If you invested 100 USD in Feb 2011, when the bitcoin price is as cheap as USD 1, you would have been a millionaire today (bitcoin price is around 8,500 USD in Jan 2020).
Since graduated in 2009, and started to have my own earning power, I had heard not only once from various sources that bitcoin is a scam, a lot of speculators who were heavily invested in it had burned their hands and some even ended their lives due to heavy loss. As a result, I didn’t spend a minute to understand this speculative investment, I wish I did.
Fast forward to July 2017, few months before bitcoin rose to its historical price level, USD 19,783 in Dec 17, I chanced up a telegram group in Singapore discussing crypto mining. As an undergraduate with passion in mechanical engineering, I was immediately indulged with crypto mining and bought my first rig from carousell at SGD 3,800, with only 1 month of research. It was a 6 x GTX 1060 rig, and able to yield close to 1 ETH a month (considering the ETH price was peak at 1,200 USD in Dec 2017, it was a pretty profitable side hustle with ROI of less than 4 months – provided you sold at peak of course). I didn’t have buyer remorse at that time, though my wife is unhappy with the fact that I didn’t inform her before I pulled the trigger – wise words for those who decided to ignore your wife 🙂
I later sold the GTX 1060 cards and “upgraded” the rig to GTX 1070, and started to build my own rigs. It was a intriguing process where I bought and resold Nvidia GTX and AMD RX graphic cards, built one rig after another, and gone through the entire cycle of booming and fading mining activities in Singapore from late year 2017 to early year 2018. I once have had a total of 4 rigs with 24-26 graphic cards mounted on, turning my study room into a sauna with average ambient temperature of 35-40 degree celcius. Again, after getting some nags from my household CFO, and the climbing risk of fire hazards, I decided to move all the rigs to a paid warehouse with monthly rental (including electricity) of approx. SGD 150 to 180 per rigs, this lasted another 6 months. Eventually I cut loss and managed to find a buyer in Carousell who is willing to take all 3 rigs for a one-third of its cost. Considering the taken price of a graphic card dropped from as high as SGD 500 to <SGD 100, this deal is the best I can find in the market, before considering the last resort – rubbish chutes at void deck.
All in all, the loss in cryptocurrency mining is bearable, and the fact that mining is no longer profitable for NOW doesn’t indicate that cryptocurrency is a scam. Till date, I am still happily HODL-ing some bitcoin and ethereum, and will not hesitate to add more capital once the bitcoin drops below USD 5,000 price range. Blockchain technology and digital banking is the future trend, the early we board the train the closer we are to our life goal – financial independence.
Journey to Financial Independence 