{"id":148079,"date":"2026-04-07T13:28:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=148079"},"modified":"2026-04-07T13:28:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:28:25","slug":"part-2-ive-been-in-bitcoin-since-2014-the-year-i-almost-quit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=148079","title":{"rendered":"[Part 2] I\u2019ve Been in Bitcoin Since 2014: The Year I Almost Quit."},"content":{"rendered":"

You asked for more. Here\u2019s the part I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted to\u00a0write.<\/em><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t expect Part 1 to land the way it\u00a0did.<\/p>\n

I wrote it on a Saturday evening, glass of water on my desk, no plan to go viral. I just had things I\u2019d been carrying around for twelve years that I\u2019d never quite said out loud. I hit publish and went to\u00a0bed.<\/p>\n

By morning, my notifications were a mess. Hundreds of people, many of them strangers, saying the same thing: \u201cNobody talks about this\u00a0stuff.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

And I thought\u2026okay. There\u2019s more where that came from. But the more I started writing Part 2, the more I realized I\u2019d been instinctively steering around the uncomfortable parts. The history was easy, the mistakes were harder and there\u2019s one story in particular I kept skipping over, re reading, then deleting.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to tell it this\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

The Year I Almost\u00a0Quit<\/h3>\n

It was 2019. Not a year anyone talks about in crypto. There\u2019s no famous crash to point to, no headline event. The 2018 collapse was already in the rearview mirror and the 2020 bull run hadn\u2019t arrived yet. It was just a long, grey and nothing\u00a0year.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been in since 2014. I\u2019d survived Mt. Gox, the first big crash and the ICO mania. I thought I was seasoned. I thought I\u2019d seen enough to know what I was\u00a0doing.<\/p>\n

The pattern never changed. Only the names\u00a0did.<\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t know is that experience in a volatile market can quietly become arrogance. You start confusing survival with mastery. You mistake the fact that you\u2019re still standing for evidence that you\u2019re\u00a0right.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d made a significant allocation into a project I was genuinely excited about. Smart people, real technology and a problem worth solving. I\u2019d done my homework and I was patient. I watched it slowly bleed for fourteen months straight.<\/p>\n

The money was one thing. What really got to me was quieter than that. It was the feeling of having been completely certain and completely wrong. Of having studied something deeply, followed every signal and still gotten it\u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n

At some point in late 2019, I remember sitting at my kitchen table thinking: what if the thing I\u2019ve spent five years believing in is just a very sophisticated way to lose money?<\/em> Not in a dramatic way. Not suicidally. Just the quiet, deflating kind of doubt that doesn\u2019t announce itself. It just settles\u00a0in.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t quit. But I came close. And the reason I didn\u2019t quit has nothing to do with the market recovering or finding a new project or reading the right article. It came from something simpler. I called a friend\u2026someone who\u2019d been in crypto as long as I had and I said, \u201cI don\u2019t know if I still believe in\u00a0this.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

And he didn\u2019t try to pump me up or talk me back into anything. He just said: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to believe in the price. Do you still believe in the\u00a0idea?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I thought about it for a long time. And the answer was yes. The idea that open, permissionless systems are better than closed, permission based ones, I still believed that. Bitcoin still ran every ten minutes like a clock. Ethereum was still building. The idea hadn\u2019t failed. A project I\u2019d picked had failed. Those are different things.<\/p>\n

I came back. Slowly, then all at once, the way it usually\u00a0goes.<\/p>\n

What That Year Taught Me About\u00a0Myself<\/h3>\n

I\u2019d been wrong before 2019. Every person who\u2019s been in crypto long enough has a graveyard of bad picks. But this was different because it was the first time I let a bad pick become an identity\u00a0crisis.<\/p>\n

Looking back, I can see the exact mechanism. I hadn\u2019t just invested money. I\u2019d invested my self-image, the idea that I was someone who understood this space, who could see things others missed, who was smart about it. When the investment failed, it didn\u2019t just feel like losing money. It felt like losing the story I told about\u00a0myself.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the trap that nobody warns you about when you\u2019ve been around long enough to be called an OG. Your reputation becomes a position. Not a financial position, a psychological one. And you\u2019ll hold that position through losses that would have stopped any rational person, because admitting the loss means admitting something about yourself.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve watched this destroy people in this space. Brilliant, early people who couldn\u2019t exit a bad thesis because they\u2019d become the thesis. Who needed to be right more than they needed to be\u00a0free.<\/p>\n

The thing that saved me wasn\u2019t discipline or emotional intelligence. It was that phone call. It was having someone separate the idea from the\u00a0bet.<\/p>\n

The Collision I Can\u2019t Stop Thinking\u00a0About<\/h3>\n

Around 2023, while the industry was still licking its wounds from FTX and Luna, I started noticing something happening at the\u00a0edges.<\/p>\n

People were building things that combined AI and blockchain in ways that weren\u2019t hype projects. Not \u201cAI coin\u201d nonsense. Real infrastructure. Systems where an AI agent could hold a wallet, get paid for completing a task, coordinate with other agents through smart contracts and do all of it without a human in the\u00a0loop.<\/p>\n

