Hi Everyone,

Today I want to talk about some of my bigger mistakes during my cryptocurrency journey so far. It is always good to be honest and show your mistakes as well, rather than to only boost when things go your way. They are great ways to learn !

Selling ETHLend/AAVE

I got into crypto around the end of 2017 and saw meteoric rises in a lot of cryptocurrencies. I started to study websites of some projects and I ended up finding ETHLend (AAVE now). It compelled to me, because of its lending possibilities. Back then lending in crypto was kind of new and I found it very interesting and believed in this project. Taking loans and not doing this through banks, or companies that are connected to banks seemed revolutionary to me. I bought in the beginning of 2018 (January) some ETHLend at around 0,38$. I got in without understanding much of bull markets and bear markets, technical analysis and so forth.

Obviously we went into a bear market and I saw this Altcoin moving all the way towards less than 1 cent ! Oeff that was kind of rough. I started to loose interest in ETHLend and did not really look at it anymore. At some point I read somewhere (I tried to find it on the internet, but without success) that the owner left the project and this was enough for me to sell it. Price was around the 0,01$ level and I converted it to BNB on Binance (dust conversion). I made a loss and until today I still do not understand what happened here. Maybe I dreamt that the owner left and thought it was real, or there was some rumor on the internet, but anyhow I sold it.

What a big mistake this turns out to be. If I did just some more research on what was really going on and if I had less emotions towards this project, I could have Hodled on. There name changed to AAVE and in the meantime we all know what DeFi is doing. From a 0,38$ buy-in which was really high, I could still have doubled my money and this shows how small the cryptocurrency market is and how big it actually can become in the future. Congratulations to all of the people that decided to buy-in at around the 0,01$ level !

When I look at the technicals and the weekly chart of AAVE (I am not going to put up charts in this post), it looks very good. The On Balance Volume during our recent dump has been one of the best ones I have seen and show a huge promise for big gains in the next couple of years for AAVE. Keep on Hodling it and you will get rewarded (Not me haha !).

Going into the ICO CryptAssist which turned out to be a scam

ICO’s where the big drivers of the previous bull market and I wanted to find a way to go in early in a project, before it got listed on an exchange. On the website Quora I found some articles about CryptAssist and it looked very promising. They were planning on helping you go into crypto in an easy way. There plans were to create an exchange, to create a Visa card to spent your cryptos, etc. It looked a lot like what Crypto.com is doing today. I went in this ICO in 2018 and bought in for a decent amount. My biggest mistake was my research once again. I kind of blindly went in with my money. I quickly checked their website and checked out LinkedIn for the profiles of the team behind it. I should have done a lot more research on it before deciding to put my money in it. It is easy to fake a LinkedIn account and to create a website that looks kind of decent.
Anyhow after months it got rather quiet around this project and their Twitter handle went very quiet as well. Milestones were not reached anymore and it turned out to be a scam ! I lost my money and it was a great lesson for me. A lot of ICO’s have turned out to be scams and I should have known not to mess with them, before they hit the bigger exchanges. If I did a little more research, I would have found out that the team was a scam and I would not have wasted my money.

Conclusion

I hope that my mistakes can help you. I certainly know that they have helped me understand that doing research is very important before deciding to invest your money. Cryptocurrencies are risky with high fluctuations and therefore it is even more important to do a thorough research.
Today we can see with some projects how easy it is to create something and how quickly it can escalate. Look at some of the names, like Hotdog, Sushi, etc. There will be a lot of scams in the upcoming months and years, so please be careful and don’t let your greed take over ! If you know what you are doing and have a lot of experience, you can take on the risks, but if you are new or have little experience, please do not fall for your greed and look at the more secure cryptos, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. You should only put in money that you are willing to loose.

Please let me know if you have lost money as well, because of scams ! It is good to put the word out, so that other people will not fall for the same ones. 

Link : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5057088.0