What 10 Years of Crypto Investing Actually Taught Me
What I got right, what I got wrong, and why the long game is the sovereign game worth playing
Key Takeaways
Crypto made me enough to retire early, but not before I made almost every mistake in the book
Not understanding Bitcoin cycles in 2018 cost me six figures in paper gains
Chasing DeFi yield after the 2021 bull run taught me that complexity has a price
The long-term strategy is the only one that consistently works if you understand cycles
95% of active traders lose money. Having a plan is what separates the rest
The future of finance is digital, and in this new world, you are your own best asset manager
I bought my first ETH at $8. It was December 2016.
I want you to sit with that for a second. Eight dollars. I didn’t know exactly what I was buying. I just liked the name (Ethereum), knew the technology was the future (smart contracts + blockchain), the team behind it was serious (Vitalik Buterin, 19-year-old genius), and knew the traditional financial system had been manipulating us for a very long time.
That was 2016. I was still working as a tax accountant, still sitting across the table from clients who trusted their banks, brokers, and financial advisors to handle everything. And I kept thinking: should we be trusting these institutions with our financial nest eggs?
Half a decade later, I retired early because of what I learned in crypto. Not because I got lucky. Because I eventually stopped making the mistakes that most traders and investors make, and started paying attention to what actually works.
Here is what ten years taught me.
The Story the Chart Tells
Let me be honest about my crypto path, because the wins only make sense in context.
I started with only $750 in 2015. By January 2018, that had grown by over 29,000 percent. I was watching my account like it was a movie, getting excited about the possibility of retiring, imagining what came next.
But alas, I did not sell a single coin.
I did not understand Bitcoin cycles at the time. I did not know that crypto moves in boom-and-bust patterns that were relatively predictable once you recognized them. I just watched, started panicking when prices dropped, and ultimately did nothing. Within five months, my portfolio had dropped 84 percent. Ouch!
That was lesson one, and it cost me six figures in paper gains.
By the 2021 bull run, I had done my homework. I understood cycles. I took profits. The portfolio peaked over 1,100 percent above my 2018 fallen basis, and I sold a substantial portion near the top. That decision enabled me to retire from accounting early.
But I still had six figures left in crypto, and I was not done making mistakes.
With money to work with and time on my hands, I started exploring decentralized finance (DeFi) to earn rewards on my assets. DeFi promises yield on your holdings without selling them, which sounds ideal. For a while, it worked. I was earning returns on a lending platform as the numbers climbed.
Then UST collapsed.
UST was an algorithmic stablecoin, the kind of innovation that sounds airtight in a white paper and unravels catastrophically in a crisis. When it depegged in May 2022, it took Luna down with it in a matter of days. I lost $6,000 in that event. Not a life-altering number by then, but a sharp reminder that complexity in crypto carries hidden risk.
I kept going. I made back most of what I lost. But after eighteen months of active DeFi participation, I did the honest accounting and realized that impermanent loss* had quietly consumed much of my yield. DeFi is not something you can set and forget. The returns require constant attention, and the math does not always work in your favor.
So I started winding down my positions. And then, while trying to figure out the safest way to put my remaining ETH to work, I made the worst mistake of the decade.
I joined a legitimate crypto trading service only to be duped by an imposter on their Discord server; someone posing as the founder offered a copy-trading arrangement that looked credible. I trusted it. I lost 25 ETH, worth about $83,000 at the time.
I do not love Discord. It is too easy for bad actors to impersonate trusted figures, and by the time you realize what happened, the damage is done.
That loss was the turning point. Not just financially, but personally. Sitting with what had happened, I had what I can only describe as a spiritual epiphany. I had been spending a couple of years chasing yield, optimizing returns, and stressing about the next move.
Something in me said: Enough. Being financially sovereign shouldn’t be this difficult. There must be another reason I had been given this financial knowledge, and it was not to spend the rest of my life anxious about ETH or altcoin positions.
I simplified everything. I returned to the long-term strategy that had actually worked for me in the beginning. And I started paying more attention to the spiritual path that had been running alongside my financial life for forty years.
That is where The Golden Age comes from.
What Actually Works
Here is the uncomfortable truth that most crypto content will not tell you: the overwhelming majority of active traders lose money. Research consistently puts the figure at around 95 percent. Not because they are stupid. Because the game they are trying to play is harder than they think it is, and the market makers do not care about your portfolio.
The difference between my 2018 and 2021 results was not luck. It was education. Specifically, understanding that crypto moves in cycles. Prices are tied to the Bitcoin halving schedule, and liquidity cycles create predictable windows for accumulation and profit-taking.
