No retirement. No savings. No future. No wonder we’re betting the house on crypto | Rohit Thawani

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I must begin this article by stating that the information I am providing is not financial advice. I think I have to legally say it because I heard it on a podcast or something, I really don’t know. But, if you follow my crypto tips, this could be your first problem.

It all started with a failed shot.

Let’s go back to 2004, when I put my $ 5,000 in savings into Apple, a company I really believed in. It was my first stock purchase and the first thing I did for my future immediately after graduating from college. Unfortunately, life quickly became expensive. Within three years of my initial purchase, I was forced to sell all of my Apple stock because the bills, housing, and starting a new life in New York City with a salary of $ 29,000 weren’t good. Marlet.

Cold sweat.

It’s been almost 15 years since I woke up with them, almost panic attacks about the biggest mistake I ever made. This 2004 $ 5,000 investment would be approximately $ 1.8 million in my account today. Instead, I’m about to turn 40, my partner and I are still tenants, and she and I are paying off loans. Compared to most of my peers, we are sort of among the lucky ones.

The point of this editorial is not to mope about my lost gains. This is our collective desperation. The dollar loses all value and the class struggle intensifies. The average home buyer is almost twice as old today as they were in 1981. After adjusting for inflation, our parents would have paid 1 / 10th of what we would have today. ‘hui to buy a house. Rental prices are rising four times faster than inflation. The cost of higher education required for most high paying jobs is 17 times what our parents paid. When we retire, our social security checks will only be a fraction of the minimum wage. The snowball that rolls down the mountain to flatten us continues to expand and accelerate.

We need an exit. We need a way to the top.

Many of you have experienced your own version of my Apple nightmare, watching the waters of prosperity flow through cupped hands. I never want this to happen again. And unless we can get into the next Amazon, Tesla, or Google stock early on, it looks like we’ll never be able to afford our future. This is why I ventured into cryptocurrency.

If you couldn’t tell now, I’m a little ignorant of the financial world. Sure, I have a working 401k and put together a small online portfolio of companies that I personally believe in, but I’m not sure how it all works. I just put some money in and pray that it becomes more money in the future.

I am almost as ignorant about crypto.

My first leap into the cryptocurrency world came with bitcoin in early 2018, after my now technically rich friends have been talking about it for years. I decided to take the plunge by opening a Coinbase account and buying a fraction of a bitcoin when it cost around 11,000 to 12,000 coins. I let it sit and two years later the price of a bitcoin hit $ 40,000. A year later, $ 60,000.

I could feel it happening again …

Was this my chance for redemption? Any chance to secure my bag? Even though I arrived late for Bitcoin, I was early enough to see my investment increase six times. It wasn’t the 3,600 times Apple would have been, but it was a start.

At that point, I decided: I’m all for it. Crypto will save us. I asked those same crypto-rich friends what the next big coin would be, and blindly bought a few of each that they recommended.

I quickly entered the dogecoin at $ 0.03 a coin. In one month, coins hit around $ 0.60, now in the $ 0.25 range. Another victory.

My retirement plan was coming to fruition. Can I continue this hot streak?

Then I looked to enter even earlier with more promising cryptos, because apparently that’s how you see parabolic growth. I succumbed to buying more meme tokens, aka “shitcoin”. It required learning a very ‘simple’ 13 step process between my bank, my crypto trading platform, my digital wallet, and some shady websites that trade real crypto like bitcoin and ethereum for crypto. desired crap.

I lost almost everything I put in these speculative coins. Coin scams only exist because people like me exist.

Cryptocurrency is not meant to be stocks bought and sold for retirement planning

Let me make it clear: Cryptocurrency is not meant to be stocks bought and sold for retirement planning. The real promise of secure and decentralized currencies is that they are free from the grip of the government and those with whom they collude to ensure that the house always comes out on top: Wall Street, hedge funds and platforms. trading like Robinhood. As long as we the people continue to lose, our elected criminals have practical problems that they can promise to solve during their campaigns.

Cryptocurrency is our chance to rage against this machine.

This promise of decentralization may seem like an impossible utopia. In a discussion with a friend, she noted that most of what we’ve seen so far has been less decentralization and more of a transfer of power from one elite group to another: the executive class. towards the technological class. These people with the insane platforms that have been mining blockchain transactions since the early days are sitting on their piles of digital gold. But that’s okay because there is more than enough leftovers to pick up along the way.

My entire cryptocurrency wallet is in the red with the exception of bitcoin, ethereum, and doge. I don’t hold any grudges against SafeMoon, CluCoin, Muskets, and all the other stupid meme tokens I’ve fallen in love with. A few hundred dollars here and a few hundred there could very well be a winning lottery ticket in a few years. Or it could all be money burnt on a fraudulent coin.

Every win is a win for decentralization and every loss a healthy reminder that crypto is a bet, just like the stock market. The real trophy is this: We don’t need to look only to the establishment to play our future. The establishment turns to us. Russia has banned payments made with cryptocurrency, China has banned it completely, and here in the United States there is talk of an official digital currency to compete with the dollar. This week again, the Staples Center in Los Angeles was renamed Crypto.com Arena.

Everyone, including legacy institutions, are looking to cryptocurrency to build their future. Unlike before, we have a better head start. Just hope we don’t sell too soon.

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