October of 2017: 

My oldest daughter got married 👰. My wife and I were extremely proud to be able to pay for the reception. I had been aggressively saving for two years to get ahead of that check. My daughter getting married was a multitude of feelings I cannot adequately express without reliving them, so I will share them another day, but mostly heartwarming and good.

December of 2017: 

I’m 46 years old 🦅. It's Christmas vacation 🎄, and I have time to come up for a breath of air. I'm off for two solid weeks during our slow time at work, which allows me some personal time to digest the past year and set goals for the year to come.

I basically sit down to review my investments 💰, see what is overweight, and decide where I'm going to allocate future savings. At this point I'm starting to get nervous 😬 about the value of the stock market. The prices seem expensive on most of the names that I'm holding.

Bitcoin is in the news and I have been watching it from a distance for about a month trying to control myself from getting involved. During Christmas vacation, a friend of mine tells me about Ripple and how he thinks it could be the next Bitcoin because it’s going to be used by the banks to exchange value. His son had bought some, and had already doubled his money. It sounded interesting and I had the time to learn, so I asked my friend if his son would come over and show me what I needed to do. My friend’s son came over, showed me how to open a Coinbase account, Binance account, and download a Ripple desktop wallet on my laptop. The rest is history 📜.

When I get into something, I get into it. I am extremely obsessive compulsive, both a blessing and a hindrance throughout my life. I have had numerous hobbies and ideas take over for periods of 4-6 months, sometimes even longer. Needless to say, I have an extremely addictive personality.

I started Youtube searches on cryptocurrencies, and found a whole slew of shitcoiners who began suggesting every coin in the book. I started to buy very small quantities - mostly to get comfortable with the technical side of buying them and transferring them to a software wallet. I started with Jaxx because it allowed me to hold a bunch of shitcoins and was good on all devices. I also dusted off an old Twitter account that I had no use for prior, since my wife and kids used Instagram and SnapChat. I had created the handle @farface2000 in a mere five minutes after I heard either Kanye West or Jamie Foxx talking about it on Howard Stern around 2008. Now it served as my connection into this new world of economics.

This innocent-bliss Christmas vacation was the first hop down the rabbit hole 🕳️🐇 for me. I really needed to understand the basics of the economic side of cryptocurrency mining. I realized from what I saw online that I did not have the technical know-how to build a mining rig, although I was tempted to try. In lieu, I ordered a Litecoin ASIC. I bought it on Amazon at the peak of the market. I then ordered a T9 Bitcoin miner, not knowing how inefficient it was. I was starting to blow circuits, power cords were getting warm, etc.

I saw how much money I had invested in a matter of weeks, and realized I was either going to set this up right or call it a loss. So I went to HomeDepot and bought some 10 Gage Armored BX, a few double pole 20 amp breakers, and outlets. I pulled the cables into my finished basement from my electric closet to a utility room on the other side. I took a basement window out and installed a piece of painted plywood. Every time I got a new miner from Bitmain, I drilled out a 4" hole in the plywood, hooked up a dryer vent kit, and connected a piece of flex duct to a plastic shroud I bought for the exhaust side of the miner fan. I housed the Miner in 3/4" fire retardant plywood boxes lined with mineral fiber. I drilled a hole on the suction side and installed an air filter. They are very quiet and have never had to be shut down.

During this initial six month phase, I also bought a Sia Miner which is now a brick and (2) S9's and an additional L3+. Once the summer came, my KWH price went up. I shut down and gave away the T9. I still run the (2) L3+ and the (2) S9's. Afterwards, when I sat down and reviewed my profit loss for 2018 in December, it was all red. The price of Bitcoin at the time was about $4000, and the price of Litecoin was about $30.

As I was experiencing the euphoria of mining and buying shitcoins, I was slowly losing money. Most of the shitcoiners on Youtube either disappeared or changed their tune. All coins were in the crapper.

Amongst other errors and small losses, what I am most embarrassed about is cloud mining. I wasted satoshis on mining contracts not having any idea what the fuck I was buying. They were worthless.

My biggest influence initially had been Trace Meyer. He got me thinking about money and Austrian economics. I went back and listened to all his podcasts and saw how his position evolved over the years as Bitcoin's price went up.

The ability to listen to podcasts from the past, where the speaker has no knowledge of future events that you are currently aware of, is truly enlightening and shows you the quality of the speaker.

Trace has stood the test of time.

