I had over 120,000 ADA, and I lost it all (sob story general)

Back in 2017 when I first became aware of Cardano, I had a gut feeling that the blockchain project would one day take off. After leaving my home country and living abroad for the summer of 2018, I came back home with one goal in mind; save up every spare penny of mine and put all of it into one cryptocurrency project that I knew would be successful. I did hours of research, reading white papers for multiple projects, and after I got around to reading up on ADA and the team behind it, I realized that the project I wanted to invest in was staring me right in the face.

I spent the remainder of that year, all of 2019, and most of 2020, working 60 to 70 hours a week, sometimes doing shifts back to back (working third shift then coming in an hour or two later to do first shift), taking no days off for weeks at a time ON TOP of going to college part-time. I fully isolated myself for the endeavor.

By the beginning of September 2020, I had successfully amassed a grand total of 122,000 ADA tokens. I was so proud of myself. I could have cried when I looked at it. I believed in the project. I believed that my victory was awaiting me right around the corner. Any day now it would blow up and I would never have to work another menial labor type day job ever again. I would finally be free to pursue my dreams and aspirations full time (playing, writing, performing and recording Jazz music).

Fast forward to October, and I’m getting pretty sick and tired of having to take public transport to get around. I can’t leave my home state without paying a hefty price and life is at a stand still. I lost one of my jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had to drop out of college again, so now I’m just barely getting by waiting for this Hell to blow over. A friend of mine hits me up and tells me about this car that “a good friend of [his]” is selling, how “he’s a good kid, no dead beat” and “it’s a good car.” He’s really putting a lot of pressure on me to buy this car, telling me how “you know how much taking the bus sucks, it’s a good deal, etc. etc…”

So after telling myself to wait, that it’s not worth it, that this coming year is going to be ADA’s year, that I just need to be patient and last a few more months, I cave. I buy the car. Between the registration, the insurance, and paying for the vehicle itself, I part ways with more than half of my ADA stack. I have about 50,000 ADA tokens left. “I can make it back in time. I’ve got time before the new year to accumulate and recoup those losses. I can pick up more hours at my job.” The car dies one month later. Transmission blows. Can’t drive it anymore. It’s junked. Decide to hold onto my remaining tokens for dear life. Eventually get so angry that I try my hand at swing trading and day trading. End up doing pretty well at first, make a couple hundred bucks here and there every few days or so, but never get anywhere near close to 120,000 tokens ever again. Generally break even by the end of it all.

Fast forward to first week of January, decide to go out of state for a weekend getaway trip. Bring my laptop with me just in case. Decide to log into Binance. All of a sudden my account has been suspended. “You must use the U.S. site.” They give me two weeks to get my funds offsite. I sign up for other exchanges in a panic, as ADA starts pumping hard. I have my remaining funds in USDC. Already made plans for the weekend, so I can’t just sit and stay inside of the hotel and stare at charts all day long. So I go. I leave it alone until I get back home.

Kraken and Binance don’t confirm me or my accounts for two weeks straight. In a complete panic because ADA just keeps skyrocketing and I’m still in fiat and don’t know if or when I should jump in and take a leap of faith. I ended up just staying on the side lines and watching it go to the moon for the past two months. I went from having 122,000 ADA tokens back in September of 2020 to having less than 12,000 ADA tokens by today. The past three years of my life were a wasted opportunity, in which I bought a car that died on me almost immediately after I purchased it, and a moment of poor luck coupled with a few poor entry and exit points in recent weeks.

I’ve been trying to find some solace in all of this. Some sort of lesson or experience to gather from this cluster**** of poor decisions and strokes of bad luck. I bet my life on seeing myself living off of staking rewards by now, and now that I missed the biggest window of opportunity to get in, I’m not sure how I should feel about anything. I’m just so mad. I’ve been so angry these past couple of months. I basically traded three years of my life just to come back out of it all with basically less than what I put into it all initially ($15k). I see people bragging on forums about how now “they’re set” for life, how they’ll never gave to work another day in their life again. How they’ll be ADA millionaires before they know it. I’m so angry right now because I feel like that should be me, that should be me right now and I made one too many mistakes and now I have to bust my ass again for another three or four years to get anywhere near close to that level of potential wealth again.

Has anyone else ever gone through a personal defeat as big as this one before? I could really use some uplifting advice here. I want to stay in with my remaining capital, but after losing all of that potential profit, I’m just heartbroken at the thought of having to wait until ADA hits $10 (if it ever does) in order to live off of the returns even slightly. I just don’t see the point in holding this anymore since it is only going to go up in price at a massive crawl for the next four to five years (in my view). It’s over. The opportunity to make a 100x return on my investment is now over. Where do I turn to next to make that much potential profit? I can’t do retail work anymore man. It sucks the life out of you being a wheel in an indifferent and cold machine. I just want freedom from wage slavery.

