I've spent the last 9 years in crypto making every mistake imaginable, chasing trends, losing money, falling for scams, and feeling completely lost. I've both made millions and lost millions in the crypto space. But through those painful lessons, I've learned a lot about how to actually make money in the crypto space over the long term. All the secrets and the pitfalls you should avoid, the hidden methods to profit, and the things most people will just never tell you when it comes to making money in crypto. And if you give me just 15 minutes, I'll hand you every single crucial lesson I learned the hard way so that you don't have to. I got started investing in crypto back in 2017 when I had absolutely zero experience investing in the crypto space, managing money, any of this kind of stuff. And I started out, like most people, investing a little bit of my money into the crypto space. But as things kept working and I kept making money, I slowly invested more and more until I had my entire life savings invested into the crypto market, which was about $30,000 at the time. I had saved this up over years, almost half of a decade. I I saved up this money. This was supposed to be money for me eventually buying a house. I invested it into the market because I was getting so excited because it just seemed so easy to make money at the time. But again, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just listening to what other people told me was a good token or project to get into because it was going to change the future. Blockchain was this amazing technology. And they seem to be right because every single week I was making more and more money. If I remember right, I ended up getting in around August of August or September, somewhere around there of 2017. And between August and December of 2017, my $30,000 ended up turning into $300,000, which for me at the time was a life-changing amount of money. This meant I could buy a house. I could never afford a house before this point. And now I could like buy a house outright. I could pay cash upfront and buy a house outright. I was over the moon. And at the time I was thinking, "Wow, if this keeps going, uh, you I'm going to be a millionaire." Um, I hadn't told my wife that I had invested our life savings into crypto. I hadn't told anyone. Uh, I I just done it. I had, you know, this huge amount of money now. I was rich. I was on my way to becoming a multimillionaire. And life was great. At least until the next month when it wasn't the crypto markets absolutely plummeted and uh went into a total crypto winner. the the markets melted down to where my 30 or $300,000 ended up going all the way back to to just $20,000. So, I I went all the way back down to the 30 I started with and then even lower down to around 20,000. I think it the all-time low is around $17,000 that I had left uh after all of this. And then obviously a lot of you guys are familiar with my story of what kind of happened next. In 2020, COVID lockdowns came. I lost my business that I spent 5 years building. I lost all my sources of income. I lost every dime I had. I was on unemployment. I had nothing left. I was eating waffles. I was playing Minecraft. And it was just peak peak depression. I'm not going to rehash the entire story. I have an entire video on this if you want to go back and watch, you know, what happened during this period of my life. Uh but I ended up making a ton of money through side hustles. And then as crypto started to turn around, took that money and rejumped back in to the crypto markets, starting my investing journey 2.0. And this time I tried to take a lot of the hard painful lessons I had to learn that first time and apply them to how I invested the second time. I was was more strategic. I was more careful. I took profit off the board. I didn't just listen to what other people told me to buy, but actually did my own research. And by the end of this journey, I ended up going from unemployment to over $1.6 million with the vast majority of that made in the crypto market. And having gone through all of that pain and depression of watching my $300,000 shrink back down to below where I started, this time around I made the decision to not let that happen. And although I didn't time the exact top as things started to deteriorate, I started moving positions into stable coins and taking profit off the board so that I wouldn't go through the same scenario that I had gone through back in 2017. And I did a pretty decent job at this. There was a lot of things I could have done better, but I did uh overall versus 2017 leaps and bounds above what had happened uh previously in 2017. Like I preserved a huge amount of my capital. I did not watch it, you know, round trip all the way back down to zero. And I was able to hang on to a lot of my gains. And I basically stayed in capital preservation mode for most of 2022 until about the end of 2022 after the FTX collapse where I jumped back into the market just a couple weeks from the exact bottom of the market. you know, put my entire life savings back into crypto and I would have been lucky enough to ride that up since 2022, making quite a bit of money over the past few years. Although, again, I