Right Click Save - The Accidental Crypto Criminal

Think of it like Digital Gold

I can't even log into my twitter anymore

I feel guilty. Guilty for not delivering on promises I never even wanted to make.

"Wen utility" chanted the scalpers and speculators, but I was a rookie then. Instead of caving to their every demand, THAT was my opportunity to share my vision. But I had none. It had all happened so fast.

I first made money in crypto when, as a promotion, and exchange gave you a $20 bonus BTC when you buy crypto. So I bought $20 of BTC and Coinbase put another $20 in there for a total of $40 BTC.

About a year later I checked it and it was 2017 and that $40 was now $500. I couldn't believe it.

I created accounts on every exchange I could find, scouring the web for insider tips. And eventually I ended up building a news website that would pull all the headlines from all the reputable websites that I would regularly visit, and it would rip all the articles, while linking and giving all writers credits, and post them in a single, Instagram-like feed. At one point the site hit 40,000 visitors.

When I heard you could make money with NFTs, I bought some axle infinity. I spent 2 eth for 3 axles and I held them for about a year. Then I sold them for 2 eth, (probably could have gotten more if I knew what I was doing) I had no idea about properties or rare traits. But at that time, ETH has tripled to about $1000 each so it was profit at the time.

Then I discovered a darker side of NFTs. Taking advantage of the madness and confusion. If you could learn the rarest traits the fastest. You could coordinated FUD the discord and scalp new listings as paper handed rare-holders flood the market and list their rare pulls near floor price. Then its all about timing your exit. Buy the rumor, sell the news. I once found a collection called Polymon, that allowed you to mint a super rare NFT by staking for a certain period. Very few people were staking for the max term, so there were very few reward dragons on the market. "Rare hunters" buy the rarest items blindly for collections rising in popularity.

Thats when I had an idea. I would mint 5 at $20 each and list them for $250 each.

I bought two more, but they never sold. It was a flash opportunity, and one I am not proud of in hindsight. But for me, crypto was cowboy shit, and everyone was anonymous. And one thing I know is anonymity breeds toxicity.

When people know they will get away with it, they act out of character.

I ended up buying a token called CORE that would lock liquidity with every transaction making it one of the most "secure" and "liquid" currencies. You would essentially lock all your money in their system forever and then get a continuous drip of money long term. I later learned this is an algo ponzi, pay now and hope to be paid later but only if people keep depositing. 

Regardless,in order to keep track of your deposits, all vaulted deposits return a liquidity token that represents your share of the "vault."

And these vault tokens could be traded but only on one exchange, Balancer. And no one really knew Balancer was built to support custom pairs like a decentralized token-LP pairing which was rarely seen and a foreign concept to crypto newbies (the majority of the world in 2018)

I had already invested a large amount in and immediately panicked for a way to "cash out" my permanently locked liquidity. And there were several others like me looking to sell their LP tokens CHEAP, like 50% off to recover their loss and move on.

Once I discovered balancer, I discovered you can make your own Liquidity Pairs. These pairs would allow other users to trade between those 2 currencies while the liquidity providers would get a percentage of each transaction.

Most commercial exchanges take less than 1-3% to facilitate a transaction, but balancer lets you charge up to 15%. I set up my liquidity pool to charge 10%, then I took my 3 ETH from Axie and bought as many LPs as I could, which was, equivalent to about $8000 of vaulted CORE bought at a discount and opened the pool on balancer.

Then I went to twitter and looked up $CORE which helps you filter posts about CORE token specifically. I would find everyone that was panicking to sell their CORE LP and sending them directly to my balancer pool, where they could cash out their core, or I would find people looking to buy cheap CORE LP and also send them there. As a Liquidity Whale, as in I was 90% of the liquidity in the trading pool for ETH/CORELP, I was making 10% of hundreds of transactions per hour.

I was making about 1 ETH per day for about 2 weeks before another whale created a pool with less LP tax, so I was out of business. He had way more liquidity and the price of CORELP was falling fast. I cashed out the rest of my LP to eth and by the end of it, I was at 13 ETH. I would have had more, but I made some other poor investments not worth discussing. ETH was back down to 500, my portfolio was worth about $5500.

I would go on try to get lightning to strike again, making impulse investments, listening to bad sentiment, falling for my own tricks. Easy come, easy go.

I was on the tail end of investing my last $500 from my bank account (yes $5500 in crypto and only $500 in my bank account) in a blockchain developer course that would teach me how to code an exchange. The course first taught me to create a arbitrage bot that would scan exchanges for price differences, then take out a "flash loan" with unlimited liquidity to take advantage. It would even play a custom "coaching sound" when it found an arbitrage" But advanced devs and corporations are already scanning, and their bots work faster. So you end up detecting arbitrage, paying the transaction fee for the flash loan, but transaction fails and you just spent $25 USD worth of ETH on nothing.

I spent about 1 ETH running the arbitrage bot before quitting.

I needed a new plan. I came up with one the next day.

I decided the NFT collection creators were the silent winners-taking-all. They profited on the mint, on the airdrop, and on residuals.

I needed to draw and code an NFT collection.

In 3 weeks I went from thinking about launching a generative profile picture NFT collection to actually launching one.

I know how to draw somewhat, winning some grade school competitions, so that was step 1 complete: learn to draw. Then I went to YouTube and decided I had to learn 3 new things; Code a NFT minting site that can connect to a crypto wallet, Code a net generator that randomizes assets and assigns metadata, launch to an existing NFT audience.

While I was able to find a strangely thorough tutorial and coded a NFT asset randomizer that assigned metadata, I didn't know how to make an attractive minting site, and I had no audience. I did not want to make the same mistake I made with my exchange and launch a token to a nonexistent audience.

I cobbled together an exchange, but had nowhere near the skill to polish it nor did I have the connections to pitch investors on a mostly complete decentralized crypto exchange. So I launched to no-one, bots killed the token launch and drained my measly $500 liquidity pool. All in all the exchange and bot costed me 5 eth. I had fought tooth and nail for a shot at the table, cobbled together a 10,000 piece collection, and brokered a deal with an existing NFT project.

I went to them and said, I have 10,000 pieces of art. I want to give it away for free to your holders. That way you are doing something cool for your holders. I just want royalties and you guys take care of everything else.

I should have asked for more.

If I had just charged $5 each and split 50/50 with the team I would have made $17,000. That would have changed my life.

But I was scared. Most successful people that I looked up to in the space like Hayden of Uniswap were doxxed and way more technically savvy. I was unsure of the laws around NFTs and wanted to remain as anonymous as possible in case things went south. I was really looking to make some easy money, not be a public figure or CEO.

Before I knew it, it was launch day.