What the Hell do I do? What the Hell would you do if you were in my situation?

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dear @a_dyin_hobo - by some definitions I’ve also felt that I missed the Cardano explosion, arriving too late and unprepared. I’ve also had similar regrets about missing the Bitcoin and Ethereum boats despite early introductions & being very interested in both technologies. In both of these earlier cases I allowed myself to be persuaded to work on conventional goals instead. I consider all these failures to follow my heart in the last decade to be a series of unhappy accidents having the same ultimate effect as the misfortunes you describe.

These days I’ve resolved to eventually close that gap by focusing on business propositions that will generate income in Ada rather than conventional currency, or at least in addition to it. If your discouragement is based on an idea of what ADA will eventually reach, then maybe you can forget about USD or EUR and just focus on the amount of Ada that you will need to find that freedom or self-sufficiency. Look for ways your skills can be applied to Cardano based business propositions, or exchanged for Ada by the hour in a way that will make your work seem well priced today while worth a lot more to you in the long run. Keep scanning all new topics on these forums to stay ahead of Cardano based payment methods & how to incorporate these into self employed businesses. Over time I believe this strategy will produce far more leverage of your income & profits than the pension contributions of conventionally minded people who don’t know or care about what you’ve seen in ADA’s future.

That’s all I can say in this thread because it’s my own complete understanding at the time. Since others may wish you better “luck” I would rather wish for you to maintain hope, and to let go of any tendencies towards bitterness and betrayal which cause paralysis of the creative mind. Stay tuned & keep looking for those emerging ideas within & without, and someday soon you will find a path ahead of you which leads somewhere much better than the future you feel you have lost.

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You are young and healthy. Plenty of time to make it all back plus more if you stay positive and dig deep. You got this!

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It sucks but you still have a lot and can stake it and wait or do you wanna lose a second opportunity? Cardano is still in the very beginning and it will go a lot higher than a dollar. Just get over it and live on.

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Yes , I lost $36,000 on XRP on the last bring drop. I was long at .39¢ and a few ticks away from being liquidated.
at near .15¢. So I let it all go at .16¢ . Just like magic, it hit .15¢ and never looked back.

Fortunately, I had enough left in my account to start all over. And I did. I’ve 3x my account and looking strong. And that’s only been three months.

So reset everything, assess what you have, listen to motivational videos on youtube. Coins go parabolic every week. You can find the next ADA and make that your goal.

Good luck . You can change your life by changing the way you think.

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I know it was not easy, I pass through many similar situations too. I have in my power 10 bitcoins back in 2014, I got some profit on it, I couldn’t imagine how far it’s gonna be. If I knew I would have saved it for sale today. What did I learn from it? I mean, all my background was in tech working as a developer. So I decided to read and study lots and lots of books about the stock market, financials, make backtests, trade try hard until I finally change the game, or at least it’s what I hope with Cardano this time. I passed through highs and lows like any other trader in the world, but I think it’s part of the process. Cardano is just in the beginning, it has all the potential to hit $5 >> $10 dollar this year. Standup and work hard to buy more and stake what you have to achieve your goals faster. In life, we need that kind of strategy, unfortunately, life is not a chessboard, where we can make always calculated movements. In life, we have a sort of probability too, but that is not bad at all, it makes us better when we understand how to handle the situations in our favor. See this community, people talking with you sharing good and bad experiences, you’re not alone. Still have plenty of other projects you can study and take the full potential of it until the end of the year. I strongly believe we are just at the beginning of this crypto cycle, I reinforce it every day for myself to not lose the point. But even If I discover in the future I was wrong about 2021, still I will be happy to have followed my strategy.

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Don’t worry man. Wait for the next bear cycle to reaccumulute. In the next bull run you will be wiser. Every thing in life and market is cyclical in nature

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“I am one of the luckiest, and everything has happened to benefit me”. That should be your constant mantra. Most people on Earth don’t have the first clue what blockchain, Bitcoin, Cardano or ADA are - and don’t have the means or ability to obtain any crypto assets yet! People like me (in my late 50s, nearing retirement with no pension fund or passive income stream except what I can earn through working - who only started to learn about it recently (learned how to work a VPN to put funds on Binance or Bybit, I forget which one, but I can’t figure out their interface to execute a trade - I have to have a simple one like Coinbase or Uphold that is more expensive - but easy!) would LOVE to have 10,000 ADA! I am up to 2500 and didn’t start buying until it was over $1.20!! It is a long term investment! Here is what you do: Repeat the first sentence mantra above - a lot. Every day. Once in awhile, if you start feeling sorry for yourself do this mantra- “feeling sorry for myself is a complete waste of my time and can even attract the opposite of what I want in my life”. Now- Go forth young human and get busy getting your life together a little better each day! You are going to be fine.

