It was September 2015. I was just casually surfing the web, reading some Android Authority articles

 They were just starting out, and as the tech head that I was, I wanted to know more about them, how they review their phones and what not.

I was also on the verge of getting a new phone, so I needed to know whether I would be on the Android side or on the iOS side.(spoiler: I'm an Apple guy to this day!)

I then came across this ad for this faucet. It said I could get  0.001BTC for free just for watching a few ads.

The first question that came to my mind was: "what is BTC?"

I brushed the ad aside, thinking it was some type of regathering ad for a game.

The next day, I was of course surfing the web again, and I came across a similar ad, but not from the previous guys. I didn't understand what Bitcoin was, but if I had seen two ads in two days about it, it must have probably meant that Bitcoin was popular.

So I decided to do some research, and I found out what Bitcoin was. I knew that I'd have to get a wallet to be able to store my Bitcoins, as well as never give out my private keys and whatnot.

I also learnt that the price of one bitcoin was around $400 then. I learnt that it had risen from$9 to that point, and at some point it was actually worth nothing.

So I became fascinated with this idea of internet money that needed no intermediate medium to be propagated. I could send and receive it to and from anyone without using a bank or payment processor. It seemed very smart to me.

So I created a wallet with a company called Luno. They began offering their services in 2013, and they had transacted about 100 million US Dollars in Bitcoin since they started, so they must have been trustworthy.

I found that you could buy Bitcoin with your regular money. You could also buy in fractions if you wished.

Well, I wasn't ready to invest any of my money into it then. So I remembered the ad that got me started learning about BTC in the first place.

It was an ad to get BTC for free by watching a few ads. The ad was very transparent about what you needed to do to get your Bitcoin. They were giving about 0.001BTC or 40 cents per ad viewed. There was no limit to the number of ads you could view, so everyday after school, I viewed enough ads to get me about $40 a day. Most of the time, I would just play the full ad while doing something else, and whenever you didn't skip the ads, you made a little more money.

I was making Bitcoins so fast, that I had about 2.5BTC after a month. Then the faucet closed down.

I was able to send these BTCs to my wallet before the faucet closed, because I was quite skeptical about them giving away so much free money. Luckily, it was a legit faucet, and I got paid 3 days before the faucet went down.

Having gotten the BTC in my wallet, given that there was no way to earn it for free anymore, I forgot about it for a while.

I had school responsibilities, and I wasn't ready to spend money on it back then.

That, in my opinion was my biggest mistake ever.

I wish I had bought BTC at $400. At least I should have bought one.

Because by October of that year, it was worth almost twice its price. I would have gotten my money back and would have been in for free.

That said, by some magical means, I didn't sell my holdings. Simply because I didn't know how.

I didn't know what an exchange was, neither did I know how to use one. I only knew that this magic internet money had value that fluctuated a lot.

If you read my story from 0-0.1BTC, you'd remember that it was at this time that I started learning to trade the FX markets. So I totally forgot about Bitcoin till 2017.

This was the turning point in my life. I had used various means to get about 0.1BTC online for free(read the story here if you didn't) and now had a value of 2.6BTC. The price of Bitcoin was $19000 then.

I was astounded. I had learnt about exchanges by this time, and wanted to fully trade BTC.

Of course, I sold part of my stash at 19000.

I wanted to sell everything, and in retrospect I should have. Because then I'd have been able to buy about 2x my stash when it dropped to 6000.

But I sold 1BTC at that price of 19000. Then I sold 0.5 at 20000. The price then dipped. But I didn't buy back.

I still hold those remaining 1.1BTC today in a wallet. O eventually bought back a few Bitcoins at the 7000 price, and I still trade those ones till today. But I will hold on to those 1.1BTC I earned for free, until Bitcoin reaches the moon.

Thanks for reading!