still made a lot of mistakes. It wasn't perfect execution. Uh, or since 2022, I've done a lot of things that have ended up being extremely lucrative, and I've still made stupid decisions that have been extremely destructive and cost me a lot of money. Throughout this entire journey, I've had periods where I've literally made millions of dollars over just the course of a couple months only to lose those millions of dollars over the course of another couple months. And although I believe over the next decade, I'm going to learn a ridiculous amount more when it comes to investing in the crypto space, over the last 9 years, I have learned a lot of painful lessons, yet hidden tricks and tips and you know, everything in between about how to actually make money in the crypto space that nobody's going to tell you upfront. And in most cases, you have to go out there and learn yourself. And I'm just going to say upfront before I get into these points. I know for a fact most people are not going to listen to anything I say. You're going to hear these things. You're going to be like, "Ah, those don't seem that important. You're going to ignore it and you're going to just move on." And that's on you if you decide to do that. But for the people that really want to win at this game, you really actually want to succeed when it comes to crypto investing. Really take in exactly what I'm saying, cuz I I actually am trying to distill every single lesson that I've learned over the last nine years. Not every single lesson. This video would be forever long, but some of the most crucial lessons I've learned over the next last nine years on how to actually make money in the crypto space. This isn't just like a a gimmick or anything like that. This is me thinking like, you know, if my best friend, you know, or my my family member was wanting to get into crypto, they were going to throw their life savings into crypto and I just wanted to give them the, you know, the best information I could so they don't lose their shirt. What would I tell them? And this is exactly what I would tell them from everything I've learned over the past nine years. First off, you need to understand that there are multiple ways to play the game. Some people trade short-term, some people invest for like a medium-term, and some people invest for really, really long periods of time. You might get conflicting signals from all three of those people. You might have one person on X saying they're really bullish, one person on X saying they're really bearish, and another guy on YouTube saying, you know, he's kind of in between. And it might not stack up or make sense to you because you don't understand that all three of those people are playing three completely different games. Short-term traders often look at very short-term trades. They could be like over the course of 15 minutes to a couple hours to a couple days to maybe at the max a couple weeks. And long-term traders might be playing for, you know, years to the entire cycle to maybe a 10-year plus time horizon. Basically, meaning you could have one guy that's saying, you know, at the start of 2022, he might be saying, "I'm extremely bullish on Bitcoin. It's sitting at, you know, $60,000 per Bitcoin." And then it goes all the way down to 16,000. You might be like, "You're an idiot." Uh, but maybe that guy's trading over a 10-year time horizon. And maybe actually he's not an idiot. And, you know, over the next 10 years, that guy gets mega rich because he was right. You know, over the 10 year time horizon, maybe Bitcoin's sitting at a million dollars per Bitcoin and, you know, buying a $60,000 was an absolute bargain. You might have another guy who one day is like, "Hey, I'm extremely bullish." The next day, he's extremely bearish. And for you, you're like, "The price of Bitcoin didn't even move." But, you know, for him, he made a fortune in between those two days because he's trading short-term movements. Basically, he, you know, maybe he's uh buying when Bitcoin's 90,000, selling when bit Bitcoin hits 92,000, and that's just how he invests. He makes those short-term plays and short-term moves. Maybe not making an insane amount of money, but over the long haul, if he's doing that day in and day out, maybe he's making 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 a month on these really small micro movements in the market. So, when you're following somebody on X or YouTube or you're getting information, you really should try to understand what game is that person playing. Are they playing a long game? Are they playing a short game? And use that to figure out if that's useful information for you because you you should know what game you're playing. Are you playing a short-term game, a midterm game, or a long-term game? And I'll say from experience, playing long-term is the easiest way to play. Uh Fidelity did this whole study on like the best traders in u their database. They had like millions and millions of traders on on Fidelity and they did a study to try to like just for marketing purposes to try to figure out who the best traders are uh so that you know in the future they could market to that type of person. And what they found were the