How I beat the MSCI World by over 21,000% over 13 years
Part 2: How I helped launder the Bitcoin that was stolen from me and lost everything a second time.
You can find the first part of my investment story (incl. background and TL;DR) here: https://getqu.in/JldknL/
Nice to have you back for part 2. Before I resolve the cliffhanger from part 1, let's first take a look at another topic:
Financial development until mid-20s
Of course, there was still a world outside of Bitcoin for me. I was able to increase my salary to a good 36,000 euros gross after 8 years (including training). Simply through growing experience and further training. That gave me room to breathe again. Insurance and savings were now appropriate for my salary. And slowly but surely, with my modest lifestyle, I didn't know what else I could sensibly spend my money on. So I went to my trusted bank advisor and occasionally invested four-figure sums in managed funds with poor returns and nasty initial charges. I also regularly put money into various fixed-term deposit products. My goal, if I had one at all, was to build up equity for a property for my own use. I also took out a private pension insurance policy.
I continued to do this until around 2018. In between, however, a lot happened in my crypto portfolio.
How I lost everything several times
In 2014, my Bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox, unfortunately went bankrupt due to a hack or something similar. I had everything on Mt Gox and never cashed out. My scarce 10 $BTC (-0.13%) and 1,000 - 2,000 USD were gone.
However, I didn't want to be discouraged by this and shortly afterwards started to build up a new portfolio on BTC-e, another crypto exchange. I also bought altcoins there for the first time. Of course, again without having understood anything. I seriously imagined that any coins worth billions could rise to a unit value like Bitcoin. I had never heard of market capitalization 🤦.
Of course, I hadn't learned anything from Mt. Gox and left all my coins on BTC-e. It came as it had to. The US Justice Department shut down BTC-e in 2017. Reason: BTC-e was involved in the money laundering of Mt Gox coins 😂. You can't make this stuff up. I helped launder my own stolen coins, so to speak 😅 and ended up losing everything twice.
More stupid decisions
Everything? Not quite. BTC-e came back as WEX.nz. Former BTC-e customers had the chance to get some of their former deposits back. So I was able to recover at least some of my coins.
As was to be expected, WEX.nz also disappeared from the scene without a trace a short time later. But in the meantime, I had finally learned my lesson. My coins were already safely stored on my hardware wallet at the time. At the same time, I decided to invest a few thousand euros in Bitcoin and randomly selected altcoins such as $ETH (-1.35%), $DASH (-1.93%), $XRP (+4.23%) and $IOTA (-3.53%) to invest. Of course, I still didn't understand what I was actually doing. I used Kraken and Binance as crypto exchanges.
This was also the time of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Every fool created their own cryptocurrency and tried to sell it to the people with wild promises. Of course, I was also tempted by the quick money 🤦. I invested around 1,000 euros in the tokens of a crypto AI project (cryptics.tech), which promised to use AI to predict crypto price movements with sufficient accuracy to enable profitable trading. I actually traded for a few months following the AI's recommendations. But this project soon disappeared - along with my 1,000 euros.
As you can see, I'm pretty good at acting first and thinking later. Of course, that doesn't stop in part 3 either. But then it's even more fun because I've climbed the ladder in the meantime, increased my salary and was able to make stupid decisions with more money. I followed in the footsteps of my bank advisor, so to speak 🚀
You can now find the third part here: https://getqu.in/sfTZ3P/
