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?