single best traders in their entire database were all dead people. They were all people who had passed away and couldn't sell their holdings and so they were forced to hold them over longer periods of time. This is kind of like the Warren Buffett strategy where you're just playing these extremely long-term games. And it's it's like it's kind of a cheat or a hack to beat the market because, you know, you're just you're basically outpatienting everyone. As long as you kind of identify the right general things to invest into, you can end up making a lot of money. This can be extra complicated in crypto because a lot of these tokens don't make it multiple years. So, you really have to be careful what you're investing into. But, in general, longer term investing is typically the easiest way to make money. short-term investing requires a lot of emotional fortitude and a lot of skill uh if you want to succeed at that game. Okay. The second thing that I learned when it comes to crypto investing that I think is crucial to actually succeeding at this game is you want to play the game when underlying fundamentals are in your favor. The easiest way to think about this, I'll give an analogy would be imagine you want to sell ice cream. You have like a little ice cream cart and you're wanting to make money. The best time to sell that ice cream is not in January and February when it's snowing and it's like absolutely freezing outside. The peak conditions to sell that ice cream is going to be in the middle of summer when it's really really hot and people want to cool down. In that example, the underlying conditions that help you succeed is that hot weather, is that summer that summer environment. You want to sell in summer, you want to maybe close down your cart and not sell in the middle of winter. Underlying fundamentals or underlying conditions are kind of like that. There are seasons in crypto when it's easy to make a lot of money. And then there are seasons in crypto when in general the entire market bleeds and everyone's losing money. For example, in 2017, in 2021 and in 2013, it was stupid easy to make a fortune investing in crypto. As I said, in 2017, I had no I had no idea what I was doing, but I made a fortune investing in crypto despite not knowing anything like not knowing any idea having any idea what I was doing. However, in 2018, 2014, and 2022, we had crypto bare markets. They were brutal. And no matter how good of a trader you were, you likely lost a ton of money trying to invest in that market, unless you were doing short-term like trades that had to do with like shorting the market or something like that. And this is where understanding macro cycles is extremely important in knowing that like, you know, where are we at in the business cycle, where are we at in the credit cycle, what's happening with liquidity, what's the Fed doing? And and this can all seem very, you know, extremely complicated, but it really isn't. Like on once you get it down, it's not that complicated. It does take a little bit of learning and kind of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, but if you want to actually make money investing, you you need to do that. Like you can't just like come into crypto, throw some money in and hope you make money. It'll work if you get lucky and you you know, it happens to be a 2021, 2017, 2013 type of year. Um but but even still, you'll probably write it back down like like I did in my my first year because you won't understand what you're doing. So paying attention to macro and knowing when the momentum is going the right direction is really crucial to actually making money investing in crypto. And during those seasons during during the 2021s, the 2017s, the 2013s, you can make more money than you than you could possibly imagine. It is stupid how much money is possible to make when underlying conditions are in your favor. It's like you could throw money at almost anything and it's like you you you just make a fortune, but no one's going to tell you like when those conditions are in your favor. There's no like easy like thing you can check where it's like, "Oh, yeah, conditions are in your favor. You should go trade today." Uh, it it takes some work. It takes like anything, it takes work. You know, if it didn't take work, everyone would do it and everyone would be multimillionaires and, you know, we'd all be happy. Uh, but it doesn't work like that. You know, only a few get only a few people can actually win at this game. And it's the ones that put in the work. And I do videos on the different macro cycles and where we're at all the time. So, if you want to kind of stay up to date with that, you can follow my channel. I I do post about that. The third thing I think is really important for people to understand is that investing is not a game of predicting the future. Investing is a game of risk management. And I like to compare it all the time to poker because and investing in poker are really, really, really similar. In poker, you're given, you know, your starting chips, you're given a starting hand, and you have to choose if you're going to bet on that hand or you're going to not. And as things progress, as different cards are