Back in November of 2017 I was looking for ways to hustle and earn some extra income. I did not have a lot of capital to put forward but I really wanted to find a way to start building passive income. I had heard of bitcoin and cryptocurrency but had not really dived into learning anything about it. I had the thought of at least looking into it and see if I could maybe mine some or something. I really had no idea what I was getting into then. The more I learned the more excited I got and my head was full of the possibilities for the future of the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency!

After scouring youTube, I started setting up NiceHash on two computers and began making small amount of BTC. It was not much but it lit a fire inside me that, has wavered here and there but, has not gone out. In my excitement I decided to try the dreaded ***Connect. I made a couple $100 loans and watched my payments come in. Then I put some money into cloud mining with Hashflare. And about this time I also put $30 in a site called Hexabot.

For a time, all was good. I was so optimistic. The money was flowing in, albeit a trickle flow. Then Hexabot went down and seemingly exit'ed. Was not to concerned as I had only put in $30 but it was a loss and I was disappointed. But then, NiceHash got hacked and luckily I only had $10 that I was not able to withdrawal and had to take a loss. It was Mid-December by this point, if I recall correctly, and the crypto market was beginning to dip. I started researching trading and technical analysis. I joined a Discord server and started learning from other and helping others learn.

Started trading on Binance and was doing okay for a while making some small gains. Then I got stuck in TRX as it topped off and ended up riding it down all the way thinking it was going to bounce. Then the but ***Connect shutdown happened. All I had put in there was now gone. I was going to hold and hope for something to happened but finally tried to send it to HitBTC. I attempted to trade my way out but that failed. So I just took the loss, sold at about $30 and put it into a mini cloud mining package on CCG Mining.

So all in all I've lost about 3/4th of my portfolio so far. It's hard not to be a little discouraged but being here on Steemit now, I am beginning to feel that excitement building again. Although writing this all out and processing through it right now is making me feel pretty heavy. But I know I just need to stick with it and keep fine tuning my plan.

Now it's time to move forward. I plan to, at a bare minimum, invest $50 a month into crypto each month from my day job income. This will be mostly in cloud mining and hodl positions of top coins and some solid altcoins which I have personally vetted. I will continue my very small GPU mining operation. Currently I have been mining ETN and sometimes Vertcoin. Would like to get ETH and PIRL mining going but have not gotten those working.

Would really love to hear from others if you have any feedback or suggestions. I'm here to learn and grow.