Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance - Hardcover

Eliason, Nathaniel

 
9780593714041: Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593714040 ISBN 13: 9780593714041
Verlag: Portfolio, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

THE WILD INSIDE STORY OF CRYPTO'S GET-RICH-QUICK UNDERBELLY

Nat Eliason had six months to make as much money as possible before his first child was born. So, he turned to where countless others did in 2021: Crypto. 

Within a year, he'd made millions writing code holding hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money. He'd been hacked. He'd sold a picture of a monkey for two hundred grand. He'd become an influencer, speaking at conferences, and writing a weekly newsletter to tens of thousands of fans. Best of all, Nat had amassed a small fortune. But how much of this money was even real? And how many times can someone double down before they eventually lose everything? 

Crypto Confidential is Nat's unfiltered, insider's account of the hyperactive, hyper-speculative, hyper-addictive, nearly unregulated, completely insane world being built on the blockchain. A behind-the-scenes exposé of the bull runs and breakdowns, revealing exactly how the crypto-sausage gets made. A story of getting rich, going broke, scamming and getting scammed— and how we can all be more educated participants during the inevitable next bull run.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nathaniel "Nat" Eliason is a writer and a crypto insider with a wildly popular newsletter and podcast. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Is Everyone Getting Rich without Me?

April 2021:
Nine Months Earlier

Getting rich is a long, slow, steady process: get a job, do your work, get promoted, invest in your 401(k). With a few good promotions, maybe a strategic job switch or two, and years of diligent saving, hopefully, someday, you will "make it" and earn the retirement of your dreams.

But what if there were a faster way?

Five months earlier, I had quit my marketing job to find work I was more passionate about. Now, I was running out of time. I had a popular blog that earned me some money, and I would have loved to have found a way to write full time. But our daughter was due in six months, and I was unemployed. I needed to figure something out fast.

I was learning to code, and programming jobs paid well, so that was the obvious answer. But it felt like, everywhere I looked, young people were cirvumventing the system to amass huge amounts of money, enough to live off for years, even decades. Some of these self-made millionaires had built businesses or created new technologies, but a shocking number seemed to have found an easier path: they'd gambled on crypto.



I finished the last of that day's coding classes and went inside to make more coffee. After first diving down the programming rabbit hole a few months earlier, I started spending twelve hours a day indoors, hunched over a screen. It was taking a toll on my sanity, so I dragged my desk outside onto my deck, where a towering old oak tree offered enough protection from Austin's heat to survive. I might have looked silly sitting out there for half the day chugging ice water, but I loved it.

While the coffee brewed, I pulled my phone out to check the crypto-trading app Coinbase. Between coding sessions, I had started day-trading Dogecoin (DOGE), a cryptocurrency created in 2013 based on Bitcoin. Dogecoin was never meant to be a serious financial asset. Even the founders said it was a joke. But when the price of Bitcoin started climbing at the end of 2020, and people looked for the next hot cryptocurrency to bet on, Dogecoin started climbing as well.

For most of the currency's eight years in existence, one DOGE was worth a fraction of a cent. Then, in February 2021, the price reached a new high of five cents. Now, at the start of April, it was rising past six cents. I had bought some in January, when it started taking off, and had been holding it ever since. So far, it was the only thing I'd done that year that had made me any money.

Every day, when I woke up and saw that it had gone up, or at least not gone down by much, I had to answer the same question: Do I sell this, or do I keep holding on to it? I was up a few thousand dollars by then, and it was tempting to sell, but the pain of missing out on more money might be worse than the joy of cashing in on what I'd already made.

"Are you ready to go?" Cosette's voice brought me back to the present. She must have come downstairs while I was buried in my phone.

"Yeah, sorry, let's do it," I said and started leashing up the dogs. Cosette was a real estate agent and didn't need to leave to start showing houses until nine, giving us an hour to grab coffee. Our favorite spot, Velocity, was only a couple of blocks away and run by Johnny, one of our closest friends.

Once we left the house, Cosette asked, "Were you looking at your doggy coin again?"

"Maybe . . ." I smirked. "We're up again."

"So, you're gonna sell it?"

"Well, no, I didn't say that."

