It’s always a friend of a friend who made big money cashing out their Bitcoin. A coworker from another department who you barely speak to. A distant and surprisingly computer-savvy uncle. The guy who supplied every party you attended between 2012-2014 and still follow on social media, but never actually liked or trusted, especially not in matters of personal finance.Specifics change, but one constant remains: you didn’t choose to buy in, not back in the good old days when you could have chucked some spare change into the digital ether and forgotten about it, only to wake up three years later a literal multi-millionaire. Just didn’t make much sense at the time, did it, to swap made-up paper currency for made-up computer currency? Maybe you had a coin or two at some point but spent it/them on dubiously legal summer festival good times. Maybe your hard drive got hacked by the FBI. Maybe you decided all that magic internet money sounded like a scam , not something a fiscally responsible adult such as yourself would bother with.
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Except somehow now the silk road stoner with terrible taste in music who you always dismissed as a badly dressed real-life Reddit troll just put down a deposit for his second home and you’re still working a desk job and renting in a suburb at least three zones out from the city centre.Friend, I am right there with you. Blockchain? More like Blockpain. Blockregret. But while many of us lost our chance to become accidental Bitcoin millionaires, we are still totally able to participate in the hot new digital currency trend: blindly betting small portions of our paychecks on the next cool coin. The coin we’ll all be trading for clean water and medicine when the nuclear apocalypse comes (June, I think?). Or, in more optimistic terms, the coin that will pay for a nice, moderately-priced two-week Bali getaway.I present to you: inspirational stories of small-time crypto success. Proof that, in some admittedly limited ways, getting to participate in a viral trend as it reaches its frenetic cultural peak is much more fun than getting in on said trend early and retiring early to live on a private island.Bitcoin? Never heard of her. It’s all about altcoin, baby! HODL on as tight as you can.I got involved because friends and coworkers told me to. My girlfriend and I got on the exchange, and it takes a while for your money to clear so during that time we did heaps of reading on Reddit and decided Ripple was a goer. We poured in $250, and it started going up. I doubled my money overnight, so I put in another $250. Now I'm up to $1000, but I haven't sold it yet. I'm riding the wave.My goal is that I want to go to Italy this year; I want about $5000 or enough to just go sit in a villa and say "Crypto got me here." I don't want to make a million dollars, I just want a holiday. I don't have enough money to put in that could actually make me a millionaire anyway. Unless Ripple turns out to be Bitcoin, which is probably won't, because it's not as scarce.
Hannah, 27, Agency Creative
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Crypto is really addictive and more about having fun than making money, for me. My girlfriend and I talk about it all the time—it's brought us closer. We literally get home and sit together on our couch with our laptops, split a block of chocolate and go into a Reddit hole while watching our profits rise.I work as a teacher, so over the past month’s school holiday have been enjoying a summer of crypto. In the space of one month, I’ve made the equivalent of six months’ salary by investing in four different coins, all with decent backing. I got interested late last year but spent a heap of time trawling Reddit before putting in money. It’s a freaking weird space, to be honest, and can become a pretty unhealthy obsession. I probably think about my crypto every 25 minutes, and I check on it about every three hours.Over the past few weeks the altcoin craze, like smaller more unknown coins, has really kicked off, and it’s been a wild time getting involved in these obsessive online communities. There’s a depressing side of it too—these nerds with massive success stories, but success founded on what? It’s also important to note that there’s a barrier to entry for a lot of people on the tech side of things. All I know is that when I get off the crypto train, I’m never getting back on. It’s a deep dark hole to fall down and I’d definitely advise that people only play around with a small amount of money that they can afford to lose.
Barnabas, 25, Teacher
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Harlett, 27, Sales Assistant
Steph, 27, IT
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