By Jose Guillermo – Sunday Punch
My journey into the crypto world began back in 2016 when I first heard about Bitcoin. At that time, I wasn’t particularly keen or knowledgeable about it, but the idea of investing was tempting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any capital to invest.
In my quest to mine Bitcoin, I came across a website that claimed to mine it for free. I don’t remember the website’s name, as it was years ago, but it did mine some Bitcoin for me. I accumulated roughly 0.00012 BTC, which at the time was worth about 400 pesos. Then, someone contacted me through a messaging app, possibly Telegram, and offered to help me boost my mining efforts. Naively, I agreed and shared my mining address. For the first hour, I saw my Bitcoin balance growing, but after another hour, I checked and found that I had lost everything. I had been scammed. That was my first encounter with a Bitcoin scam, and it was a hard lesson. I immediately stopped using that site as it was clearly compromised.
Next, I stumbled upon another site offering free Bitcoin, but this one involved betting your satoshi on a game called “Hilo.” You’d predict whether a number would be high or low, and based on your bet, you could either double or triple your stake. I played for a couple of weeks but eventually grew tired of the game and lost all my satoshi. It was a classic case of tough luck.
Then I tried investing in a coin wallet, the first of its kind in the Philippines. I invested a thousand pesos and initially saw gains as Bitcoin surged during a bull market. However, after a month, Bitcoin’s price crashed from around 400, 000 pesos to 200, 000 pesos. My investment in that coin wallet app ended up breaking even.
My next venture was into Ethereum through Forsage, a platform I didn’t realize was Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). To earn with MLM, you need to recruit others. The person who recruited me said he would list my investment under his name, but instead, he placed it under one of his downlines. Once again, I failed. If I had simply bought Ethereum and held onto it, my investment could have grown significantly. But such is the volatility of the crypto world. I decided to step away from crypto after this experience.
In October 2021, a friend approached me with an opportunity to become a scholar for the game Axie Infinity. For some background, Axie Infinity was launched in 2018 by Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis, co-founded by Trung Thanh Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen. I’ll write more about this in a future article. Playing the game was both fun and stressful, as maintaining a high matchmaking rating (MMR) was crucial. I played for almost a year, earned a substantial amount without making any initial investment, bought 20 Axies, and became a manager. However, when the crypto market crashed, including Bitcoin and its effects on all cryptocurrencies, the SLP coin I earned never recovered.
I was also introduced to Pegaxy, another money-earning game where the coin is called VIS. As a scholar, I earned a significant amount of money from this game. However, after the developers burned 7, 000, 000 VIS in a single day, the coin’s value plummeted and never rebounded. I was able to buy two Pegaxy horses with my earnings, but this too marked the end of my crypto journey.
Now, the crypto world is calling me once more. I’m currently exploring a Telegram game called Hamster Kombat, which has reignited my interest in crypto. I’m mining through various Telegram apps and waiting for an airdrop. Actually I just received an airdrop from $DOGS which is currently valued at 3996.07 pesos without spending anything. In the crypto world, sometimes money does fall from the (digital) sky.
For now, it’s a waiting game to see if I will succeed in crypto for the third time. My advice before diving into the world of cryptocurrency is to Do Your Own Research (DYOR). In my next blog, I’ll discuss the top coins in the market and explain some common terminologies used in the crypto space.