My real crypto fails, the early days

 
 
Good morning/evening
 
I had a comment on my 'I coded a bot article' over on Bulb about how real my article was, and all along writing for me was about documenting my crypto journey (not just the good parts) as well as improving on my writing, (I would love to write a book one day) So I would like to think my writing has got better as well as my investment choices, so really this is just a little re cap of some of the really bad projects I was in, back in the beginning.
 
So here it is and yes it does feel somewhat embarrassing that I even considered 'investing' in these projects/disasters, but it was many years ago!
 
Node season
 
This was a time when I sort of watched YouTube crypto and believed what people were saying to some degree.........Another lesson learnt on the way! Anyway it was node this and node that and I do remember most of these just collapsed, much like the s**t coins we have now or dare I say most NFTs.
 
Yield nodes
Out of all the projects we got involved in, Yield Nodes was probably the one I trusted the most.
I first researched it over six months before investing. Compared to most crypto projects at the time, it actually looked professional. There were real people with real names and faces involved. Communication was regular and updates were detailed. Their socials were active and full of people discussing strategies and earnings.They claimed to run between 2,000 and 4,000 masternodes, had their own token ecosystem, their own DEX and several years of supposedly proven results behind them.It looked legitimate.
They even held “audits,” although if I’m honest I never fully believed those were true independent audits. It felt more like a select group of investors getting flown out to Malta for a behind the scenes tour, but at the same time they were unusually transparent for a crypto project.That gave me confidence.The structure itself sounded risky but believable. Minimum investment was €500, funds were locked for six months and expected monthly returns were supposedly between 5% and 15%.And that right there should probably have been the warning sign!
Still, after months of waiting, I finally invested and six weeks later everything changed and Instead of writing happy monthly updates about compounding profits and eventually cashing out into Bitcoin, investors received one of those emails.Yield Nodes announced they were becoming “Yield Nodes Pro” because of crypto winter, inflation, liquidity issues and attacks on their ecosystem. What it really meant was everyones money was locked!
There were AMA's, videos and even a monthly news letter for years, even now there are people who still think they are going to get their money back......Oh dear.
 

 
Stablefund
 
If Yield Nodes looked professional, Stablefund looked unstoppable it was on Polygon and Binance Smart Chain offering a fixed 1.5% DAILY return.Yes… daily and looking back now, that sentence alone should probably have ended the conversation immediately. Deposits were locked for 28 days and the platform claimed its trading system generated consistent profits regardless of market conditions.
The hype around it was enormous and they even managed to get an advert displayed in Times Square.
Within a week I had compounded profits and added more funds. Then more again and I remember feeling great and making easy money or number goes up on the screen aka unrealized gains.
Then withdrawals froze and again there was the promise of refunds and version 2 would be better, well that never happened lol.
 
One more for you from my learning curve of crypto 
 
Project X, Hallon and a few more name changes in between

Then there was ProjectX. Again just as I was about to take profits one of the devs 'Paolo' had ran off with all the money, that should have been the end of the story, but somehow it wasn't and the remaining team decided to “rebuild” under a new name called Hallon. Investors were promised allocations of the new token based on previous investments, profits taken and node ownership.
Then months later we received a huge emotional announcement from 'Professor X' explaining how devastated he was about the collapse of PXT and how much of his own money he was personally investing into rebuilding the project and apparently he had even injured his back from working so hard on Hallon. You honestly could not make this stuff up. Then as everything was ready the new lead developer 'Leon' stole all the money the day before launch.
Again! lol two different lead developers, two rug pulls and that was the end of that............
 

 
In my defence it was all new to me and I can laugh about it now, but we all have to learn, sometimes I got lucky, sometimes I did not but I did enjoy the thrill and luckily I had not invested much. I researched a lot back then, yep really, but I was reading white papers that sounded great, well the ones I could understand anyway but even learning what and how to research takes time and this was before AI could help you out. I learnt many things during this time and my failures were what drove me to Bitcoin as I got fed up getting up in the middle of the night just to check if the projects were still going, so it was worth it to me. 
 
Things are different now, I understand a lot more, I know what I want to invest in and I take profits........There is nothing wrong with that, the diamond hands thing is rubbish IMO, because taking profits can give you the freedom to do many things. Yes crypto is still a risk and probably always will be but those early projects I was in were pure wild west stuff. It is called school fees, I paid but I also learned and now I believe it was all worth it.
 
So what were some of your worst investment choices? Were they going to be the next big thing? As always, thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.