Bitcoin: We May Have Opened Pandora's Box

Welcome to the New Frontier

Instead of horses and mules, we're riding bulls and bears, instead of spinning revolvers and carrying carbine repeaters, your typical new age outlaw has an assortment of phones, laptops and keyboards in his or her arsernal. Instead of Cowboy hats — Guy Fawkes masks and instead of spurs, we now have exchanges where we can command our crypto to either buy at a Set Price to help our bulls garner traction or to place a Stop Limit to slow things down. In between that, the Crypto scene (especially back in 2017) is STILL a lot like the Wild West.

Back in 2017, I invested close to $11,000 into Bitcoin. If I didn't fall for a scam or two here, get scammed by a "business partner" and along the way make some poor trading decisions, today I would be sitting atop of at least 11 Bitcoin. But all of that dwindled down to about 6.6 Bitcoin.

I made a profit from an investment, and it paid off BUT it wasn't until late 2017 where I got exposed to trading and fell in deep with it. This exposed me to the dark side of Bitcoin (besides its manic-like volatility) and Cryptocurrencies in general. Looking back with hindsight, it was a great lesson that could have only been taught through that experience alone and now, it is something I can now share with others.

Demystifying the Mystery of Bitcoin

What I carried away with me was something quite insidious — Bitcoin and the eventual effect it has on your mental health can be very impactful, there is a psychological and emotional aspect to it that I had to experience first hand to truly understand. This grip caused a great deal of depression and anxiety in my life which was never there before and this "grip" was one of the main causes of stress in my life.

It is one of the reasons why I keep Bitcoin at arm's length today and often suggest to my friends, don't get hooked into it. Now, I'm making more informed decisions and making sure I look at it with this mentality:

"Own the coin instead of allowing the coin to own me."

So, during 2017 as I saw Bitcoin continue to grow exponentially, it felt as if for every green candle that I saw, it gave me a good Dopamine kick and for every red candle it increased my anxiety and in turn, depression as well as an empty feeling. With all of that, I ended up giving most of my Bitcoin away — helped my parents, helped some friends, and gave away $10,000 to form a group hoping to start something "special" where we could network with each other and create something where we could all bring each other up and hopefully, succeed.

However, after the crash of 2018 is when I experienced the dreaded right boot coming down to stomp me back to reality, and just like that, it pretty much wrecked all of my plans and brought in a lot of chaos and disorder. Through that, I talked to some close friends of mine who also invested in Bitcoin and altcoins and the only thing I could compare it to was — the Wild West of the 1880s.

How I initially got into Bitcoin was through Stocks. For an only child who grew up just above the poverty line in my country, who had to witness a lot of traumatic experiences growing up, I can look back now and draw comparisons between my life and the 1994 NZ cult-film "Once Were Warriors" as it felt as if my life and that film unfortunately constantly clashed with my reality so managing to rise above that and make something out of myself first with Stock Trading then with Bitcoin, I felt like a success.

But I was in no way shape or form "successful" through the traditional system, I was successful through something new and different. Here I am, commenting on the "mystery" behind Bitcoin after spending a few years playing the role of Jonah, stuck for three years inside the belly of the Bitcoin whale. So, with that, let me get straight into the mystery, and we will see if I can pull the curtain back just a little bit... If I am able to do that, then I have done my job.

The Origin of Bitcoin

For this, we must go back to the "person" who created it - Satoshi Nakamoto. The name in my imagination initially conjures up some type of Japanese tech-styled wizard sitting around in a white room that looks straight out of the Matrix, surrounded by holographic screens and technologically advanced computer hardware. A pretty good image for someone who doesn't exist. But the name has grown so big that "sat/satoshi" has become synonymous with determining the valuation of a coin.

One of the main theories concerning "Satoshi Nakamoto" is that the pseudonym was created by a clandestine group of very smart people and launched in 2009:

• Was it a group of University students that had some type of ties to Homeland Security?
• Perhaps they had ties with Wall Street? I'm going to say "unlikely" with this one.
• Or was it created by a group of people within the NSA?

But what were their intentions? I believe it was created as a safety measure after the 2008 financial crisis. Could they have made something to allow the CIA to launder their money? No comment. Create a decentralised currency for the people? I think so.

Created to allow criminal organisations to ply their trade on the Black Market? Not intentionally, no, or... Maybe it was created out of spite after the U.S. Government bailed out the rich after the 2008 economic crash and left the common Joe with nothing?

Everything is uncertain at this point but what is certain is that Bitcoin has ironically now grown to become "the Gold Standard" of digital monetary assets and has become the Godfather to new money.

Understanding Bitcoin

If the Internet was a country, you could class Bitcoin as its official currency. A united world without actually being united with a united currency isn't printed on paper, something that you cannot actually hold nor is tangible in the physical sense is now somehow worth over forty-five times more than the US Dollar and the scary thing is, it's not slowing down especially after Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX) just invested 1.5 billion into the cryptocurrency with projections that it will skyrocket to at least $100,000 a coin and only keep going up.

There is only a finite number of coins in existence (21 million to be exact) with 18.5 million in current circulation, so even owning 0.025 BTC would put you in a top financial bracket of people in the World and now with Musk's recent backing of Bitcoin, with it being put on as a proper payment method for TESLA products, the upsides continue to expand which ranges from mass adoption to proper mainstream acceptance, but the downsides are still quite evident: these include high fees, volatility and whale manipulation.

Personally, I feel as if we opened Pandora's box and while I think yes, there are great benefits with Bitcoin, it is still a wild game and is still very much the same Wild West it was when I first got into it. There is a lot of space where manipulation can happen and for me, that seems to be the biggest bullet for Bitcoin overall.

I do not think we are ready for what's about to come, I think a lot of people will make a lot of money but a lot of people will also lose a lot and having gone through years of trading, I have found that nothing is worth your inner peace for it is written in the Good Book, "What benefits a man if they own the whole World but forfeit their soul?".

The Future of Bitcoin

Right now, I see Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency growing more and more out of their infancy stage (some may argue that it has already, but I think after it is worth $100,000 USD then I will class it as so) but we have not yet seen the potential of what it may become. If you have not found the right group or support network, it is like navigating a new world, except this new world is unlike anything we have seen before with strong comparisons to the dotcom boom.

Help your fellow man out and if you must, bring in some type of regulation amongst yourselves, self-policing is much better than another entity policing it for us. Show the world that something good CAN come out of this. Unfortunately, until that happens and even if it does happen —

I believe Bitcoin's final form will be something if left unchecked, could be something straight from the Book of Revelation, monstrous and beastly that has the potential to turn on us at any moment. Something we are feeding now, that in the future might have a hold over millions and this hold may cripple us further into a descent and bring even the strongest man down to his knees.

But with that said, we MUST learn from the mistakes of those who have come before us, proceed with caution and be as diligent as humanly possible, not just for OUR sake but for the sake of future generations. For all of us 80s babies, Gen Y, Millennials, and Gen Z.

Now is OUR time and if WSB (WallStreetBets) is anything to go by, there seems to be a changing of the guard but let's try to go down on the right side of History. We must proceed with caution for the sake of future generations it is our civic duty to our fellow man.