laid out on the table, you can increase your bet or end up folding and kind of, you know, passing going to the next one. It's it's a game of strategy. It's a game of risk management. And the way most people invest in crypto would be the equivalent of like you start, you know, you've never played poker before in your life. You get a hand, you don't even know if it's a good hand or not, and you go all in. You're like all in on this hand, and you know, you just kind of hope you're, you know, you're going to win. Obviously, that's a really stupid way to play poker and you're probably going to lose if you, you know, go to a professional poker table and end up playing that way. In the same way, investing in crypto, unless you're just stupid lucky and that starting hand and all the cards end up going in your favor and just like miraculously you end up winning, uh, if you don't first learn how to read your hand, so is this a good project? Is this not a good project? And then follow along and and see, you know, kind of how things progress, uh, you're going to end up losing. Also, you need to understand even if you have the perfect starting hand, like the by definition, the single greatest starting hand that you can have, you can still lose based on the cards that are played out. So, even with the perfect starting hand, that doesn't mean you can go allin because you could still be wrong even though you have by definition the perfect starting hand. In the same way when you're investing in the market, even though maybe you have correctly identified an absolutely amazing altcoin, like this is one of the best altcoins, you could like you did the research, you did the due diligence and it's perfect. Even then, things could just not go your way. Maybe the project gets hacked randomly. Maybe techn like some technological breakthrough happens that makes that irrelevant. Uh, you know, maybe something else happens. Like there's always something that could go wrong. Even if maybe you did your due diligence right, you still need to carefully manage your risk and make sure you can survive to win the game ultimately. And that brings me to the fourth lesson I've learned along the way. You will never always be right. You will absolutely make stupid mistakes. You will absolutely pick stupid projects. And some of the things you pick will absolutely lose you money. Assuming you're going to get every single investment you pick right is the equivalent of like being Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan and assuming you'll make every single shot you take. It's just not going to happen. Even if you're the best of the best of the best of the best, it's just not going to happen. You're going to have misses. That is that is how the game works. That's why it's a game of risk management. The fifth lesson is that volatility is the price you pay to make fortunes in crypto. Crypto is extremely volatile. you uh like I I have literally made millions of dollars and then lost millions of dollars over the course of like two months or three months. That is part of the game. You will watch your portfolio go way up and then you you'll watch your portfolio go way down and you're not going to always be able to perfectly time that. If you were able to perfectly time that all the time, you would just be this mad genius billionaire. Okay? It's just not possible to account for every emotional swing in, you know, movement in the market that's going to happen. So, if you're doing long-term trading, which is what I do, I trade for the entire cycle. You're gonna just have to be okay watching your portfolio go way up and then watching it go way down. You you mentally have to be able to handle that if you want to play this game. The sixth lesson I think I'm number six that I learned along the way is that most tokens are just flat out not going to make it. Most of the tokens in the crypto space are going to die. the the vast majority of them are going to be scams and just nonsense and vaporware and just stupid things you should not be investing into because it's so easy to create tokens and create like a simple website and a white paper just by nature. The vast majority of tokens are useless complete nonsense you're not going to want to invest into. It's kind of like the vast majority of social media posts are stupid things that that nobody actually cares about. The vast majority of videos that get posted on YouTube, nobody's going to ever watch or would even want to watch because they're just not very good videos. The videos that get surfaced your for you page are going to be the best of the best of the best. But there are billions and billions of other videos that get uploaded to YouTube that nobody watches because they're they're horrible. They're not good content. Unfortunately, crypto doesn't have a very good for you page. It doesn't have a very good way to surface like the best the best tokens. There are really good tokens. There are really good projects that are like building real tech that's awesome and could change the world. That's just a such a small percentage. That doesn't mean you can't make money on all these other scam tokens and and stupid tokens. Like, you know, there's