It's 2015 and you're 19.
A friend shows you a website that pays out tiny amounts of Bitcoin for playing simple games and clicking through ads. These were called faucets, and they were everywhere back then. The payouts are so small they're almost a joke. You do it anyway, mostly because it's free and a little bit fun.
Bitcoin trades in the few hundred dollar range that year. It had already crashed hard after the 2013 peak, and Mt. Gox had collapsed the year before. Most people you know think it's either a scam or something used on the dark web.
After a few weeks you've got a small balance. Not enough to buy lunch. You forget about it.
Two years later, in 2017, it's everywhere. Bitcoin runs toward $20,000 by December. Your cousin who never cared about tech asks you how to get some. You remember the faucet, dig up the wallet, and there it is. Still tiny, but suddenly it's worth real money.
You sell. Of course you sell. It feels like a lucky windfall, and nobody in your life has ever seen a chart go up like that.
A year later Bitcoin is near $3,200 and you feel like a genius. Everyone who bought that December is down more than 80%. You tell yourself you timed it perfectly.
Then 2020 happens. A pandemic, money printing, companies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. By 2021 it's near $69,000. The coins you sold for a nice dinner are now worth a used car. You stop checking because it hurts.
2022 brings LUNA, FTX, and a crash under $16,000. Part of you feels relieved. Maybe you weren't that wrong after all.
Then January 2024, spot ETFs get approved, and two months later Bitcoin prints a new all-time high. Today it sits at $77,267.
What nobody tells that 19 year old is pretty simple. The mistake wasn't selling in 2017. Selling after a huge move is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The mistake was never coming back, never learning what the thing actually was, and letting every price since then feel like proof that it was too late.
Every single year of that story, someone was saying it was too late. At a few hundred dollars. At $20,000. At $69,000. At whatever price you're reading this at.
I'm not telling this story so anyone feels bad about coins they sold. Plenty of people made smart decisions with what they knew at the time. I'm telling it because almost everyone in crypto has some version of it, and that version usually says more about patience than about price.
If you could go back and give that 19 year old one sentence, knowing everything you know now, what would it be?
And what's your version of this story?
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Personal view, not advice. Everyone does their own research and makes their own decisions.