Versión Español: Contacto del cuarto tipo: un mal experimento [ES]
Previous post Encounter of the third kind: concepts come to life [EN]
Hi, did you miss me? Don't worry, remember that, at the beginning of this saga, I promised you that I would describe the whole process I have gone through to understand something about CRYPTOCURRENCIES, I hope I won't disappoint you and will guide you, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes I did.
Well, in the previous episode I let you know that I had changed jobs. In this new company, I had worked with before and others I was just getting to know. During this change, my interest in CRYPTOCURRENCIES went down a bit, I had to focus on the new challenges, but one of my colleagues liked to invest, his name was Alf, I introduced him to you:
His investments, at the beginning, did NOT consider the CRYPTOCURRENCIES, because between lack of knowledge and its high degree of volatility, it did not make him safe to risk playing with his money. But as time went on, by 2018, and after having more confidence we would talk and share about various topics, he enjoyed explaining to me about the stock market, some of his investments and how it worked, my face was more or less this:
As Alf talked more about finance and his investments, I was convinced that BITCOIN was not safe, and what Alf was doing was the right thing to do, in other words, Alf seemed to invest in the traditional Banking system, which is what we all know. But one day, the topic of CRYPTOCURRENCIES came up in our conversation and he seemed to be interested, I simply explained to him the little I knew, and that I didn't quite understand the value that BITCOIN could bring to the world. Suddenly, around March 2019, he told me that he had risked some money in a BITCOIN business, in which a friend invited him to participate.
Alf showed me his account, explained the system and even passed me his invitation code. Alf was always transparent with me, he gave me to understand that the business was a pyramid business, and that the profit was given automatically, since they used a robot to make micro transactions of buying and selling BITCOIN in order to get the best profit from the value. Alf warned me that if I wanted to invest, I had to do it with money to spare, but the most attractive thing about this system was that you could enter with 50 dollars, meaning a low risk, since that amount is what you would spend in a bar or at the cinema. Alf had shown me that what he had invested had already been returned and that now he was just waiting for the profits.
That night at home I was thinking about it. I thought, I have some extra money in the bank and I was not doing anything with it, I just had that money in the bank without spending or investing it, and even the bank did not offer any safe investment product with a decent return. So after thinking it over, I invested 400 euros.
Just a week after my investment, what Alf didn't even imagine started to happen. The company started to change the interest rates, their way of withdrawing profits and even announced that they would no longer accept new users. The result was that Alf, thanks to the fact that he had invested before me, managed to get his money back and made some extra profit, but with only one week of investment, I simply would not have time to get it back. That company kept changing its conditions from week to week, everything seemed very unstable and I could only be happy because I was recovering some of what I had invested and it could have been worse.
After a while, the company simply shut down and I was only able to recover 200 euros of the 400 euros I had initially invested, Alf even apologised to me, but the truth is that I couldn't be upset with him, as Alf had been transparent with me. At the end of the day, what happened was a lack of understanding about BLOCKCHAIN to know how to invest and not rely on companies that were clearly scamming people.
Disappointed with this experience and with 200 euros in BITCOINs, I only thought that I was right to distrust this technology, that it was not safe and that it only served to do illicit business; So I abandoned those BITCOINs and neither transformed them into euros, I just left them aside, unlike my friend Alf who, on the contrary, did not give up, he was convinced that to avoid making mistake again, he had to understand better the CRYPTOCURRENCIES and therefore, the technology that conforms it, but that is a conversation for the next and last episode of this set of publications.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
