How degenerate crypto trading led me to financial security

05 Jun, 2026

Did I ever tell you that I was pretty early on the cryptocurrency train?

Nowadays, that train seems to have left the station, only to round the first bend, deciding that stability of the tracks was too much for its lofty ambitions and instead flinging itself into the abyss in the hopes that it would float away towards the moon, yet tumbling into obscurity. Many parts of me now wish I'd just put the my money into a tidy all-world ETF and be done with it, but a long time ago I learned about getting rich fast with the help of Bitcoin and it changed my life forever.

Back in 2014, I had heard about Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) somewhere deep on the internet (all nerds back then were getting into it) and I put $30 NZD down onto Litecoin. I had bought it via an old cryptocurrency exchange called Vircurex and in those days, you had to buy currency for the game Second Life, then take that to this exchange, and purchase your chosen currency using the Second Life currency. It was all very obscure and very sketchy and very fun. Best of all was that I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow I got my moneys worth of Litecoin and knew I was going to be rich¹. God, I'm so dumb sometimes.

I promptly forgot about it and also of course did not buy any Bitcoin because that ship has sailed (dumbass), and went on with my life. Smash cut to 2017 and if you've read some of my posts before, you'll remember I've recently landed in Berlin and I had started working as a barista. Now before anyone tells you that BaristaFIRE is the way to go, please be mindful of taking that too literally, because being a barista is HARD as fuck and takes a huge amount of energy for essentially minimum wage. Midway through 2017 and I've had enough. Three or four years of the work had taken its toll and I was ready to start something new.

Now, if you remember your history, 2017 was another bumper year for cryptocurrency and I got another sniff of it and wanted in. Vircurex had totally collapsed and almost taken all my money with it², so I was back to square one, but this time I wanted onto the Bitcoin train and the new hotness too: Ethereum (ETH).

I had sweet fuck all money except 500€ that obviously I didn't need to eat with, so in it went. Great! I now owned something like 0.1 Bitcoin, and I also picked up like half an ETH or something. I told my Dad and he, also wanting in on the action but in a loving, supporting-my-dreams kind of way, gave me some extra money to play with, with the condition that we would split the profits. Not a great move, Dad. We sat with like 0.55 BTC and a full ETH. This was August 2017.

Immediately we start making gains, the market is moving fast and I had bought the currency via an exchange called Independent Reserve in Australia, which honestly was quite small and pretty archaic in its capabilities for HIGH VOLUME TRADING, which I wanted to dabble in. God, I am so dense. So I found these great places called Bittrex and Binance and moved some of the coins there and proceed to try to trade amongst all the new coins that had popped up. I started "making money" everywhere. I remember one day waking up and Monero (XMR) had popped like 100% and I was amazed: this was so easy. Buy, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell, just do whatever felt right at the time: I had no plan.

I tried tracking my trades in some app on my phone, but was a disaster. No worries, because by the end of the year, I was up 10x. Does anyone else remember those days? Gosh, they were fun. I didn't sell those ginormous pops. I was too busy trying to be a slick as fuck day trader and hadn't taken the time to zoom out and see that my lucky bets had transformed into serious money, instead thinking that the technology was truly the future, bro, and that just holding on to the tokens that had really made it into the stratosphere would make me rich. Again, it's hard to look back on this time and not cringe deeply.

Being so balls-deep in the markets and the community, I end up trying to find a way to make some actual money to live off, so I find these guys who are looking to write a catalog of cryptocurrencies in the form of a hardcover that would sit on the coffee table. They wanted to call it "The Standard Catalog of Cryptocurrencies 2018" or something and I approached them saying I'd love to help. They're here in Berlin so I head round to their apartment, seal the deal of writing some listings and getting paid in crypto (I am SO STUPID, my god) and get to it. I'd recently done some work as a sub-editor for the Oxford Business Group and was (maybe still am, you decide), a bit of a dab-hand at squeezing words to make them fit onto pages, so this was really good fun to me.

The front cover of the crypto catalog. Honestly, it's a pretty beautiful book.

Researching, writing, editing; I'm a full blown crypto journalist. All these amazing tokens I'm learning about: I should probably trade them all! Dumb. Ass. 2018 rolls around and the market is starting to shake after BTC hitting all-time highs of $20,000 USD. It's time for my dreams to come crashing down.

And there's me credited in the back of the book. Look, mum, I'm a ghost writer; I made it!

I get rekt. I'm stuck with all these fucking tokens, somehow have traded away an assload of my BTC and ETH, and it's a disaster. I'm trying to lock in gains, but I've got no idea what I'm doing. On top of that, the German government is constantly remind me that being a freelance cryptocurrency journalist is not a real job and if I don't proceed to find a real job, then I need to get the fuck out of their country. Things are getting grim, fast, and I remember feeling really stressed around that time. Nothing that some partying couldn't fix.

We get to a house-party that I actually have no idea whose it was, and I end up chatting to this dude on the floor. A real amicable, kind, calm person who just makes you feel cosy as shit. He tells me about his work and turns out he works at a gaming company based here in Berlin. Well how about that Stepan, I am a gaming nerd and, what's that, you're always hiring new folk for entry-level, English speaking, community management roles? Count me in! I apply and I ace the interviews. I just secured my first job in Berlin with an actual contract. The German government let's me stay.

