Cryptocurrency beginnings and regrets
Although Bitcoin can trace it’s beginnings back to 2008, like most people the first I heard about it was in 2010 when the press started to regularly report on the massive gains made by investors. I believed that I was too late to the party and that it was likely a peak had been reached, however the possibility of mining was very appealing and I filled a cart with some graphics cards and mining boards ready to start mining, intending to use any profits generated to buy more equipment. At the last second I talked myself out of purchasing the cards at this point and forgot about crypto dreams. Recently I worked out how much I would have gained if I hadn’t changed my mind and wept!
2016-17 My first taste of mining
In 2016 the price of Bitcoin almost trebled and once again Cryptocurrency was all over the news. Although by this point Bitcoin was almost exclusively mined using expensive ASIC machines that required cheaper electricity than we have in the UK to make profits, Ethereum mining was very profitable and so once again I filled my cart with some GPUs (6*RX480s) and this time I placed the order before I had time to change my mind. Six months later I had 30 cards mining on 5 rigs and cards were no longer available. I was making good money but almost daily the media was warning of the ‘crypto bubble being about to burst’. I listened and decided to sell some of the cards for a good profit and keep a couple of rigs. I put them up for sale on and when the guy turned up to buy them he wanted to take everything and I accepted. This was in November 2017 and a few months later the price of Ethereum had crashed and I felt extremely smug. However once again it turned out if I had only been brave and kept mining until the price recovered in 2021 I’d have turned a small profit into a sizeable fortune.
2020-22 Third Times a Charm?
Once again when gains were being made again in 2020, I decided to start mining again. I kept buying cards until I maxed out what my electricity supply could generate, I made rigs for friends and we started to generate a good income. A question started to become more insistent as our wallets started to swell ‘how do we protect ourselves in case the price drops again as it did in 2018?’. The only easy and obvious alternative to volatile Cryptocurrencies were tethered currencies, almost invariably tied to USD. However the whole ethos of Cryptocurrency is decentralisation and moving away from FIAT and it’s tie in to investment banks that gamble with our money, keep it when they win and get the governments to pay their losses with our money when they lose, so I’d prefer to lose it than buy FIAT. Besides the USD like all FIAT loses a large proportion of it’s buying power every year so is I very poor long term investment.
A solution is found – BlockCoin
After spending months looking for and considering different investment options I found that the ideal solution for me was property. However there was a problem. Property takes a lot of work to manage, there is a lot of legal hoops to jump through, a bad tenant can ruin a property and eviction processes are extremely lengthy and costly. Unless you have a large property portfolio you can easily get into a situation where you need to sell your property to recover the losses from a bad choice of tenant but can’t because the tenant won’t leave and when you finally get permission to evict them the damage they have done to the property means you can’t cover the mortgage before a complete renovation has taken place which you can no longer afford to do (trust me I speak from experience).
As well as this, decent property is expensive and takes a while to sell so you have no immediate access to your funds and can only invest in large amounts. It’d be much better for me to own a small amount of a large property portfolio where I can increase or decrease my investment instantly. Ideally this would be available on my current trading platforms so i don’t have to pay fees multiple times in order to remove my funds from one source and put them in another.
As the ideal solution didn’t already exist, I decided to create it. As an experiment we converted our existing property to BlockCoin in 2020, assigned 1 Coin to equal £1 of property value and by using Agents to regularly value the property combined with the House Prices Index watched as over the first 18 Months each Coin rose in value by almost 20%.
The time had come to offer this opportunity to other investors, to use the money generated by the property management company to go through the legal processes required to make everything completely watertight and allow the investors to take control of the network. Profits raised will allow further bonuses to be given back to long term investors and we hope to be able to invest in community projects and charities despite their lower returns. We believe that people are generally good and kind and that by removing corporation from property ownership we can do great things together.
We look forward very much to you joining us on this journey and can’t wait to see what we can achieve together.