Crypto Off Ramps
In the early days of crypto if you wanted to buy Bitcoin you had to somehow find a miner’s contact information and convince them to sell it to you. Then you had to muster up the courage and manage the extreme anxiety of sending money to a complete stranger who claims to be a “miner”. On top of it if the “miner” didn’t send you the Bitcoin, what would you do? There’s no customer service number to call and surely Satoshi Nakamoto won’t be answering your help desk ticket.
Not until July 2010 was there a centralized exchange to purchase Bitcoin from, which was named Mt. Gox, short for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange". This is not a joke, the first every Bitcoin exchange was originally a online fantasy-based card game service.
In late 2013, at the height of this infamous exchange, Mt. Gox controlled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide only to abruptly suspend all trading in February of 2014 to file bankruptcy! This was a huge storm to weather in the early days and further validated the political narrative around the fraud and corrupt practices of “crypto”. Once the dust settled, Mt. Gox, announced that they had lost/stolen over 850,000 Bitcoin, valued at $450 million dollars at the time and present day value of approximately $42 Billion Dollars!
Fast forward 5 years of lawsuits and 199,999 Bitcoin seized by the court, there are still 650,000 Bitcoin lost forever!
For those who recently got into crypto the centralized exchange market is plentiful, safer than ever, and highly regulated in the USA. Exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken have made the user experience brainless to purchase your first digital asset(s). These “on ramps” into crypto have quickly grown into extremely large businesses such as Coinbase’s $77B valuation for their upcoming IPO (Initial Public Offering).
It’s very clear that that “on-ramping” of fiat money into centralized exchanges are here to stay. The wave of significance into crypto will only get bigger as the “boomers” of the financial sector are forced to answer questions about Coinbase’s IPO. I fully anticipate the stock price of Coinbase to go parabolic and further push crypto in the spotlight, consequently forcing the Wall Street figure heads to report on it.
We are witnessing history with Bitcoin institutional adoption and other digital assets being legitimized worldwide. This will undoubtably create a corporate and retail FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that we have haven’t seen since the birth of the internet in the 90’s! I won’t bore you with the same news you’ve read or seen on YouTube a million times, but just know that none of this happens without “on ramps”.
Which brings me to the whole point of article
Question:
What happens when Bitcoin tops out and you’re ready to sell?
The right answer is super easy to type and even easier to say, which is to simply not sell and “HODL” (Hold On for Dear Life)!
But………………many of you are gambling, speculating, chasing the pump, swing trading, or whatever you want to call it. Which in the end will be a very expensive lesson to learn. If you’re honest with yourself and having a hard time sleeping at night please do yourself a favor and only invest in what you’re willing to “save”. Your goal should be to become an investor and not a trader. Do what the millionaires and billionaires do, not what some social media influencer is telling they do.
Every mega rich person does a few things that retail speculators can’t seem to employ into their thought process:
1). Their investment timeframes are Years, not Hours, Days, or Weeks
2). They know the tax laws and how to use them to their advantage
3). They see macro trends way before anyone else does
4). Leveraging assets as collateralizing a loan is a way of life, not a trading strategy
If you can wrap your head around these 4 guiding principals then you’ll understand that the “off ramps” of the rich do not include:
1). Guessing the top of the market to sell, then buying back in once the market corrects