One man’s journey from crypto millionaire to ‘poor’ again

Reddit user u/soundsoviel recently shared an emotional story about his two-and-a-half year journey to become a crypto millionaire, only to lose it all and become “poor” again.

In a Reddit post, Sondsoviel said he was writing while “sitting in a bar in the slums of East Africa, enjoying my $0.60 beer in the shadows”.

Sondsoviel told the community that whilst working for a bank in Europe, “a colleague told me about Ethereum” near the end of 2016. He then decided to “invest blindly what I had left from my savings” into the upcoming decentralised project.

The first 12 months of the investment went very well as the price of the Ethereum token went from around $10 to nearly $500 by the end of 2017.

After the first year, the crypto trader said that he “had the right timing when I switched from Ethereum to EOS”. During this time, we can assume he flipped his gains into a single-digit EOS token that traded all the way up to $20 by the end of its year-long ICO in May 2018.

‘Worth about a million’

Sondsoviel said: “My initial investment was suddenly worth about almost 100x in a liquid market. Worth about a million. I didn’t tell anyone about that apart from my parents, my best friend, and the colleague who told me about crypto.”

After this, he explained that’s “when my parents started asking me for help”. He said he was glad to help initially, but soon he was also “asked to help more family members, also outside of my country”.

“My dad told everyone that his son is rich now. I was his best bank. I lend some 5-digits here and there I think. I don’t even know how much exactly. I never got back anything after a year and I don’t think I ever will. Also waiting 2 years already for some money I lent out.”

Started gambling

At this point, he said he felt like “if nobody gives me back anything, I need to make it back myself”. He spoke about this being the point where he “started gambling with DICE and EOSbet crypto casino”.

He said that after doing well for many months, he won about 9,000 EOS with a careful strategy. However, he then “lost all profits again with EOSbet within one day”.

“Until here it wasn’t even bad. I lost as much as I won. But also the crypto market had a serious pullback and my EOS wasn’t worth as much anymore.”

He said at this point he “got emotional after this step backwards and market bought DICE at the wrong time”.

“Gambling felt like a funny game with some numbers. It gets you going when you make profits every day with it for months. The way I played it, even 16 losses in a row wouldn’t throw me out most of the times. But eventually it did.”

Didn’t hedge his investments

He said that he “lost most because I didn’t do anything to hedge my investment in this bear market, and more importantly dealt one of the worst trades as a result of the gambling losses”.

“It was an emotional raging market buy of a very risky token with low liquidity. It crashed a lot and I watched it, being unable to exit with this low liquidity.”

“I lost another big chunk there on top of the general crypto pullback. All this gave me so much stress for about a month. I also couldn’t carry the financial burdens of my parents and family on a monthly basis anymore.”

At this stage, he said he “felt like I didn’t want to care about money anymore. It didn’t really make me happy, I didn’t really use it myself anyway. It created only problems because suddenly so many people had financial problems and literally begged me for help.”

Decided to quit everything and leave the country

In March this year, Sondsoviel made the decision to “just quit everything and leave the country to have my peace”. He spoke about how he had quit his job because it “wasn’t fun anymore” and he didn’t even care about salary or money in general anymore.

He concluded that “now I am living amongst the poorest people on earth here in Africa and I am more happy than all those months before when I was living in Europe with all this money”.

“This journey completely changed how I perceive money and how I value it.”