JBM

My name is JBM. My story in cryptocurrency began around February of 2014. This was quite a busy time in my personal life. My fiancé (at the time) and I were preparing our upcoming wedding. My overall investment experience was minimal. Prior experience I had was using option trades on the SP500 in 2008 and Silver in 2011. I was first introduced to crypto by a friend of the family who had made a success of mining and investing. He retired from his finance job in 2013 to fully focus on the crypto market.

The landscape in crypto was vastly different then, than it is today. The entire market cap was around 8.5 Billion US Dollars (2014). Regulation of digital assets was slowly taking form, and with rules less clear than mud. Despite some marginal regulatory clarity, the “Wild West” feeling was present in the space. AML/KYC was something only a handful of exchanges cared about, typically fiat gateways (converting USD/EUR to Crypto for example). Once you obtained your crypto, you were free to move about from one exchange to another. The feeling of financial freedom took on new meaning to me.

Soon, I stumbled my way through setting up my first GPU mining rig. Not having spent quality time on Linux, I setup my first mining rig on Windows 8.1 (Quickly switched to Ubuntu). Dealing with exchange limitations in 2014 was one of my biggest challenges. Wait times for higher purchase limits created serious opportunity cost. My interests at that time were acquiring altcoins, and the only trading pair in town for most was against BTC.

This was my start.

(Early attempt at mining Scrypt Coins – Colorized 2014)