My Background and Enlistment
I joined the military after 9/11 and got a job that I was extremely overqualified for. Only years later I opened that folder and looked at the ASVAB sheet that had all high 90’s on it. Hell, you can show a recruiter your high school GPA and they don’t base your job off of it. It was supposed to be the test that showed you what you were qualified for
I should have known something was up because not only were they looking for smart people in the Air Force, but with 9/11 happening and the constant need for intelligence was greater than it ever had been.
That sheet till this day is penned by a supervisor of sorts at the Des Moines MEPS where you do processing and tests to make sure your qualified to join. On that same sheet he circled quite a few things, later to find out it was my scores. Interestingly enough, he wrote a certain dollar amount on the paper and put 6 years down beside it.
Normal enlistment was 4 and I could tell they wanted me. I was facing felony charges back home for being a stupid 20 year old, and miraculously after a meeting with a lady in what I can only describe as a Men in Black suit, things changed.
After being extremely paranoid due to the fact some things were pending and I still hadn’t spoke a word of the truth to anyone, I somehow confided in her and knew everything was going to be OK.
Not a week later, everything was dropped. Not a clue who she worked for but I simply knew her as “investigator.”
Jump to the last few years, after getting out more than a decade ago, I found interest in cryptology kind of by accident. I turned interested when I found out the CIA had a puzzle that hadn’t been solved in 30 years.
The NSA couldn’t even crack it. It’s still in cracked, however holds a lot more information than can be researched online about it. Because, hey, would I even want the attention given to someone that discovered what I did? I don’t really know.
Only years before that I was homeless in a hotel room in California looking up how to sell a Dominos gift card for money to pay for the next days stay.
The Introduction to Cryptocurrency
Boom, there was a marketplace. On the clear web, someone would give me bitcoin for the card. Granted,the card was only 40 dollars and a hotel room would be more like 60. But, come to find out that my American Express Bluebird card was a possible converter of bitcoin.
Aka people could pay me online via Bluebird to Bluebird with a simple transaction to an email account. It was specific enough of a payment method to fall in the category of “not many people are going to accept this payment, especially since it’s a prepaid card and there is a massive amount of fraud going on with that.”
Therefore my 30 dollars worth of bitcoin now was worth about 100 dollars to the poor soul who had that as his only payment option.
If anyone knew the fraud game, it was this marketplace. If you had a western Union transaction let’s say, it was the most trusted payment method. You damn near got dollar for dollar.
I made money doing that and also accepting payments via PayPal at 4 times the cost of what I paid for the bitcoin. Of course I had to deal with my accounts getting shut down commonly because people were using stolen credit cards; therefore chargebacks. As long as I did my due diligence I was protected.
When your flipping money faster than a drug dealer taking $25 and turning it into a quick $100 with one transaction, you become hooked. All I had to do was watch out for the guys saying they paid me with the perfect photoshops of receipts and screens showing them paying me.
Even though I thought it looked legit, I wouldn’t get payment. Somehow the moderators had a way of finding out if they were telling the truth. Some special kind of access I never understood. But that worked for me too because I wasn’t trying to rip anyone off.
I didn’t even know the word cryptocurrency until after that. It’s awkward thinking back to junior high. My teacher always had us play a game called the same name as the sculpture at Langley. Kryptos. You’d get 5 cards and then have to take all those numerical cards and through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, have to arrive at the destination number. Let’s just say I was good at it.
I Knew Bitcoin was Going to Go Up Another Time Also
I think it was 2015 or so, and no one had heard of bitcoin. I even saw it as a fictional currency that unless you had someone who wanted to buy it, it was useless. But with the trading game going the way it was, I saw opportunity. Other people had way more payment methods to choose from than me. Way more money to be earned. Hardly anyone but a select few were doing this all day and they were committed.
I finally told my buddy who had a business account with PayPal, (which was the shizzy back then because PayPal trusted your account and less likelihood of them to shut you down.) we would head to the ATM once someone paid into it at 4 times the rate, then turn around at the same store find someone who was willing to accept Western Union electronically.
Someone fast. Because when your doing something like this, the more seconds that tick by, the more gradual your distrust in the person and the more likely you think they are scamming you.
