Experienced my first bull market, followed by my first bear market. It's kind of like ER - life and death in the same episode. Lol. My thoughts on bitcoin/crypto have radically changed from last year till recently. Even though I made money from altcoins like Solana, PlanetWatch, Helium, Jewel, etc., I now look at them as centralized junk/scams. Most of these cryptos are barely regulated companies in all but name; there's nothing decentralized about them. The Tornado Cash situation further underscored the importance of decentralization. No need for the Federal Reserve to create a CBDC - USDC is fulfilling that function by freezing any wallets that interacted with sanctioned wallets; centralized exchanges will do the same.
I've become orange pilled. I only care about bitcoin. I've been steadily learning more about how it works (podcasts, bitcoiner Youtubers, books, twitter), its adoption around the world, and keeping abreast of new software/protocols/hardware releases. There's some interesting stuff cooking up in this space. There's a podcast app (
Fountain.FM) where you can stream sats to your favorite podcaster. There's a Uber/Lyft-like rideshare app (
Arcade City) where you can earn/pay in bitcoin.
I've tried my hand at using bitcoin as it was intended to be used - as money. The experience has been really interesting. Thanks to the lightning network, transactions are quick (in all, but one case - they took less than a minute), and ridiculously cheap.
- I've paid for a year's subscription for the VPN service,
Mullvad.
- I've bought gift cards for Amazon, Whole Foods, and Steam from
Bitrefill (
The Bitcoin Company is another similar service):
- Bought some tees and stickers from
Lightning.store:
Next, I hope to stack my garage freezer chest with some beef the
Beef Initiative, just in case the world goes to hell next year due to out of control inflation, and there's a run on the grocery stores.
I've been stacking sats by using Fold card (the card on the left) to pay my mortgage and utilities on Paypal BillPay, and buying gift cards for Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber. Since April, I've stacked over a million sats that are worth $259 at bitcoin's current price.
I've closed my KYC exchange accounts at Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, and OKCoin, and will now acquire bitcoin through non-KYC means. I did just that yesterday for the first time from this platform called
Robosats:
I transferred cash from my checking account into my
Strike Wallet, paid the seller, and received sats into my
Wallet of Satoshi. Before accessing this site, I watched this tutorial on how to use/navigate it:
So, that's what I've gotten up to thus far during this bear market.