When I first heard about "cryptocurrencies," like most people I had no idea what it was about, and I had my financial eyes on what I considered more immediate and important things. And, like most people, a few years later I regretted it. Along the way, the little exposure I had to it was typically the mainstream news, much of which branded it a thing for the "millennial generation" and sketchy at best, outright fraud at the worst. Although I consider myself pretty computer savvy, when it came to things like blockchain technology, it was just a bit over my head, and I moved on to things that were in my more immediate sphere of influence, like paying my monthly bills and spending time with my grandkids. To add to that, I come from a generation that's typically been either pro-or-anti investing of any kind. For many of us, we inherited our hippie parents' counter-culture mindset, while the others inherited the opposite, with very little in-between. When the news media began to talk about the massive money, the large scale investors, and the attention the financial community was giving cryptocurrencies, I kind of wrote the ocean of crypto off as something that only bigger fish than me would have any chance at surviving in. 

Since my early days programming in DOS (the precursor to Microsoft's Windows platform,) on a shiny new Commodore 64, I've always been interested in the amazing things computers can do. I grew up watching "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes"  starring a 13 year-old Kurt Russell. It's a Disney property and on their streaming service to view, and highly recommended for the nostalgia factor, if only to show your grandkids how BIG computers were and how lucky they should be for their tablets. Before the internet was born, people with computers had to communicate with phone modems and many of us communicated through Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs. These was the systems, run mostly by users, that laid the foundation for what became the World-Wide Web, which further evolved into what we have today, with websites springing up teaching everything from HTML, CCS, Java, and everything else in-between. Not to mention programming languages and the explosion of computer graphic design.

So I was always tinkering around with all things computer, and it bugged me that this thing called "crypto" was becoming a big thing and I didn't know how to use it. I read up on it, but could never really wrap my brain around it much. I liked the concept of "decentralized" finance (or DeFi for short) though - I was one of those that picked up that counter-culture leaning I mentioned earlier. In addition, I grew up poor, so the idea of finally doing something right and getting out of poverty was a pretty good motivator. 

It all started with the Brave browser on my laptop. Touted as a more secure browser, I looked into it and decided to check it out. The developers of this browser feel instead of making a killing off selling the user data to advertisers, they created a way to encrypt your data locally on your PC and then when your data matches their criteria for any advertisers they work with, you see a small unobtrusive pop-up in the corner. This is on top of a great ad blocker, built in Tor, and a number of other features. And for this, they pay the USER for the advertising being displayed, - they give you revenue in the form of BAT - Basic Attention Token. I liked the idea of all that extra security AND getting paid in crypto (as well as the name Basic Attention Token, since you're "paying attention,") but it required an Ethereum wallet, and I had no clue what I was doing.

Brave works with the Uphold wallet, so I opened one of those to drop my BAT into. Uphold isn't bad, but to transfer anything out, you're going to pay a transaction fee, something the crypto world calls "gas" (like gas for your car.) Then I found a website called Coinbase, where you can earn small bits of various crypto tokens by watching short videos and answering very simple multiple choice questions about what you watched. I earned about $20 worth of various tokens doing that. Each month when Brave paid me for use, I would swap it into something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and even Dogecoin. Eventually because of the tokens' value going up, I'd accumulated about $100 from my meager BAT. And BAT itself was going up in value. Over time I watched the tokens and trends and consolidated my earnings into just a couple of tokens, namely Ethereum. I liked the project's goals better than Bitcoin, and it had more application from what I could tell.

Getting bit by the crypto bug, I started to go to any website I could to learn more about crypto, from articles like this one to websites like Coinbase that gave you crypto for making an account. I thought I was "diversifying" like I'd learned in High School economics back in the 70's. Problem is, crypto doesn't exactly work that way. Having all your coins in one basket isn't exactly a good idea per se, but having them spread around the chicken yard isn't good either, especially when you get charged every time you move them into a more consolidated location. Crypto is held in things called (appropriately) wallets. Some wallets are secure software using encryption similar to on-line banking websites (some even more secure.) Others are super encrypted hard-drive wallets called "cold storage" that because they're not attached to any computer systems until you plug them in, are more secure from hackers. Each have their drawbacks, and everyone has their opinion as to which has the better application. In the case of all these websites, they each come with their own built-in wallets, so it's like having $5 in each purse when you have a closet full of purses, except to consolidate it all in one purse, there's individual fees each time. While there's no problem letting these bits of crypto sitting in various places appreciating in value, I eventually realized I was going to have to bite the bullet and pay those fractional fees to get it all in one place to be able to *use* it for anything.

One of the small pop up ads from the browser was for a crypto-token based game called Upland; a monopoly-style phone game where your tokens are called "UPX" you use to buy the properties like monopoly money, and outside of the game are just as useful. Even though this game is based on the EOS blockchain, this particular game's token is not transferable outside of the game, but can only be rolled back into buying more property. However the properties are slated to be sellable outside of their system for regular U.S. currency. Another game, called COIN, asks you to keep their phone app open in the background as you go places and "mine" data about the locations you visit (in the same way Google Maps does) for which it grants you XY tokens which can be traded out for other things like gaming systems or Ethereum. Unfortunately, the amount of points or tokens you have to collect in games like these are almost unachievable, even with the additional keychain attachment COIN sells that's designed to increate the number of tokens you collect (it only works if you pay them a monthly subscription fee, in regular money, of course.) Obviously, these are not fast or sustainable ways (respectively) to earn cash or crypto. No to mention the amount of resources used like electricity or cellphone data, a topic which crypto has come under fire for in recent years. 

