We often hear crazy stories about someone who bought early and struck it big – well, how about a horror story?

In late November 2017, I had about $45,000 in my bank account that I’d spent the last 5 years saving. Figured it was time to start thinking about investing it. So what did I do with it? You guessed it, I decided to go all-in on crypto.

So I gradually transferred it onto an exchange over the course of about a week, dealing with frustrating daily deposit limits while I watched BTC soar quickly past $8000, $9000, $10,000. I’d open Reddit and see “it’s over 9000!” memes all over the place. After spending approximately 10 minutes thinking about it, I decided on a portfolio consisting of 2/3 Bitcoin and 1/3 Litecoin. Took the advice I saw on various crypto subs and bought a hardware wallet. Things were looking good.

Of course, I fell into one of those most common pitfalls that newbies experience in this market and got extremely impatient. I watched BTC climb steadily over the following few days, but LTC wasn’t doing anything. So I decided “welp, Litecoin clearly isn’t going anywhere” and traded it all for BTC. I woke up the next morning and Litecoin was up something like 60%… it then proceeded to go approximately 4-5x over the following week. Oops.

Frustrated that I missed the LTC pump, I became desparate and began chasing other pumps. “Oh, something called Swarm City Token is up 80% today? Better buy, maybe the momentum will continue!”

In the end, I got weirdly attached to Vertcoin and became persuaded by a bunch of Vertcoin believers, while failing to account for the fact that it had already seen massive pumps and was up more than 200x that year alone. I watched almost everything else moon around me throughout December and frequently traded, but only ever with the intention of increasing my Vertcoin stack. I figured it was “due for a pump” that never really came.

I watched Raiblocks (Nano) and TRX do a 100x in a single month, with so many other coins going 10x or more, but I remained faithful to my Vertcoin. Once we reached New Years 2018 I opened the Vertcoin subreddit and saw that someone had made a post pointing something out: Vertcoin was the only coin in the top 100 to not end up in the green over the course of December 2017, the greatest opportunity in crypto history.

Well, as we know, January continued on and at first things got pretty crazy… but then they got very ugly. While my $45k had initially climbed to a peak of just over $80k, mostly thanks to BTC in early December, things were rapidly declining and before I knew it I was well below my initial investment. Eventually in the last week of January 2018, with less than half of my money remaining, I decided “that’s it, I’m done chasing coins that have already pumped, I’m going to get in early on an actual good project with real world potential this time”.

I found out about this new token that had just launched that week called Origintrail (TRAC) and saw people talking about its crazy potential, a team which had been chugging away working on the project for years already, etc. So I became convinced and decided to go all-in on TRAC at $0.25.

At first I saw a quick spike which validated my decision, but things in the market were pretty unstable and little did I know at the time, the bear market was just beginning. My holdings declined past my buy-in point, but after a massive drop, the market seemed to be showing signs of recovery. I watched TRAC drop to approximately 15c and recover to 20c, and after reading more about the project, I decided “this might be the greatest financial opportunity of my lifetime”. Now before crypto I’d never been one to take financial risks, so the whole thing was weirdly uncharacteristic of me, but it was at this point in February 2018 that I took out my first of two $20,000 loans, which I then put in to TRAC at $0.20.

Thus began the slow and painful decline of 2018. So many hopeful almost-recoveries and “BTC finally broke out of the downtrend!”, only to watch the market turn straight back down shortly after and take all alts with it. I watched my holdings bleed out more and more until TRAC had reached 5c, an 80% decline from my initial buy-in point and -75% from when I took out the loan. So in August 2018 I decided to double down and took out my second $20,000 loan.

Seeing how much TRAC had declined, I thought about buying something else with this $20k. I saw Chainlink which was trading for 25c at the time and almost decided to buy it, but I saw some FUD about it on Reddit and it had a bit of a reputation of being a 4chan meme coin, so I decided against it and instead put the second $20k into TRAC at 5c.

But the decline didn’t end there. The market kept dropping. Eventually in late November 2018, it reached the point where TRAC had declined a further 60% from my last buy-in point and I was now something like 90% down in total. My total $95k investment including all that loan money was only worth a little less than $9k. So at this point I decided “I’m already so far down, might as well make some risky plays to get a head start in the next bull market”, got out my ledger, swapped the 450,000 TRAC I had at the time for BTC and decided to open a series of leveraged BTC longs on Bitmex.

I thought the bottom was in when BTC was trading for about $4400-4200 at the time. It wasn’t. Over the course of a few days, I got liquidated over and over again until I eventually lost it all.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up committed to spending the next 2 years losing half my salary to loan repayments, with nothing to show for it. The worst part? The loan repayments also prevented me from being able to DCA in much during 2018-2019, which I otherwise fully intended to do.

How’s that for a horror story?