Learning About Crypto
I'm a cryptonoobie, and here's my learning process.
Last updated
I'm a cryptonoobie, and here's my learning process.
Last updated
Disclaimer: I guess that goes without saying, but still: I'm not a financial advisor. I'm happy to share my experience, though. Proceed at your own risk.
I've been curious about cryptocurrencies for a few years, but never really inquired into it, because it seemed too complicated and technical.
It still does, but I feel some energy to explore a little bit of this rabbit hole, and as always, I'm happy to document the process and share it with you.
I don't have much money to invest. The most common advice seems to be to invest only what you can afford to loose, and that means a few hundred euro for me.
I don't really want to spend a lot of time researching. Crypto is a super deep rabbit hole, and I don't feel the need to be an expert in that field. However, I want to know enough to be able to navigate this world, and communicate with people who know more about it and learn through them.
I want to make some money. Ideally, loads of money, fast, and without any work 😄. But that obviously is not likely to happen, and I'm totally okay with that. Since I play with small sums, I know that the gains won't be massive even if I 10x my initial investment.
I'm happy to pump some cash into crypto because I feel that this technologies are changing the world for the better, and even if I loose all of my money, I want to support this movement.
I started with a free exploration of different videos, articles, tweets etc. I quickly got overwhelmed, but also gained awareness of the vocabulary that I would have to understand.
In the process I've noticed that I lack financial education (the only thing I did in that field was to read the Rich Dad, Poor Dad a few years back). I vibed with videos from Andrei Jikh and learned some basics from there, although I didn't vibe with his values (eg. I'm totally not okay to put my money into Exxon Mobile, even if it's profitable).
I think best relationally, so I reach out to a few people I know, who know about crypto. During these conversations I was able to clarify my intentions, ask "stupid" questions, find new questions to ask, and find common pieces of advice.
Sometimes a twitter prompt is good enough to start the process. I'll add the list of resources that were recommended to me at the end of this note.
However, the best outcome was clarity on what are my next steps.
One of my friends shared about Pi Network, which seemed great because it didn't require any financial investment and felt very easy. I wrote a note about Pi Network here. I'm still loving it, and if the project really takes off, it can generate some wealth for me.
Finally, the time was ripe to put some money on the line. I started with Coinbase because it felt the easiest and I've had a referral link from a friend.
My first step was to buy SEEDS to pay for Regenerative Renaissance course. I transferred GBP into Coinbase, bought BTC, and then bought SEEDS with BTC using Seeds app. This is actually a great investment, because the course pays 4800 SEEDS (around $300 at the time of writing) to students who complete all of the assignments, so it's a wonderful investment – I get paid for learning! After I paid for my course, I planted all the remaining SEEDS I had left, which will bring me some benefits in the future.
Learn more about Seeds ⤵️
The next step was to buy around €170 worth of ETH (Ethereum) at €1,630.80 on 24th of April. As I'm writing this post ETH is over €3k.
The referral link to Coinbase (like this one) gave me a tiny amount of BTC. It's not much, but it's growing.
I absolutely love Iconomi. You pay a small fee to follow a strategy managed by someone with more experience than you. This sounds perfect for someone like me, who doesn't want to spend time glued to charts and rebalancing my portfolio based on market activity.
I've decided to follow Metastrategy by Stephen Reid, because the idea behind makes a lot of sense to me (and I appreciate the fact that even as a cryptonoob I can understand how it works), plus I came across Stephen's work and loved it, and I know that people I trust trust him with crypto advice. That's good enough for me, so I've transferred €100 worth of ETH from Coinbase to Iconomi.
🚨Technical note: It seems that Revolut doesn't work well with Iconomi.
My portoflio on Iconomi was growing fast, so I wanted to add some more cash there and follow a different strategy. A friend suggested to try Binance, so I gave it a go and bought some ETH to transfer into Iconomi.
As I was about to make a transfer, I noticed that the fee was 5x higher than in Coinbase. I thought that perhaps I can pay smaller fee with Binance coin (BNB) so I traded some ETH for BNB. Unfortunately that didn't solve my problem. I decided to keep the ETH and BNB and in the future I'll use Coinbase for fueling my Iconomi protfolio. Lesson learned.
That's where I am at right now.
This is the North Star strategy I'm playing with:
ETH HODL (⅓) – buy ETH, and hold on to it for long term.
Copying strategies of others (⅓) – using Iconomi, and perhaps PieDao.
100x AltCoins (⅓) – invest in 1-3 altcoins with a huge potential for growth (TBC).
Pi Network (0 financial investment) – mine daily and hope for Pi to be worth something in the future.
Seeds (minimal financial investment)
Below is the table of my current distribution of assets with growth to date.
Asset
% of Investment
% Growth
Metastrategy on Iconomi
35%
31%
ETH
45%
31%
BNB
7%
1%
BTC
2%
104% *
SEEDS
10%
–
Pi Network
No financial investment
–
*The crazy 100% BTC growth, is due to referral money coming in and the amounts being super small. I left it for dramatic effect 😄.
My next step is to find the Altcoin(s) to invest in, and put in another €100, and (hopefully) see it grow to €10k 🤞🏿.
I'm planning on taking out 20% back to fiat currency, when my assets triple, and gradually recuperate my initial investment.
If I get to 50k, I'm pretty much withdrawing everything (or most of it) from crypto and buying a piece of forest and building a tiny house on it. And leave the rest to grow into a sailboat ⛵️.
Mining Helium (seems promising, but I'd need to invest in 3 nodes because there are no nodes around me)
Pie Dao (similar to Iconomi, but decentralised)
The list is much longer, but I don't want to overwhelm myself, so better keep it simple.
If you have comments or ideas to share, ping me on twitter. I'm always happy to connect. If you want to laugh at me because I'm a total noob, you're also welcome to do so. I laugh at myself a lot 😄.
Crypto Fundamentals by Richard Bartlett
Introduction to Crypto Investing by Richard Bartlett
Crypto Investing: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Reid
Coin Bureau (youtube channel)
Andrei Jikh (youtube channel)
The Defiant (newsletter)
DeFi Pulse (newsletter)
The Kraken Intelligence (newsletter)
DeFi Learning Resource from Zapper
Introduction to Crypto and DeFi (online course)
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