[Part 2] I’ve Been in Bitcoin Since 2014: The Year I Almost Quit.

You asked for more. Here’s the part I wasn’t sure I wanted to write.

I didn’t expect Part 1 to land the way it did.

I wrote it on a Saturday evening, glass of water on my desk, no plan to go viral. I just had things I’d been carrying around for twelve years that I’d never quite said out loud. I hit publish and went to bed.

By morning, my notifications were a mess. Hundreds of people, many of them strangers, saying the same thing: “Nobody talks about this stuff.”

And I thought…okay. There’s more where that came from. But the more I started writing Part 2, the more I realized I’d been instinctively steering around the uncomfortable parts. The history was easy, the mistakes were harder and there’s one story in particular I kept skipping over, re reading, then deleting.

The Year I Almost Quit

It was 2019. Not a year anyone talks about in crypto. There’s no famous crash to point to, no headline event. The 2018 collapse was already in the rearview mirror and the 2020 bull run hadn’t arrived yet. It was just a long, grey and nothing year.

I’d been in since 2014. I’d survived Mt. Gox, the first big crash and the ICO mania. I thought I was seasoned. I thought I’d seen enough to know what I was doing.

What I didn’t know is that experience in a volatile market can quietly become arrogance. You start confusing survival with mastery. You mistake the fact that you’re still standing for evidence that you’re right.

I’d made a significant allocation into a project I was genuinely excited about. Smart people, real technology and a problem worth solving. I’d done my homework and I was patient. I watched it slowly bleed for fourteen months straight.

The money was one thing. What really got to me was quieter than that. It was the feeling of having been completely certain and completely wrong. Of having studied something deeply, followed every signal and still gotten it wrong.

At some point in late 2019, I remember sitting at my kitchen table thinking: what if the thing I’ve spent five years believing in is just a very sophisticated way to lose money? Not in a dramatic way. Not suicidally. Just the quiet, deflating kind of doubt that doesn’t announce itself. It just settles in.

I didn’t quit. But I came close. And the reason I didn’t quit has nothing to do with the market recovering or finding a new project or reading the right article. It came from something simpler. I called a friend…someone who’d been in crypto as long as I had and I said, “I don’t know if I still believe in this.”

And he didn’t try to pump me up or talk me back into anything. He just said: “You don’t have to believe in the price. Do you still believe in the idea?”

I thought about it for a long time. And the answer was yes. The idea that open, permissionless systems are better than closed, permission based ones, I still believed that. Bitcoin still ran every ten minutes like a clock. Ethereum was still building. The idea hadn’t failed. A project I’d picked had failed. Those are different things.

I came back. Slowly, then all at once, the way it usually goes.

What That Year Taught Me About Myself

I’d been wrong before 2019. Every person who’s been in crypto long enough has a graveyard of bad picks. But this was different because it was the first time I let a bad pick become an identity crisis.

Looking back, I can see the exact mechanism. I hadn’t just invested money. I’d invested my self-image, the idea that I was someone who understood this space, who could see things others missed, who was smart about it. When the investment failed, it didn’t just feel like losing money. It felt like losing the story I told about myself.

That’s the trap that nobody warns you about when you’ve been around long enough to be called an OG. Your reputation becomes a position. Not a financial position, a psychological one. And you’ll hold that position through losses that would have stopped any rational person, because admitting the loss means admitting something about yourself.

I’ve watched this destroy people in this space. Brilliant, early people who couldn’t exit a bad thesis because they’d become the thesis. Who needed to be right more than they needed to be free.

The thing that saved me wasn’t discipline or emotional intelligence. It was that phone call. It was having someone separate the idea from the bet.

The Collision I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Around 2023, while the industry was still licking its wounds from FTX and Luna, I started noticing something happening at the edges.

People were building things that combined AI and blockchain in ways that weren’t hype projects. Not “AI coin” nonsense. Real infrastructure. Systems where an AI agent could hold a wallet, get paid for completing a task, coordinate with other agents through smart contracts and do all of it without a human in the loop.