The first time I saw a demo of this, something clicked in my brain that I haven\u2019t been able to un\u00a0click.<\/p>\n

Because here\u2019s the thing about AI that nobody was saying clearly at the time: AI has a trust problem. A fundamental one. When you can generate a convincing document, a realistic video, a perfect impersonation of any voice, how do you verify anything? How does one AI system trust data that came from another AI system? How do you audit a decision made by a machine that processes a million inputs a\u00a0second?<\/p>\n

The answer that kept surfacing was the same technology I\u2019d been watching for a decade. Blockchain doesn\u2019t just store money. It stores truth, <\/em>verifiable, timestamped and immutable. Every state change, publicly auditable. In a world that\u2019s about to be flooded with AI-generated everything, the ability to prove something is real, to prove where it came from, to prove it hasn\u2019t been tampered with\u2026that becomes one of the most valuable capabilities imaginable.<\/p>\n

I remember calling the same friend again, except this time the energy was completely different. I was pacing around my apartment at eleven at night, talking too fast, trying to explain what I was\u00a0seeing.<\/p>\n

He let me finish and then said: \u201cSo you\u2019re saying crypto becomes the immune system of the AI internet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That was exactly it. That framing has lived in my head ever\u00a0since.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve Stopped Doing and What I Do\u00a0Instead<\/h3>\n

I used to track prices obsessively. Not in a healthy, research way in a checking the market at 3am for no reason way. I told myself it was staying informed. It was anxiety wearing a productive mask.<\/p>\n

I stopped doing that around the same time as 2019. Not all at once, it was a slow withdrawal, like breaking any bad habit. But the mental space it freed up was enormous.<\/p>\n

What I do now is simpler and weirder: I read about things that seem unrelated. Monetary history. Game theory. How the internet actually got built, the boring middle years, the 1990s when everyone agreed it was real but nobody could quite say what it was for<\/em>\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

Because those unrelated things keep connecting back. The internet felt like a solution looking for a problem in 1995. So did Bitcoin in 2012. So does the AI x crypto intersection right now to most people who haven\u2019t spent time with\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

The edge in this space was never being the fastest trader or the most connected insider. The edge was always being the person who genuinely understood what was being built before the market priced it in. And you can\u2019t manufacture that understanding. You have to actually read. Actually think. Actually sit with uncertainty long enough to develop a real\u00a0view.<\/p>\n

The Message I Keep\u00a0Getting<\/h3>\n

Since Part 1, dozens of people have reached out with a version of the same question. They phrase it differently, but it\u2019s always the same question underneath: \u201cI\u2019m scared I\u2019m too late and also scared to miss it. What do I\u00a0do?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I know that feeling intimately. I felt it in 2014 when Bitcoin was at $400 and everyone said the real gains were already gone. I felt it in 2017 when Ethereum had already 10x\u2019d and I wondered if I\u2019d missed DeFi. I felt it in 2020 watching DeFi explode while I was still doing my research.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned: that feeling never goes away. It\u2019s the permanent state of being in a technology wave. The horizon always looks like it\u2019s receding.<\/p>\n

What changes is how you relate to the feeling. You learn to use it as a signal that something is worth paying attention to, not as a trigger to act impulsively. Fear of missing out, handled carefully, is actually a form of curiosity. It\u2019s your brain telling you this might\u00a0matter.<\/p>\n

The people I\u2019ve watched make the most of this space over twelve years weren\u2019t the most fearless. They were the most patient. They let the fear make them curious, and then they let the curiosity do its work, slowly, without forcing it into a trade before they were\u00a0ready.<\/p>\n

One More\u00a0Thing<\/h3>\n

I almost didn\u2019t write Part 2 at all. Not because I didn\u2019t have more to say. But because Part 1 ended in a comfortable place, the survivor\u2019s glow, the hard-won wisdom, the inspiring finish.<\/p>\n

Part 2 required me to say: I almost quit. I made expensive mistakes. My ego cost me real money. I had a year where I sat at my kitchen table and genuinely wondered if I\u2019d been wrong about something I\u2019d built my entire intellectual life\u00a0around.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad I wrote it. Because the thing that actually helps people in this space isn\u2019t the success narrative. It\u2019s knowing that the person who has survived twelve years of this still has years where they nearly\u00a0don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The technology kept building through my worst year. It didn\u2019t care about my doubt. It just kept\u00a0running.<\/p>\n

Every single one of these headlines was written with complete confidence.<\/p>\n

That, more than anything, is what I believe\u00a0in.<\/p>\n

See you in Part 3\u00a0(maybe)!<\/p>\n

Follow <\/em>@crako_0<\/em><\/a> on\u00a0X.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Part 2] I\u2019ve Been in Bitcoin Since 2014: The Year I Almost Quit.<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You asked for more. Here\u2019s the part I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted to\u00a0write. I didn\u2019t expect Part 1 to land the way it\u00a0did. I wrote it on a Saturday evening, glass of water on my desk, no plan to go viral. I just had things I\u2019d been carrying around for twelve years that I\u2019d never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":148080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/148080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}