I officially sold 100% of my bitcoin holdings today. I'm off the ride, and I'm kindof sad about it. Just wanted to tell somebody.

(This is not a story of me losing faith in bitcoin. The opposite.)

I first got involved in bitcoin in around 2013. I bought my first bitcoin for about $120.

From 2014-2017, I did one of the smartest things I've ever done, and set up an automatic weekly buy of $50, telling myself that this was money I wasn't going to touch EVER. Bitcoin morpheus and all that.

Early last year things started getting...nervous for me. The few thousand dollars became >$10,000, and I started thinking "holy shit, I have more than $10,000 of magic internet money. I am an idiot not to sell this!?", but I just held strong, reminding myself that I was a hodler. I was in this for the long haul, and I wasn't fucking selling.

In November/December things started getting really nuts, as my holdings ballooned (I also had a non-insignificant amount of ethereum), to around $200,000. My wife, who is extremely supporting of me, was completely supportive of me hodling through EVERYTHING.

I started looking at yachts. At this point, buying a $120,000 yacht (a 40 foot sail cruiser, which would fulfill one of my life goals of sailing around the world) was possible. I wasn't going to sell, but it was completely nuts to look in my account and see an amount in there that could legitimately make this dream come true today.

But still, I told myself: either this is going to be a global currency, or it's going to be worth nothing. HODL strong.

At this point, I moved all of my funds to cold storage (hodl storage!) in the form of multiple cryptosteels distributed across multiple safety deposit boxes (with redundancy).

I'm a holder.

In January, I set up one of the first lightning nodes in the world on mainnet, and used some of the dust I still had sitting in coinbase to buy myself an (expensive, haha) t-shirt from blockstream. "Don't trust Verify". I love that shirt.

Well here's what happened in the meantime: my house went up for sale (I'm a renter)...and the amount of money I had in bitcoin meant that I could just buy it. Actually even better: the house I'm buying has a small guest house/casita in the back, so my bitcoin isn't actually buying the house, it's making a large enough downpayment on the house that the rental income from the casita pays ALL of the mortgage on a half a million dollar house.

So this is where my story ends (for now). This is my moon. I'm cashing out, and because of my cashing out, I feel like I'm exiting the system to some degree. I can live for free forever, and when I feel like it, I have a half a million dollars in land.

The first thing I'm doing is buying back in (aggressively), but it's going to take YEARS to get back to where I started.

This stuff is the future. There is no doubt in my mind about that, but at the same time: I still have to live in the world.

To all the people who believe in this technology with me, the ones who are willing to buy my coins because you, like me, believe that they're worth $11k (no, $10.5, no $10.7, no $11.7k, no $9k, no $10.5k, no $50k): thank you.

I'll be back soon to buy yours.

Submitted March 09, 2018 at 02:54AM by hodlthedoooor http://ift.tt/2G7oHoQ