In my CV, I'd written that I was involved in this cryptocurrency book and that had caught the eyes of the team leads in the company's secret room. I was slated to begin CMing for a new shooter that the company was publishing, but on my first day I was whisked away to the secret room and told that they were working on something big.

"Have you ever heard the concept of an NFT?", they asked. Non-fungible tokens are fancy ways of saving bespoke computer bits and bytes. When you have one of these tokens on a big blockchain like Ethereum, you can confidently say "these EXACT bits and bytes are mine, and you can't copy them". It's a cool concept and they wanted to use this in their games, which were mostly decrepit massively-multiplayer online games that four people played and each of them paid $10,000 a month to be the best. Horrid things, these games, but NFTs were a way for them to make super-rare-mega-cool-one-of-a-kind items that these whales would obviously spend all their disposable income on and the company wanted in on this action. My experience as a cryptocurrency expert (re: dumbass) was exactly the reason I was let into the enclave. Was all this stupidity paying off?

We go bananas on building, marketing, trying to make it work, but the market has had enough of cryptocurrency bullshit for another cycle and NFTs at the time were far too niche. What's funny is that this was 2018, and you probably hadn't heard about NFTs until 2021! We were so far ahead of the game, but timing really is everything. We flopped and the plug was pulled around the end of 2018. I get placed in another small department with just my immediate boss (everyone else in the team re-enters the rest of the company, trying to pretend like none of the past year had happened), trying to make blockchain work for our investors, but it's a shitshow. Eventually that gets shit-canned as well and my boss and I are left holding a bag of our own making.

We get relegated to the gaming online marketing subsidiary and I actually have no memory of what I was immediately meant to be doing there, but my boss likes me (still does, somehow) and finds me some odd jobs here and there. I remember dicking about in some Google Sheets quite a bit and trying to hack some things together for whatever reason. Thankfully, an opportunity quickly arises: the sales operations manager has decided to leave, and my boss asks me if I'd like to take over the role. Well, it's better than being fired, so yes, I would like to do it, please.

The role is the following: managing a single Google Sheet with a bunch of scripts that is used to calculate how much we get paid from our partners, and managing a terrible Bitrix CRM that is used to see what everyone is working on. Absolute cluster-fuck, and I love it. Something clicks in my brain and I'm just balls-to-the-wall trying to min-max this nightmare setup like it's some game that hasn't been beaten yet. The dude before me, god bless his soul, obviously had no interest in trying to make things better (or more likely no clue how to), and everything was working, barely. It was like watching someone constantly doing backflips next to a really large cliff, and you're just waiting for the fuckup to come.

We get told it's time to move away from Google and onto Microsoft, so it's up to me to rebuild everything in Excel. Did I ever tell you I'm so dumb? Excel is NOT made for the work we were doing and it was a fucking disaster. I get it all going and it all falls apart instantly, as everyone is trying to do collaborative work in this document and it's choking while we end up with 48 thousand different copies of the same doc and I'm trying to figure out what the fuck we're meant to pay people. Worst thing I've ever made. However, SharePoint Lists is a godsend and I manage to cobble together something that works, just in time to get everyone paid.

This job is hard, but my work pays off, and it leads to me getting a message from our old CEO via LinkedIn one day, dangling a fat pay-check to go work at some other startup as their Sales Controller. I accept it, I tell my immediate boss and I remember being crazy stressed that I was abandoning him. He tells me it's gonna be worth it and to get it done. So out the door I go, and into what ends up being 8x more stressful and a total shitshow. I'm doing more operational stuff than controlling, trying to moonlight as a controller, trying to do analyst work too, my immediate mentor at the new job quits two weeks after I start and I have to take over all her shit (she obviously was plotting her exit as soon as she heard I was hired), and wouldn't you know, I'm back to managing a big fuck-off spreadsheet to get everyone paid. Fuck me.

This job lasts a year. It's mid way through 2022 and I am so fed up with it that one day my old climbing buddy writes me and asks if I'm interested in a sales operations role at his company. I immediately say yes, and he puts me in touch with the head of sales, who asks me if I want to come by their office to have a chat. Today? Sure. I rock up, in that really useful headspace of "I don't give a fuck about anything right now" and we click immediately. We ended up drinking three beers each in their meeting room for a couple of hours and just chat, and I ask him flat out if there's any bullshit at their company that I need to be aware of, because I'm not doing this again. He allays my fears (I'm still there to this day) and we sign the contract.

These days, I am a senior sales operations manager for a sales team of like 70 people, working along side two others in the team: an incredible data analyst, and our new joiner who is with us as another operations manager, also doing a spectacular job and helping to spread the load. We crush it, every goddamn day. We've got stable systems for all our folk, we do a shitload of sales every day, things are automated like crazy, we've got monitoring systems, we support three different geographies, we speak English, we speak German, we get by in Spanish, and we constantly find ways to improve and adapt to the realities of the market and the business.

I sometimes forget how the journey starts. One day it's making one of the dumbest decisions in your life, to learn to day trade and get obsessed with something akin to gambling, but somehow that butterfly buffets its wings into a career that you really care about, that you're good at, that you want to stay on top of and learn about outside of your working hours. I often think how somehow taking that big risk of buying crypto actually put me on a path to real financial security. It was me trying to get rich, fast; but no, instead it's been really slow, yet steady. Sometimes you just gotta say, "fuck it", and see what happens. Most of the time, it'll work out just fine.

#2026 #life #work