - I also believe that I'll fly in the long term, so yeah.

See ya next month.

Concluding: 1. Do not trade under the influence of emotions. Try to be a cold calculative psycho. 2. Do not buy on green dildo. You'll most likely lose as the price will drop. 3. Be patient. 4. Do your research - don't just randomly buy some coins because you heard something somewhere. Look on the product, read what it's about, think about it. If you think it has a future - go for it. Otherwise, don't. 5. It's worth to invest in crypto even with small capital. 6. Do not invest what you can't lose.

Questions some newbies might have, same as I did: 1. How do you store your bitcoin? I used cold storage and paper wallet. Do not hold your bitcoins on exchanges. Do not. Period. Temporarily maybe. But not for longer periods of time.

1. What exchange do you use? At first I used poloniex, then moved to bittrex. Poloniex's support was way to overflowed with everything. They still are. I also heard good things about Bitifiniex, but was told to avoid Kraken.

2. When it's good time to cash out? Depends on you. For me it's probably a long time from now on - I believe that long term bitcoin will only gain on value.