Hitting somewhat of a dead end in my searches, yet having a much better understanding of at least the basic ways cryptocurrencies work, I'd pretty much shelved crypto again as a pet project, somewhat at my husband's request. Quite a lot of time and energy, as well as a little money, had gone into my learning curve, and the limit of our resources had hit it's final stretch. I still had little bits of tokens spread here and there, and the best I could hope for was one of them would jump again and I could cash out (something called "paper hands" or "toilet paper hands" in the crypto world, definitively a pejorative.) Until another pop-up appeared.

This time, the advertisement was for a new crypto which had yet to be introduced to the world. I ignored it. The name was inspired by the fiasco between the reddit group "wallstreetbets" and traditional Wall Street traders/the Robinhood phone app. While the name both intrigued me and put me off being still fairly new and inexperienced with crypto (and traditional investing as well) the premise of the idea of a true community-owned token kind of stuck with me. After all, in the end, the reddit users had for the most part lost their gambit and it seemed another lost cause to me, but when I saw the ad again, I impulsively clicked on it. 

I was already a user of the messaging app called Telegram, having ditched Facebook a couple years prior; now I only kept it on my phone for friends and family who refused to leave it. When I saw they had a telegram group, I joined so I could listen in and get a feel for what this was all about. The group was in it's early days, only having a few hundred members, but I noticed that number was growing quite rapidly, and the people there was quite nice, even to someone as obviously inexperienced as me. I wasn't the only one there who asked pretty basic questions, and the developers and moderators of the group never really lost their cool, even when the same question was asked nearly every half-hour. They shared the very basic webpage landing URL (www.wallstreetbets.com the acquisition of the domain name of which was no small feat,) which had a place to sign-up for email alerts. There was talk of an "airdrop," which I had no clue what was but it was being offered, apparently at not cost, so I figured at worst it was another small pittance of representative token I could eventually sell for a buck or two and I started getting some junk mail. Incidentally, I get an incredibly smaller amount of mail (no junk) from the WSB folks than I get from getting an online car insurance quote (from which I get TONS!) 

When the coin went live, everyone who had been involved got a rather huge portion of coins compared to the developers, depending on how you had been involved before the launch. Since I was on both Telegram and the email list, I got double for a total of 8400 "$WSB" tokens. I found out that there were other tokens with the same name (unlike Wall Street ticker codes, apparently the crypto world has no such restrictions) and the only way to guarantee you were getting the right one was through what is known as the "smart contract address" which is an obnoxiously long string of alphanumeric coding (0x8DF586aa346c3d9d1c99A21316A2735d71355eC8 to be exact.) Come to find out everything, including my previously created wallets on each website, had similar obnoxious coding (and all different) just like everything else on the Ethereum blockchain. I also found out that they are almost impossible to read on one screen and type into another without making a mistake (much better to cut & paste) which if you're working from two different devices can be a true pain in the rear. 

The day of the new token's release it was a flurry of people trying to figure everything out, and I was amazed at how helpful everyone was even in the frenzy. One gentleman from Texas even stayed up quite late until early morning to help me learn and figure out what I was doing. No mean feat given that everything I had were small bits on a half dozen different websites and wallets. People in the community stepped forward and made both written and video tutorials for the new people while others offered to give each other help or small bits of currencies to facilitate various processes. People patiently explained, over and over again, what crypto terms meant, what steps to take and which tools and websites to go in order to see prices of various things, including the price of the token itself and the transaction fee or gas needed to put things in their right places.

I learned about "pooling" or "pairing," the process where you pair the new token with a more established one to create a stability, which I liken to holding my granddaughter's hand while crossing a busy street. I also learned about "liquidity mining," a process similar to traditional investing where you get "dividends" except in this case, it's for a limited time and of a finite amount. Once I put my tokens in, I saw (and still to this day see) those dividends count up every few seconds! But by that time, I'd already developed a comradery and great feeling about the management and people in the community, as well as the token overall and it's prospects, and had made the decision to be "all in" for the long haul, something the crypto world calls "HODLing" (short for "Hold On for Dear Life") and I became what I learned was being a "Diamond Hand" (the opposite of "Paper Hand.")

While the token started at a reasonably high price, people looking to get their free payday and bolt quickly sold off and disappeared, which drove the token's value down considerably, although this was expected by many. The drop in price drove out quite a few more, and it sank lower. The long-time crypto investors in the group said this was not only expected, but good, as the cheaper price was now a ripe time to buy at a very cheap price for long term investing and meant most of the remaining people would be long-term investors. I was told there will be another such "dip" in price when the liquidity mining program ends, and that once that happens, the real magic will happen as the price will grow and the supply of tokens, which are intentionally coded to be finite, will be limited and no longer available, so people will have to pay a higher price to acquire. 

So far my experience with the WSB telegram group and the $WSB token have been exceptionally positive, and I've sold off all my other tokens and put them into this project with very little exception (mostly just the couple who's price is too low to reasonably sell at this point.) It's very possible, given the cryptocurrency's environment and infancy, that I will within a couple of years have a much more comfortable lifestyle than I currently have ( which wouldn't take much,) and at worst, it's something I'll be able to pass to my children and grandchildren. Possibly both. But for now, I'm just content to watch, learn and feel much more comfortable about keeping up with the times and the world of cryptocurrency, one token at a time. 

If you find this article useful, feel free to follow me and tip, and for more information on the $WSB token mentioned, be sure to visit www.wallstreetbets.com for accurate information and the correct token address.