How I got into crypto – Fiskantes
By the way, online poker community is probably one of the biggest early adopters of Bitcoin. And unlike other communities such as libertarians and cypherpunks, poker players are not driven by ideology but largely by pragmatic needs. And some of them are switching to stablecoins now. Poker player’s life is volatile enough even without the volatility of their “working capital”. There are also nice parallels between easy money of early online poker and easy money in early crypto days, and both fields naturally attracted a lot of misfits, who want to play games and click buttons for money rather than go outside and get hired.
But I digress. I was also playing with stock markets at that time, and the price action of BTC briefly caught my attention during the collapse of 2014. That was the time when the BTC poker room shut down and I lost around 16 BTC I left there, forever. I started losing interest in poker and used my savings for traveling, and investing in stocks and some local startups, which I was helping to fundraise. World of investing always attracted me. I was into stocks, commodities, real estate, active trading. In 2016 me and my friends found an arbitrage opportunity in BTC involving infamous exchange BTC-e, which was really shady, and thus BTC there was traded with a 3–10% discount. We did couple of rounds, but it was all very shady. Eventually BTC-e got shut down by FBI.
Luckily we ended our arb operation long before that. I used some of the arb funds to create a small portfolio for pure speculation — bought some ETH, XMR, XRP and LTC in 2016, not thinking much about. In late 2016 I also started to get more interested in tech and ideas behind cryptocurrencies. At first I did a brief research and found Ethereum to be most interesting. Thanks to it I got slowly suckered in the space, studying all I could about smart contracts, tokenization, prediction markets (every poker player loves betting).
I was very lucky to ride the 2017 wave and seen my portfolio multiply, despite me not understanding the space very well. I refocused my attention more and more to crypto, abandoning and exiting most of my non-crypto projects (such as import/export brigde between Europe and India, gourmet cheese e-shop and startup fundraising services).
I was enthusiastic, the rush I felt learning more about crypto was something I only remember from my very early poker days, before the routine set in. Of course, with prices rising, everybody felt like genius, and I ended up giving advice on Quora, which sounded elaborate despite not being so:
Here I claimed LTC is undervalued.
And here I was praising TRST token.
Oh the shame…but I was learning quickly, studying hundreds of whitepaper and developing a “bullshit detector” that prevented me to lose too much money in this craze.
With research I also got deeper into the ideology, when I hang around cypherpunks and libertarians, where I started to like Bitcoin and it’s libertarian value proposition. I briefly turned into (closet) BTC maximalist, getting sceptical about value prop of “blockchains” outside hard money. I am slowly withdrawing that view, seeing the vast amount of exciting experiments happening mostly on Ethereum, but I try to remain critical and do a lot of deep dive research.
During 2017 we had many requests from our network to manage crypto based investments, provide advisory etc….so we set up a private investment fund focused on crypto assets. We also founded and funded Crypkit.com that we originally aimed to use just ourselves to manage our investment fund, and it slowly got a life of its own.
There are many more things I could write about the turbulent times of 2017–2018, — opportunities, steep learning curves, awesome and awful people I met along the way or lessons I learned the hard way (some very expensive) and even some things I wished I never experienced. I have seen a lot. From binance account getting hacked, mining ETH in my room to heat it during winter, meeting ring of scammers masquerading as OTC brokers, staying at 20 million dollar mansion in Davos for free and explaining crypto to Big 4 companies as well as businessmen in India.. But these are stories for another time.
After 3 full time years in crypto I don’t regret a thing — our Sigil fund is doing great (investing in late stage liquid crypto assets), our reporting app Crypkit turns into a full accounting tool and I am tasting (crypto) startups and early stage investments as a VC partner with Zee Prime Capital.
AMA on twitter.
(Originally published on txti)
Published at Wed, 12 Feb 2020 17:30:59 +0000
