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- 8 Years in Crypto: The Painful Mistakes No One Warned Me About (Part 1)
8 Years in Crypto: The Painful Mistakes No One Warned Me About (Part 1)
Crypto will humble you harder than any job, any market, any business you’ve ever tried.
Digital Vault
June 18, 2025
Let me say this upfront.
Crypto will humble you harder than any job, any market, any business you’ve ever tried.
And it’s not just the money.
It’s the lies you believe.
The people you trust.
The greed you feed.
The time you lose.
I’ve been here 8 years.
And I earned every scar. Every breakthrough. Every dollar.
No one warned me.
So I’m going to warn you.
Here are the first 6 mistakes I made — in detail — so you don’t repeat them and bleed like I did.
1. The First High Is Never the Last One
In 2017, I got paid in Bitcoin.
Didn’t know what it really was.
Just knew it doubled. I sold. Felt smart. Smug, even.
I told myself, “That’s good enou
gh.”
But four years later?
That same BTC was up 10x.
Lesson?
It’s easy to feel clever catching a double.
But in this space, small wins can blind you to generational ones.
Crypto doesn’t reward early exits.
It rewards understanding cycles — and having the discipline to ride them.
Had I held for 4 more years, I wouldn’t have just doubled.
I would’ve rewritten my bloodline.
2. Friendship Is Not a Security Model
During the 2017 ICO boom, I joined a degen Discord.
Everyone was sharing alpha.
One guy kept DM’ing solid early-stage tips. We built trust.
Eventually, I got too comfortable.
Gave him too much insight into my wallets, habits, even devices.
One day, I woke up $10,000 lighter.
He’d social-engineered me. And it was my fault.
I confused familiarity for trust.
In crypto, trust isn’t earned in days — it’s built over years.
And even then, always verify.
This market is ruthless.
And the friendliest people are sometimes the most dangerous.
3. Never Take Profits Into Hype
I caught a wave.
Turned 5 figures into 6 during the altcoin run.
But instead of taking profits?
I rotated everything into $XRP at ATH — because it was trending.
I didn’t exit. I “re-invested.”
I called it “rotating into strength.”
What actually happened?
I bought into a narrative that was already exhausted.
Held it through a slow bleed… -90% over 10 months.
Lesson?
Taking profits means taking profits.
It doesn’t mean rotating into whatever the herd is screaming about.
The next play isn’t always “more.”
Sometimes the smart play is to pause, protect, preserve.
4. Stability ≠ Safety
After surviving several bull/bear cycles, I finally said, “I just want to chill.”
So I parked my stables in Anchor Protocol.
20% APY sounded nice.
I didn’t ape — I researched. Read the docs.
What I found made me uneasy. Too much circular logic. Too many dependencies.
So I pulled out.
A week later: Luna and UST collapsed. $40B wiped from the market.
I got lucky — but it was a lesson:
High yield hides broken models.
If the numbers look too good, something is underneath them. Something fragile.
Crypto loves to promise stability.
But 99% of those “safe” yields are just volatility delayed.
5. FTX Was 'Safe' — Until It Wasn’t
After Luna, I moved everything to FTX.
Clean interface. Big name.
SBF was on Forbes, right? Seemed like the safest bet left.
Then the drama with CZ started.
I tested a withdrawal. Took hours.
Gut told me: get out.
So I did — fast.
The next day: withdrawals were frozen.
You know the rest. $8 billion disappeared. Lives shattered.
Lesson?
Exit liquidity is an illusion. It doesn’t exist when everyone wants out.
Don’t wait for the headlines.
Don’t wait for the chaos.
When something feels off, trust your gut.
Test your exits when no one else is exiting.
Because if you wait until everyone’s running — it’s already too late.
6. Multichain ≠ Multisafe
I diversified.
Had bags on:
Solana
Ethereum
A hardware wallet
A browser wallet
Felt safe. Smart. Sophisticated.
Then one night at 3AM:
“Slope wallets are being drained.”
Mine was one of them.
Just like that — funds gone.
I thought I was diversified.
But I was diversified across chains — not across attack surfaces.
What I should’ve done:
Split cold wallets
Used multi-sig
Avoided hot wallets for serious capital
Diversify across ecosystems, yes.
But also across wallet technologies, jurisdictions, and access models.
And that’s just the first half.
In Part 2, I’ll show you:
How I survived narrative misreads
How I built a public brand during the bear
And how I finally detached from rage trading and learned real patience
👉 [Join 9-5 Traders Now]
Because this is the level of insight you only get after years in the fire.
I’m here to save you time, money, and pain.
What took me 8 years to learn, you can now absorb in 8 minutes.
This isn’t about hype.
It’s about lasting power.
— Victor
P.S.
If you’ve made even one of these mistakes — don’t beat yourself up.
The ones who win in this space?
Aren’t the ones who never mess up — they’re the ones who learn faster.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
We’re just getting started.