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Thanks everyone. Your kind words and shared experiences are comforting. I really do appreciate it. It’s been hard for me to watch this project go parabolic and to miss it when I knew it was coming for so long. I find comfort in the fact that I was at least correct in my judgement that Cardano was going to take off at some point in the future. I may not be the most financially literate person, but I think I’m a pretty good judge of character; Between the teams consistency and the increase in the assets price, it feels good to know that in the first instance I was right.

I’m waiting for a market collapse, or at the very least, a bigger dip at which point I plan on buying back in and holding on for dear life. Somebody mentioned accepting the losses and missed profits and instead staking what I have and accumulating more until I reach the point that I won’t have to work traditional labor anymore (what I originally intended). I think I am going to do that. It is the safest way to assure that I will be financially successful in the longrun, at least in the sense that I will have one very reliable source of income coming in regularly to support me and allow me to pursue performing and writing pieces of music.

Thank you all again for your kind words. I haven’t checked in here in quite some time, and I’m glad I did. Have fun trading and accumulating.

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Your post really helped me think this through. Thanks for sharing.

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Get ready for the next bear cycle, as mentioned before and also realize this:

Cardano is an ecosystem being built. Over the next years, throughout the bear cycle, many projects will be launched where you can buy tokens cheaply. The opportunity does not only lay in ADA coins, but other native assets yet to be created. You’re plenty in time for those! Make sure you select them on the quality of the team and spread many small investments on them until the clouds start to clear. Then go bigger on a few of them with fiat you’ve collected in the meantime.

As to your other challenge of work / freedom. If you’re able, teach yourself a technical skill such as web programming (javascript, python, etc.) or smart contract programming. You can do these jobs as a freelancer which buys you a lot of freedom. Forget about studying AI unless you’re going to get a Phd. That market usually prefers Phd’s only unless you have additional complementary skills (my wife has a Master’s in AI and in biology, which got her a job in pharma).

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Invest in fast moving lower track crypto to match up the loss.

You make different decisions in life and only afterwards you will see the outcome. So dont blame yourself to strongly. Noone knows whats coming in the future. You asked for learnings, i will hint you some.

Two lessons:

  1. Dont judge your decision only by the outcome.
    Never Judge a Decision by Its Outcome -

2.Dont compare to others. A strong lesson. You will never get happy if you keep comparing.
“Personality begins where comparison leaves off. Be unique. Be memorable. Be confident. Be proud.” ~Shannon L. Alder

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 * IN MEMORY OF STEVE JOBS*
            *   MY ROLE MODEL*

in other eyes,my life is the essence of succes,but aside from work,i have a little joy and in the end,wealth is just a fact of life to wich i am accustomed.at this moment ,lying on bed sick and remembering all my life,i realize that all my recognition and wealth that i have is meaningless in the face of imminent death.you can hire someone to drive a car for you,make money for you-but you can not rent someone to carry the disease for you.one can find material things ,but there is one thing that can not be found when it is lost-life.your inner happiness doesnt come from material things of this world.wether you’re flying first class,or economy class-iff the plane crashes you crash with it.wich ever stage we are right now with time,we will face the day when the curtain comes down.
â—Ź treasure love for your family
â—Źlove for you. spouse
â—Źlove for your friends
â—Źtreat yourself well
â—ŹCherish others
as we grow older and hence wiser slowly we realize that-
•carry a 300$ or a 30$ wallet/handbag-amount of money is the same inside
•driving a 150000$ car or a 30000$ car the road and distance is the same and gets us to the same destination.
•drinking a 300$ bottle of wine or a 10$ wine hangover is the same.
living in a house of 300sq ft or a 3000 sq ft loneliness is the same.
therefore…i hope you realize,when you have mates,buddies and old friends,brothers&sisters who you can chat with,have sing song with talk about north south east west or heaven and earth… that is true happiness.

please my friend dont make too much head spins in your head,straight up think forward
all comes good​:muscle::muscle:

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Hi Bro,

Just wanted to share my own experience so you will feel more comfortable with your situation. I have myself owned around 40000 ADA until let’s say the beginning of the year with an average cost of 0.10 cents. I had never doubts of the future success of Cardano but unfortunately the greed tells me to make some dollar average cost strategy and I sold them just before the bull run. Now I own 1/10 of my initial bag. So here’s the lesson, if you strongly believe in the project, never sell, never and never, just stick to your original plan (mine was initially to keep my 40000 ADA for @ least 10 years). This is the best strategy for someone who wants to never have regrets. Invest what you afford to lose when you can and forget. And finally what have been done have been done, it’s the past and it will never be back and for some reason, your happiness doesn’t link to your money : fiat, crypto or anything. It’s a good opportunity but life offers much than one. Cheers and keep safe.

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