Things I learned during 3 yrs of crypto

I started investing in crypto at all time high (ATH) 2017. Bitcoin seemed to have climbed up from 6000 to 17000. I looked at the graph and thought it could only keep rising. n00b lol. Right after i bought, it started going downhill. And then a while later, it went downhill again. And again. Till it hit 3500 in January 2019. I looked around before investing and found that some small coins did 40x during that short bullrun. Of course, you have to sell in time, because in 2017 it was a matter of days between the rise and drop again.

So in Dec 2017 bitcoin did x2.5, while some small coins did x40.
That was my observation and thinking of how much profit i wanted with my not-so huge savings my strategy was: don’t but BTC, but buy smaller coins. Everything from LTC to Raven. I followed the coins on Discord. I did lose Raven at some point because it seemed no one was actually working on it. I sold and bought and sold.. I think I lost a lot of money that way. THere is a way of making money with trading if you follow a certain coin and you know its movements and you also don’t care about losing it (when price goes up and you can’t buy again) because you aren’t emotionally attached to that coin.

I’m too stupid to read white papers and development programs so what I do is read the facebook comments in crypto groups and see what everyone is saying. You can say it’s stupid, but it gives me a lot of feeling of where things are going. And everyone = the people investing in crypto eventually. Except for the big whales of course who own millions and can manipulate the market price by selling big quantities.

I think the MOST IMPORTANT lesson after these 3 yrs is that PRICE OF TOP COINS WILL GO UP EVENTUALLY. If only you wait long enough.

Some other things:

  • probably not smart to panic buy (FOMO) when it went up bigtime already. I know you think it went up that much, but you can still buy and make some profit on the way up.. Nah. Unless it goes up for weeks and everyone calls it a bullrun :p Very short-term green candles: don’t buy. It’s actually adviced to sell it when it went up vertically, because usually there will be a correction (overbuying and then the smarter people start selling because THEY know the downfall is coming) that follows so you can buy cheaper again.
  • Keep your keys somewhere, and keep a copy of them somewhere else too (usb stick or so). Read on how to reinstall the Google authenticator in case you lose your phone. Best: keep a phone just for this and don’t take that one outdoors.
  • Cryptopia (some smaller exchange) closed after a hack and I also lost some coins there and I won’t get them back: lesson learned. Put your coins in a trustworthy BIG exchange, and also: don’t leave them on an exchange unless you think you will be trading soon. Put them in an offline wallet.
  • you only lose when you sell again at a lower price. And price will eventually go up. In three years maybe but it will go up. SEe main lesson.
  • Bitcoin made more profit than any other coin this time. God knows what will happen next time. Some people say there might not even be a big fall again, but meh.. It’s been going up and downhill again for 10 yrs so why stop now ? I’m hoping for one more big drop so i can buy more. And then the net bullrun will be my retirement plan. Of course it can be a disappointment but I’m sure I learned a few things so next time I will more than just double my investment.
  • stop selling coins that had good future predicted by most people but that didn’t move for a while. Buy them and keep them, eventually they will go up in the bull runs.
  • the small unknown coins can be lucky and go 40x. But yeah.. that’s just a lot of Maybes. Worth trying but don’t put all your money in one, like I did. Egem keeps on being ‘developed’ but it’s now the only coin going downhill in this long bullrun. I sold 2/3 of it, and now keep the rest because the price is simply too low, there is no one willing to give anything for it. And thus I keep it, hoping it might jump one day.
  • selling a coin because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere usually results in a big pump right after :p Crypto is just a way of punishing yourself on a daily basis because you’re stupid and have no sense of timing lol.
  • look into the extra cost of sending around coins from exchange to exchange. Litecoin is cheaper than BTC or ETH, for example. Or trading comes at a certain cost. Sometimes it’s a lot cheaper to create a new order than to answer an existing one.

If you are smart enough to learn to read the signals and to be a day trader, good for you. I’m more of an intuitive person and I just follow the feels. The feels often short-term fu*ked me over because i was greedy. I know now i have to just wait it out a few more years. Stop selling. Buy more when price goes down.

Ofcourse i bought now that BTC went into a 20 percent dip after new ATH of 50000 :p But like I said, the bullrun is going on for weeks this time. And if it goes downhill more, it will go back and higher in a while.

First time with the Minelab Equinox 600

Everyone is jumping on the Nox bandwagon and I could keep it off with the arguments that I’m not going to find a lot more with a new detector, and also a lot of people have some issues with the build quality of the Nox. I watched some youtube tutorial for Nox Beginners and did some facepalms. I mean, the fairground attraction sounds at startup = ?? There seems to be a lot of icons instead of words.
But ok, if it’s that good than I guess people have a good reason to buy it.