She laughed. "I don't know how you do that."

"Do what?"

"See it go up and not sell it. I'd be terrible at this. I'd want to sell as soon as I saw I made money." We stopped at the intersection, waiting to cross. "Are you excited for this afternoon?"

"Yeah," I said, stepping into the street. "I can't wait to see her."

"I bet she's a cute little tadpole," said Cosette.

"Our cute little tadpole," I said. "I can't believe it's already been three months."

We rounded the corner to Velocity and froze. Johnny was on his hands and knees crawling around on the ground in front of the order window, while Rose, his partner, paced back and forth on her phone, clearly agitated.

"Johnny, what happened?" I yelled as we started jogging towards the trailer.

"Keep the dogs back," Johnny called out. He had shards of glass carefully balanced in his hands, and I saw there was a larger pile on the steps in front of the shop below the shattered window of his café door.

"Again?" I asked him.

"Yeah," said Johnny. "Again." He tossed the glass in the trash and scanned the front steps for any remaining pieces. "I think you're good."

Cosette kept the dogs outside with Rose, and I followed Johnny inside the trailer to survey the damage.

"Lucky they left the prototypes," I said. Johnny was a mechanical engineer at heart and had spent the last year designing the best travel espresso maker money could buy. At $1,500, it seemed like an insane investment to me, but he had hundreds of coffee aficionados who had already preordered it and were eagerly awaiting its release.

"Yeah, probably too hard to pawn. They took all the tablets though."

"Think it was the same guy?"

Johnny nodded. He opened in 2019 and built a thriving community around the café. Then the COVID-19 pandemic nearly put him out of business. His online sales of coffee beans and espresso tools were doing well, but the café was barely scraping by. Worse yet, someone in the area had been breaking in every few weeks. He couldn't easily afford a surprise bill for new tablet computers.

"What're you gonna do?" I asked. "You can't keep letting this guy steal from you."

"I know," said Johnny, inspecting an espresso machine for damage, "but what I can do?"

"What about putting in more security? Or a gate? Booby traps?"

Johnny laughed, "Yeah, a gate and more security would be great, but I can't afford that."

"You could sell your DOGE," I said.

"Yeah . . . but I wanna let that ride," said Johnny. He'd been much more aggressive than me with his DOGE investment. I knew he was up almost twenty thousand dollars. He was making more from holding a joke cryptocurrency than he was from all his hard work at the café.

"We need to find the next Dogecoin," I said.

"Yeah, well, if you find any more free money, please let me know," Johnny said. "I don't know how much longer I can do this." He stared at his espresso machines. "Anyway, what can I get you?"



On the walk home, I couldn't get the idea of "the next Dogecoin" out of my head. Would other cryptocurrencies follow Dogecoin's meteoric growth the way Dogecoin was following Bitcoin?

It had happened before. When Bitcoin launched in 2009, very few people cared. For the first few years, one bitcoin (BTC) was worth almost nothing. In 2010, someone spent ten thousand bitcoins on two Papa John's pizzas. Curiosity grew, though, and eventually peaked with the first crypto mania in 2013-14, when Bitcoin hit $1,100 per BTC and spawned tons of copycats who wanted to cash in on its success.

If you caught the wave of that mania early, you could have made a fortune by finding out when a new cryptocurrency was going to launch, buying it early, then selling it as it took off. People made millions speculating on the Bitcoin copycats.

By the end of 2014, though, the mania was over. Bitcoin fell to a low of $172, most of the copycat cryptocurrencies died, and the public consensus was that the Bitcoin story was over.

But it came back. In 2017, the market took off again, this time sending Bitcoin to a peak price just shy of $20,000. Once again, as the fervor around Bitcoin increased, people started launching copycats.

The second wave of mania was even...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593714040
ISBN 13 
9780593714041
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

105 Golborne Rd
London
W10 5NL
Vereinigtes Königreich
Verantwortliche Person
M.E.G Cards & Gifts
443000000000
paula@megcards.com

48 Cloyfin Road
Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road
Coleraine
Londonderry
BT52 2NY
Irland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780753561232: Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0753561239 ISBN 13:  9780753561232
Verlag: WH Allen, 2024
Softcover