I stopped trying to trade and started investing with a framework. The results speak for themselves in that chart. Financial sovereignty is about taking ownership of one’s wealth and abundance within a financial and spiritual framework that aligns with one’s life and heart.
The Cardano Lesson
In 2021, I sold 75% of my ETH and all my BTC, but I did not get everything right.
I also held 50,000 ADA. I started buying Cardano at $0.02 and watched it run to $3.50 in 2021. I believed in the project. I thought the fundamentals were solid enough to hold through the next cycle and sell when I needed the cash, so I did not sell at that time.
Unfortunately, Cardano has not recovered. The project is still active, but it has not delivered on its promises (in my opinion), and the price has not come anywhere close to that 2021 peak. I ended up selling at about $0.50 to gain cash so I could invest in other, more viable projects. My holdings should have been a generational win, but they were not.
Cycles Are Everything
Life is defined by cycles. Birth and death. Winter and spring. Day and night, and so on. We tend to organize our lives around cycles. Why should it be any different in our investing life?
People say you cannot time the market. That is true in the narrow sense. No one knows the exact top or exact bottom.
But crypto is not like other markets (at least not yet). It runs on cycles that are relatively predictable, tied to Bitcoin’s halving schedule, money flow, and the waves of retail and institutional attention that follow. Those cycles do not repeat identically (just like in nature), but they rhyme loudly enough that if you are paying attention, you can make informed decisions about when to accumulate and when to take profits.
It is worth noting that the BTC cycle appears to be shifting in 2025. With more institutional capital in the market and fewer retail-driven waves, liquidity cycles and macro money flow now carry more weight than the halving alone. The framework still holds. But the inputs are evolving, and any serious investor needs to be tracking both.
Buying during prolonged bear markets (winter), when prices are down 70 to 90 percent from their highs, and everyone has given up, is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable. Selling into bull-market euphoria (summer), when everyone is calling for higher prices in the news and on social media, is not complicated either. It is just uncomfortable.
Most investors do the opposite. They buy when prices are rising because rising prices feel like confirmation that prices will keep rising. They hold when prices are falling because selling would mean admitting loss. The market is perfectly designed to punish that behavior.
Understanding cycles does not make you a prophet. It gives you a sovereign framework for decision-making when your emotions are telling you to do the wrong thing.
The Bigger Picture
There is something more at stake here than returns.
Like it or not, the future of finance is digital. Distributed ledger technology, generically called blockchain, is not going away. It is becoming the infrastructure of a new financial system, one that operates without the intermediaries we were taught to trust: the banks, the brokers, the advisors who handled everything while we looked the other way.
That system has served some people well. It has also quietly extracted wealth from others for generations, through fees, inflation, bad decisions, and complexity designed to keep ordinary people dependent.
Crypto is attempting to change that equation. In its current form, it does not make things easier. It makes things more demanding. More options, more flexibility, and more personal responsibility. You become your own custodian. Your decisions are your own. Often, there is no one to call when something goes wrong.
That is either terrifying or liberating, depending on how prepared you are.
A Simple Framework for Getting Started
Most people who lose money in crypto do not have a plan. They have a wish. They want significant returns, they want them quickly, and they have not thought through what they will do when the market moves against them.
A few principles that have served me well:
Know yourself before you invest a dollar. What type of projects or narratives attract you? What is your actual risk tolerance? How much time do you have to research and monitor positions? What would you do if your portfolio dropped 50 percent tomorrow? These are not rhetorical questions.
Start with the blue chips. Bitcoin and Ethereum have the longest track records, the deepest liquidity, and the strongest fundamentals in the space. They belong at the core of any serious long-term portfolio, typically 60% or more.
Learn to read market cycles. You do not need to be a technical analyst. You need to understand roughly where we are in the cycle, whether we are in accumulation, expansion, euphoria, or contraction, and let that shape your decisions.
Have a plan for both entry and exit before you buy. Most people plan their entry. Very few plan their exit. That is why I held ADA at $3.50 and lost an opportunity.
And finally: this is a long game. The people who have built real wealth with digital assets are not the ones who traded every week. They are the ones who bought during the winters and had the discipline to sell during the summers.
Ten years in, that is still the whole story.
The technology is extraordinary. The opportunity is real. But the only person who will protect your interests in this new financial world is you.
That is not meant to scare you. It is an invitation.
Until next time, keep walking the path.
In Light and Service,
Kelly Sunshawl
* Impermanent loss refers to a situation where the compensation you receive from allocating a token in a liquidity pool is less than what you would have received just holding the asset. This happens when a token’s price changes in the market, causing your allocated assets in the liquidity pool to become worth less than their present value in the market. The larger this price change, the more your assets are exposed to impermanent loss.