My first 2 hrs with the Nox on my *very good hunted to death* field were kinda disappointing in that i had a lot more signals again (Yay), but then I had to dig A LOT deeper too and that mostly ended in either No Item because somehow I lost the signal. OR the item was rusty iron. Joy. Very big iron nails, and other iron items; I sometimes dig iron nails or rusty rings with the Deus, cos well.. Deus LOVES iron rings and I accept that little thingy.. but I didn’t but a 10-yrs younger multifrequency Minelab to start digging gigantic craters for nails every metre. Why can the old Minelab Sovereign and Excalibur perfectly ignore iron ?? So I went back to the computer to google and apparently all I needed to change was the Iron Bias setting. It’ set to 0 in Field 2, and the iron will go away if you put it to 2. It’s in the advanced settings of Recovery Speed (the last one). The higher you put it (it goes to 9) the ‘longer’ the silence will be around bad targets. So if you go over iron which has a ‘good part’ with a high tone, the bad iron part will widen up a bit and make the good part not sound out with a good tone. I also have this with my Deus that iron will give a bad tone next to a good high tone. I’m pretty confident in that it’s not accidentally a good item very close to iron. Well, it is possible but I’m not going to dig every time I get into this situation.

I first tried the 50 tones. Then the second time I took Digmaster’s advice and set it to 2 tones, which helped a lot. It gives you only a good tone and a bad tone. IT does seem to give a much softer reaction to a lead musket ball than the Deus but cannot really say much about it for now. I know Deus also seems to react louder or softer depending on frequency. Isn’t that what the high freq is all about ? Ringing harder on foil and gold ?

Losing the signal happens almost never with the Deus. It’s hard to lose it because I can pinpoint very well and rarely have to dig very deep with Deus (yes it seems not to go so deep but sometimes it does amaze me). If I take one pile of dirt out and the signal is gone, i put the pinpointer in the hole. In most cases the Thing just fell a bit deeper and is out of reach. Lately the dirt was playing games and I lost my item. Found it back sticking under my boot . Several times it was hanging on the piece of mud that was stuck to my shovel. THe mud is annoying sometimes. Well, it’s always annoying. Either too hard and dry in Summer, or mushy and sticky in Winter :p Yes, I do appreciate the rare occasion where the mud is behaving perfectly.

THe Equinox has a design that makes me cringe forever. I mean, you guys had to just get someone’s Deus, hang it against the wall of the design office and make some kind of copy of it. But what you did was: ‘let’s not take into account ANY ergonomy.’ It’s heavier, the handle is big and shapeless (I think the battery is in the handle). It started really hurting my hand with thick gloves after 2 hrs because i couldn’t get my whole hand around it. THe next time without glove was better, but my arm was almost falling off. I’m a small tiny girl, you know. Thanks for caring for the exceptions in your target audience :p I did expect the whole detector to roll to its side when I put it down on the ground, but it stayed upright perfectly. It does have a bigger fork than the Deus. Does also get in my way sometimes but ok. Very Wide arm rest. Totally not necessary for me. Also I don’t like straight shafts. I discovered that when I made my own telescopic carbon shaft for my Sovereigns.. it activates the muscles in my underarm and hand more, it seems. And there you go: the old Minelabs can be modified and you can put the unit wherever you want, put new handles on it.. Does not work that way for the new Equinox. Pity, and shame, since I like fiddling with stuff. I was thinking of cutting off the handle but now it turns out the battery is in there. What kind of Frankenstein do I have to make to have an S-handle with this detector.. My guess is the waterproofing caused some limitations. THe coil cable is just long enough to have a unit on the shaft, so no removable big unit with built-in battery. Why not ? I could have changed the shaft then. Maybe you can remove the whole unit/handle thing and put it in a bag around your waste. Silly huh.

So yeah, I need to try the Nox on the beach because I don’t really feel a need to change my lightweight Deus on the field. It is said the Nox is performing better on pasture and I don’t have much of that anyway. There is room for improvement on the beach. 1) I don’t find much, maybe due to the sanding in. 2) there always seems to be a problem with the old detectors that I’m using. It would be nice to not have a constant ringing because of cable break or empty batteries. So I’m not sure about the nox’ place in my collection. I actually bought it because we are going to start printing parts for detectors, and well.. There’s not much to upgrade on a Deus, is there ? OF course, if I find lots of stuff in the future, I will keep it. I’m not sure I will be able to swing it for 4 hrs like I do with the Deus. WEll, 6 hrs was even possible once with my Deus 13″ coil.

I did find a nice green whole needle with my Nox on the good field. It looks a lot cooler in reality. Seems some yellow metal is shining through but the shape says it’s quite old. Most cool finds on that field go back 500 yrs.

nice green needle found with Equinox