The first time I saw a demo of this, something clicked in my brain that I haven’t been able to un click.

Because here’s the thing about AI that nobody was saying clearly at the time: AI has a trust problem. A fundamental one. When you can generate a convincing document, a realistic video, a perfect impersonation of any voice, how do you verify anything? How does one AI system trust data that came from another AI system? How do you audit a decision made by a machine that processes a million inputs a second?

The answer that kept surfacing was the same technology I’d been watching for a decade. Blockchain doesn’t just store money. It stores truth, verifiable, timestamped and immutable. Every state change, publicly auditable. In a world that’s about to be flooded with AI-generated everything, the ability to prove something is real, to prove where it came from, to prove it hasn’t been tampered with…that becomes one of the most valuable capabilities imaginable.

I remember calling the same friend again, except this time the energy was completely different. I was pacing around my apartment at eleven at night, talking too fast, trying to explain what I was seeing.

He let me finish and then said: “So you’re saying crypto becomes the immune system of the AI internet.”

That was exactly it. That framing has lived in my head ever since.

What I’ve Stopped Doing and What I Do Instead

I used to track prices obsessively. Not in a healthy, research way in a checking the market at 3am for no reason way. I told myself it was staying informed. It was anxiety wearing a productive mask.

I stopped doing that around the same time as 2019. Not all at once, it was a slow withdrawal, like breaking any bad habit. But the mental space it freed up was enormous.

What I do now is simpler and weirder: I read about things that seem unrelated. Monetary history. Game theory. How the internet actually got built, the boring middle years, the 1990s when everyone agreed it was real but nobody could quite say what it was for yet.

Because those unrelated things keep connecting back. The internet felt like a solution looking for a problem in 1995. So did Bitcoin in 2012. So does the AI x crypto intersection right now to most people who haven’t spent time with it.

The edge in this space was never being the fastest trader or the most connected insider. The edge was always being the person who genuinely understood what was being built before the market priced it in. And you can’t manufacture that understanding. You have to actually read. Actually think. Actually sit with uncertainty long enough to develop a real view.

The Message I Keep Getting

Since Part 1, dozens of people have reached out with a version of the same question. They phrase it differently, but it’s always the same question underneath: “I’m scared I’m too late and also scared to miss it. What do I do?”

I know that feeling intimately. I felt it in 2014 when Bitcoin was at $400 and everyone said the real gains were already gone. I felt it in 2017 when Ethereum had already 10x’d and I wondered if I’d missed DeFi. I felt it in 2020 watching DeFi explode while I was still doing my research.

Here’s what I’ve learned: that feeling never goes away. It’s the permanent state of being in a technology wave. The horizon always looks like it’s receding.

What changes is how you relate to the feeling. You learn to use it as a signal that something is worth paying attention to, not as a trigger to act impulsively. Fear of missing out, handled carefully, is actually a form of curiosity. It’s your brain telling you this might matter.

The people I’ve watched make the most of this space over twelve years weren’t the most fearless. They were the most patient. They let the fear make them curious, and then they let the curiosity do its work, slowly, without forcing it into a trade before they were ready.

One More Thing

I almost didn’t write Part 2 at all. Not because I didn’t have more to say. But because Part 1 ended in a comfortable place, the survivor’s glow, the hard-won wisdom, the inspiring finish.

Part 2 required me to say: I almost quit. I made expensive mistakes. My ego cost me real money. I had a year where I sat at my kitchen table and genuinely wondered if I’d been wrong about something I’d built my entire intellectual life around.

I’m glad I wrote it. Because the thing that actually helps people in this space isn’t the success narrative. It’s knowing that the person who has survived twelve years of this still has years where they nearly don’t.

The technology kept building through my worst year. It didn’t care about my doubt. It just kept running.

That, more than anything, is what I believe in.

See you in Part 3 (maybe)!

Follow @crako_0 on X.

[Part 2] I’ve Been in Bitcoin Since 2014: The Year I Almost Quit. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.