There was nothing preventing someone from putting enough bitcoin in their account to spot for the transaction, take the money, then hope the money they escrowed got found to be me lying about ever sending the western Union. Thank someone above for the moderators.
From there $100 turns into $400 real quick. Through all my rambling I forgot to mention the price of bitcoin at the time, which really isn’t important because it’s all relative to how much your actually spending. In the end it doesn’t matter how much bitcoin it was, only the value of the bitcoin at the time.
However, I saw value in it. What I thought at first to be a steady price started to creep up. My $50 of bitcoin would turn into $60 overnight without me doing anything.
Bitcoin was slowly rising from $200 to $250.
Like I said in the beginning of this, I’m not rich. But I damn well told everyone I knew about what I was doing. Whether any of them even listened I don’t know, but I would like to think I was part of a marketplace that was the foundation of what bitcoin trading is today.
For I believe only with its success was bitcoin ever to truly take off and do what it has done. It all started with that marketplace that still exists today. Only it’s so exploited that you can’t get a better rate for the bitcoin you are trying to sell.
People are somehow getting it so cheap they can practically sell it for 99 cents on the dollar. Back then I’d be sitting there waiting for someone to purchase at 50 cents on the dollar to double my money. It wasn’t long before it wasn’t worth it.
The Emphasis on Investing When I See It
I don’t randomly look for patterns in the stock market to invest in. I could, I frankly don’t have the money to do so. I’m not going to waste my brain on trying to flip 50 into 100 on some half ass penny stock I think might double.
Now, if something does happen to catch my eye even though I’m not trying to investigate the matter, it’s only a matter of time before I use my previous knowledge and think back, avoiding the present for a brief time, and for instance, think of all those times bitcoins price showed up on my news feed.
I can’t remember the month, normally, unless I write an article specifically highlighting something that I see and it gathers enough of my attention to basically say, “I am going to say something.” The department of defense had the saying “if you see something, say something.” It was then that I felt the need to share what I thought about the currency.
My audience was hopefully poor to middle class, no big investors. The only thing was that the article didn’t gain too much traction, even though it turned out to be correct.
The article was titled something like “Why You Should Buy Bitcoin Today.” I was sincere in my approach in expressing my thoughts as to why my brain said “hey Chad, spend your time writing an article on it when you have no money to invest and on the Medium Partner Program you’re not even going to see a dollar.
You would think I wasn’t getting the click bait I expected or people weren’t clicking on advertisements, or signing up for my free newsletter. That’s because I had none of that. I thought it was important enough to share something I saw, and simply ask, can you see it too? A type of “if I’m not mistaken it looks like this is going to happen doesn’t it?”
Now, as I wrote that article, as with any article, I stop the flow that is my hands and pause for a second and reflect to see if I’ve gotten off topic, or more importantly, if my words could even cause damage to someone.
Indeed, if I’m telling people to invest, there’s obviously going to be some background in my credibility shared and me making my position as to why you would ever believe me.
I think it’s more of me looking at the approach of what is to gain by sharing this information. I think that a hard look has to be taken into why I would write an article that possibly could have people losing a fortune if taken the wrong way. Let’s say, I was manipulative enough.
I’m not advertising an app, my brokerage, or selling anything to you, so there is no gain for me to tell you these things. Hopefully along the road you earn some money, but that which I will probably never know of.
As an adult you have to sit and wonder, is he winging it, or did he actually feel it was necessary to try and speak his mind to those that were looking for what I saw as a logical tip.
“Hey, it’s not insider trading if the only place that will allow me is the outside.”
I’ve followed bitcoin from damn near the beginning, and am exhausted with people analyzing if bitcoin will go up or down on a given day. Let’s put it this way, you don’t know, and I don’t know.
I’m merely confident over what it will do in the course of a month or so. I’m not even going to get into data, because I don’t think data is always the answer to what is highly analytical.
Bitcoin Popularity
If bitcoin was so popular, why can you only purchase it from international processing (thanks to my prepaid cards for informing me on that) or on PayPal and Venmo. Let’s face it, getting Gemini or Coonbase to work is a pain in the ass if you don’t have an actual credit card, live overseas, or have an international card.
Or a fairly popular banking institution. But do we really like using bank institutions when they take 3 — 5 days to process a monetary. transaction that doesn’t reflect the price of the crypto from when we initiated it. You’re simply loading money to the account. You can’t buy until 3 — 5 days later at whatever price it is then.
