Recently I've made a short post about why I don't buy any crypto (spoiler: I can't). The post went so popular as to get several quite interesting comments and thumbs, but I will probably discuss them in some other article.

Right now I'd want to point to one particular comment:

O mais importante interessante da história da vou por contar que é saber como gere os investimentos e qual a sua proposta

I don't read Spanish, but Google Translate tells me that the guy is interested in my investments and my outlooks. Well, why the EU and EEA guys would be interested in how "crypto-adoption" looks like at my end? (Spoiler: it looks ugly as hell.) Reading about someone's personal experience in some money-making activity is far more entertaining. I myself love to read such stories, and I thought maybe a story of my inwastments can entertain someone as well.

The story of my investments is quite a long one. For example, I still receive dividends from some shitty shares I bought in late 1990-s. I don't even know where those shares are deposited today (their first depository company went broke in early 2000-s), but every year I receive a letter from some PO box, that I have my regular yearly dividends due -- in the amount of about a whole US dollar in total! I've never bothered to claim those "dividends", though.

So I limit my story to my crypto investments only. I already made an article on how I didn't become interested in Bitcoin in 2009 (my missed once-a-lifetime opportunity). Also I skip the story about how I "invested" in GPU mining rigs in 2016/2017. It was rather successful, but I sold all the hardware and cashed all the earnings out long ago. If you wonder how I managed to cash my mining earnings out to fiat -- those were different schemes of all fifty shades of grey. For the most part, I used so called "exchangers" -- you send your crypto to a specified address, tell the guy your transaction's number, and the guy sends you some fiat. No escrow, no "non-custodial" bullshit, you basically send your crypto out into the dark and then pray that the guy on the other side is not a scammer... I used several co-branded chip cards (it's like a debit card, but issued by, say, a mobile provider or a gasoline company who made an agreement with Visa/Mastercard/etc.) for many-many little tranches through different "exchangers". I was lucky enough not to get scammed, neither I got questioned for money laundering or get a bat hit my head during some "P2P Cash2Hand transaction" (these are real risks of crypto investing in my area).

Shortly, by the end of 2017 hype I had no rigs, no crypto, and some cash which I spent for my daily needs. But I got hooked to crypto.

I started with faucets. At that time there were quite a lot of various legit faucets, and my 5-9 job allowed me enough time to jerk them rather regularly. Most of those faucets are dead by now (or at least not so good as they used to be), as well as the wonderful Faucethub project. But e.g. this Bestexchange faucet still pays and I still jerk it rather regularly. Also, the faucets at Crex24 and Graviex are still in function. I was sending pennies from the faucets to Bitmax and swapping them into BTMX token. At that time conversions to BTMX were with almost no fee and hodling BTMX had an "est. APY" of well above 50%, paid out in BTC, ETH, USDT, and USDC. A couple of times I managed to trade my BTMX quite profitably and doubled my stack. Unfortunately, my last trade was not successful -- I sold all my BTMX at about 0.035 expecting to buy them back at around 0.02 -- but instead, after several weeks it soared to above 0.09... Shortly, I pulled all my pennies (~60 bucks) out of Bitmax -- they raised conversion fees and their APY had become a "miserable" 15-25%.

I used to hodl my ~60 bucks in USDT at Celsius, but later moved them to Binance. At the same time, I got some referral pennies from Atomic wallet and Netbox browser and started to write articles at Publish0x.

Then I discovered Prospectors -- a kind of blockchain-based economy-strategy idle game. I think the game is quite good for fans of simulation games (Sims crowd and the like), but I've never had time to play it "in full". Basically, it is much like a faucet for me: "farm -> sell -> withdraw". I still draw some EOS pennies out of the game (PGL to WAX, and WAX to EOS at Newdex), but the rewards now are much lower than they used to be.

From my Prospectors earnings I bought ~200K of TXT and a few BET tokens -- and staked them at Trustdice and Earnbet. Those can't be considered as "real" investments (they're simply too small), but relatively speaking, my Trustdice holdings pretty much doubled (in USD) since then.

And then I found Splinterlands ! At first, I wasn't much impressed by the game, the rules looked too difficult for me and playing the game at full speed required purchase of a $10 starter's pack. But later on I managed to grab two packs for free and learned the rules gradually. And then one of my speculative affairs ended in a $28.95 "investment" into the game's credits. I was forced to play Splinterlands regularly because I wanted my money back. And after some time I did get them back -- plus twice as much, because I've got disappointed with how the game was managed and sold my holdings there. It's interesting how the game made a full cycle in my attitude -- from denial to excitement and then back to denial...

By September I'd already had quite a few pennies at Binance and decided to resume my trading career. However, trading cryptos is not exactly like trading "traditional" assets, and besides my deal with the caller guy made a substantial hole in my depo. I was satisfied with my caller guy's service in every way, except its subscription fee (a modest fee, honestly, but quite substantial for my little depo). I will probably write a review about him later, I think his service deserves some feedback.

Anyway, by the current BTC rally I'd had about 0.01 BTC at Binance, a fistful of various shitcoins which I hadn't bothered to sell on time, and 200 HIVE stuck at Hive-Engine.

There is little left to do for me now, other than to sit back, relax, and watch my 0.01 BTC rallying against USD. I placed a market order to short leveraged futures for 0.01 BTC if BTC falls below $12389 (it's a hedge for my BTC stack), and pull this order up like a trailing stop. I pray it will work out... If altcoins start rallying as well, I'm going to trade alts against BTC, to grow my BTC stack. And when the show is over, I will swap 1/4 or 1/3 of my then holdings (supposed they will be larger than they're now) into stablecoins and will stake them at some relatively secure interest-bearing place -- until I find a way to cash out crypto earnings quickly, cheaply and reliably. The rest will stay at Binance for future speculations.

Meanwhile, I continue to mine BFG at Earnbet (I don't expect much about it, but why not, if they offer free BTC), to post bullshit at Peakd, Leofinance, Publish0x, and elsewhere, and to try to get free coins from various airdrops (though unsuccessfully so far).

Well, folks, it was an unusually long post for me and now I really got tired of typing so many foreign letters. But I hope this time I could entertain you better, than my usual average. Stay safe and beware!

Disclaimer: The article is cross-posted in my blogs, the links are affiliate, not financial advice, and blahblahblah

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