A very frustrating and confusing part of being able to learn about cryptocurrencies is that 90% of the people have an ulterior motive. A percentage of them were early Bitcoin adopters. They probably sold way too early because they were nervous about holding onto their exponential gains, only to see Bitcoin go much higher. They have moved on and are probably promoting something else. Some of the podcasters and Youtubers are sponsored, or have a vested interest in something they are trying to sell. Navigating through a sea of shit is very difficult and expensive. I've accumulated a nice little bag of shitcoins that I will not sell, because they serve as a reminder and answer the "what if I bought that shitcoin?” question for me anytime I get the itch. Lesson learned.

I would say after six months, I started to understand where the real value was.

Bitcoin has many traits or properties which appeal to different people for different reasons. It is the most dynamic investment I have ever come across. For me, the value comes from its finite supply. The ability to store your hard work into something that cannot be diluted is ground-breaking. It is a paradigm shift for modern society. It reduces third-party risk and allows you to make simple calculations to determine what portion of the total supply you own, and if more people feel the way you do, the value of your position will increase.

Why Bitcoin and not another shitcoin? In my opinion, Bitcoin's value comes from the network of users with skin in the game. It is that simple. I think of it this way: it’s as simple as if you joined Twitter and were given a fixed percentage of the company. Imagine if Twitter was owned by its users, and every time you got a friend or contact to join the network, your piece increased in value and they became stockholders as well. What if another friend said SnapChat was better? Would you abandon Twitter, the company you owned? Probably not. And if the features SnapChat had were really wanted by the holders, we would find a way to import them into Twitter rather than jumping ship.

Summer of 2018:

Around the Summer of 2018 I was convinced enough to just commit to #stackingsats (courteous of TFTC, Marty Bent and Matt Odell) exclusively for my cryptocurrency allocation of my savings.

For me, being a Bitcoiner means being able to stomach HODLing my position while I stay vocally supportive of Bitcoin only.

I am of the opinion that sound money for humanity is the most noble of causes one could ever donate to. It could shift society upside down, and give some wealth and “say so” to people who don’t cause the current financial problems of the world. I am all for it! Let the pieces fall where they may. Regardless if Bitcoin succeeds or fails, at least I will be able to say that I tried.

As I was stacking sats during the summer and fall of 2018, the price consolidated at or around $6,500. It seemed relatively cheap compared to what I had previously paid so I kept on #stackingsats because I continued to work and earn fiat. I did not see anywhere else to commit my savings to that had a better long term value. I kept dollar-cost-averaging on a weekly basis.

I was well aware that Bitcoin had corrected in the past to its previous high (around 1200 in 2013) so I was mentally and financially prepared for such an occasion.

I was ready to double up if we got a sudden drop in value. My plan was to take advantage of a tax deferred account using GBTC, knowing it traded around 30% higher than its NAV of Bitcoin it held. I was willing to take the risk. The risk, in my eyes, was that an ETF could be approved, reducing GBTC’s premium, but I also thought if an ETF was approved Bitcoin would jump up more than 30%. So, I took my chances. In February of 2019 I finally initiated my plan of buying enough GBTC in my tax deferred account to double my position in actual Bitcoin. My plan was to sell my GBTC when it doubled so I could free ride my actual Bitcoin, pay for my mistakes and continue to #stackingsats with a clear head. I was not able to stick to my initial plan. I did pretty good - I sold some in late April, May and June. I came close enough to my original goal that I was comfortable holding onto some GBTC and all my Bitcoin.

January 2019:

One day in late January of 2019, I read a tweet from a fellow Twitter follower @hodlonaut. Basically he said, “Who wants to start a Lightning Network Trust Chain? I’ll send you 100,000 satoshi but you need to pass on 110,000 to someone else”. I happened to be scrolling through my feed at the time and decided to send him an invoice. The rest is history. The Chain went viral. Everyone and their mother wanted to hold the Torch (that’s what they called it). Someone made a Google spreadsheet that recorded all the hops, Twitter handles and locations. @fartface2000 being the first hop got me some attention. Mostly, people poking fun at my name, but hey, fartface is my name, and this stinker is here to stay. It was fun to be a  part of it and I’m very grateful for @hodlonaut for sending it my way.

In Part 3 (if people are actually enjoying this), I’ll tell you about my passion/hobby business Bitpiggys and what I’ve been doing to take advantage of Bitcoin's volatility. Until next time…

#buyTHEMbitcoin #HODL&STFU