Venmo and PayPal
The spike in price that I thought would occur from being able to get into crypto on these platforms wasn’t what I expected. Because I had a intuitive thought at the direction the companies would go, and didn’t do anything close to what I thought they would in the rollout.
First of all, there’s only 4 currencies to choose from, and absolutely no reason that more crypto options couldn’t be available. The thing Venmo and PayPal would have to fear is in their buying and reselling of the product.
Most cryptocurrencies long term go steadily up, it’s why people stay in. So if PayPal for instance buys AMP let’s say at .01 (I know it’s off) and it jumps to .1 and everyone decides to sell, guess who won money? You. Guess who lost money just for doing the transaction? Them. It serves them no benefit to get into that game.
Think about what this says about Litcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin too of course. They had to purchase enough of it to cover anyone who wanted to buy it. That my friends, came at a set cost that only PayPal knows.
You could try to guess and put the buy at about a couple months before they rolled out with the option to buy, but don’t you really think that it was probably timed well? Companies are all for gambling on an investment and dealing with the added security and customer service along with workload that crypto brings, if they know it’s going to work out for them.
Do you think someone at these companies said I have an idea, let’s sell crypto, we will buy a bunch, and sell it to our customers, with a little fee too. Not once do you think that it might have been stated that “ok if we buy at 15k alllllll this bitcoin and it goes down to 10k, we have lost 5k on X amount of bitcoin.”
Way too risky.
PayPal had to predict the correct time to buy, and as far as the public is concerned you can never tell what’s going to happen. We couldn’t predict the crash or the Depression, and guys that work on Wall Street will tell you that.
So PayPal was confident enough to purchase bitcoin at -said price-. Isn’t bitcoin down from what it was when that whole option rolled out? And they are still selling bitcoin? Not coming up with a flimsy excuse to no longer sell.
If you have half a brain, deducting this will tell you that PayPal loses money with every transaction they do in cryptocurrency as far as Bitcoin is concerned.
Buuuuuut, and here’s the but… a little birdie probably told them that even if it does go down guess what, the odds of it eventually increasing to above the price you bought it for are so exponentially probable, that it is worth it to invest X millions of dollars to offer bitcoin through your service.
Remember, they have to buy bitcoin too.
Profit hasn’t shown up yet I doubt, the financials if you can get access to them should show that accordingly. But it’s a long term investment. Even at a current loss, PayPal makes money charging transaction fees on their crypto. I put in $5 towards litcoin and it went up over double digits to $6.30. By the time I sold it I was back down to $5, even though the price had went higher over 2 weeks.
They sold a certain amount to me for $5 and then technically took a larger amount back for the same $5. (Or the same amount of Litecoin that $5 bought, then getting a discount on the Litcoin you sell back to them.) The $5 minus PayPal’s transaction fee, which goes to PayPal anyway. So they got my $5 of bitcoin back to them for $3.70.
Now do you see how they are making money even despite a loss in their bitcoin value?
That mixed in with knowing the market will go up should leave any investor at this moment with a sense of rest and ease. Big corporations are investing in the sale of bitcoin, and big corporations are billion and trillion dollar companies for a reason.
I would say PayPal knows finances pretty well and probably has some top individuals in the field working on this.
So see it as the sign it is. Get out of those daily articles and predictions on bitcoin, and the worry that comes with them or a bad day.
Companies have a certain amount of faith to invest billions. You can go pop that $1000 in an account and watch it triple over the course of the next two months.
My Goals
To advise people to strategies outside the normal means. I do have my doubts on things I say at times, but if I actually look at my track record, I’m pretty spot on. I see it as beneficial to share about me and my story, and why you should take a chance to live a little bit better of a life.
I wish I would take my own advice. Maybe I’d be happier. But for me, being happy is seeing other people happy. We all should try to help each other.
I’m hoping to finish college in a year or two in psychology. I think too much so I chose a major where I have to think even more. Real smart.
I don’t know if I signed up for them or not but I get recruitment letters telling me to apply in my email. I look at it unfortunately as some kind of joke. Just looking for an outlet for my brain to be of some good use.
Take care guys and gals. <3