definitely strategies where you can and the market can be really dumb at times. And uh it'll go through various narratives where it'll be like, "Oh, this is AI is super cool. Look at all these AI projects." And if if a project looks cool enough, you know, people will throw money at it and maybe bet on it potentially going up. And some people even know it's a scam and they'll throw money at it just thinking that, you know, maybe other people won't know it's a scam and will throw money at it. There's all kinds of weird things like that where you could still make money. It's not like that restricts you from investing in those things, but you should just be aware that like most of these tokens aren't going to be around in 2 years, 3 years, four years. Uh so if you're playing a really really long game, you really should make sure you're doing your due diligence and you're investing in tokens and projects that are going to be around for the long haul because they have something there. They're actually doing something. They're actually building something. They have actually smart teams uh behind them. The seventh thing that I've learned along the way is that often the best time to buy into the market is when everyone is telling you it's the worst time to buy into the market and we're going way lower. When when those voices are the loudest, when they are just like all over the place screaming that everything's about to collapse, that is often the peak buying opportunity. And inversely when everyone's telling you, you know, Bitcoin's going to 10 million, everything's going to keep going up forever. and those voices are screaming at their loudest. Everyone's making money. Everyone's getting hilariously rich. That's often the best time to sell uh out of the market. Most people are sheep. They just kind of do what everyone else is doing. And if you want to win, if you want to actually make money investing, you have to not be a sheep. You cannot follow the crowd. You have to be doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing in most cases if you want to actually make a lot of money. And just think about it like everyone cannot win just by the sheer rules of the market. Everyone cannot win. Therefore, most people cannot be right. They have they have to by that very nature be wrong. Not everyone is becoming multi-millionaires investing in the market. It's only these like small fringe 1% of people who do things differently than the vast majority. The eighth thing that I've learned along the way is that position sizing is key. It is like uh one of the one of the laws of investing is you have to have solid position sizing. It is a crucial mechanic to actually winning when it comes to investing. And what position sizing is is basically restricting yourself to only investing a certain percentage of your total portfolio into any one given asset. And you have to have this rule up front because you're eventually going to, you know, at some point come across an asset where you're like, this is the best thing ever. This is going to make it's going to do a,000x. I'm going to make, you know, so much money and you'll be so tempted to stick a lot of money in there. Maybe, you know, 20% of your portfolio, 50% your entire portfolio. And you can't do that. you just you can't do that because as a going back to the poker analogy you will be wrong sometimes and even though you might be right maybe it is a really great token uh odds are you're not right but but you know maybe you are right and maybe it is a really great token even then you can still lose something could still go wrong and so for me myself I restrict myself to only even if I'm like if I'm peak bullish about a project and I think this is the greatest project that crypto has ever made uh I will restrict myself to a max of 5% of my portfolio can go into that project. Most tokens I'm investing 1 to 2% and they're like really risky ones I'm doing like 5% or less. The only reason that wouldn't make sense is maybe you're just throwing a little bit of money and maybe you're like throwing 25 bucks in the market and like because of fees or whatever, you know, it doesn't make sense to spread out that 25 bucks into like 1% positions. But but if you're like playing in size, if you're actually investing a meaningful amount of money into the markets, position sizing is key. It is absolutely crucial. The only exception I would give to this would be Bitcoin. You know, there's some people that'll put 80% of the portfolio in Bitcoin or, you know, 90% or 100% of the portfolio in Bitcoin. And that's a strategy and and you know, whatever. What I'm talking about specifically is anything that's not Bitcoin, you want to have very strict position sizing rules for how you're going to invest in those things. And that is going to ultimately help you win a lot. Okay? That is going to make a huge, huge difference. At least from my own experience, that has made a massive impact on uh how I invest and how I make money. The eighth thing that's important to understand in crypto is that literally everybody is shilling their own bags. It doesn't matter if it's your best friend, doesn't matter if it's your mom, doesn't matter if it's a respected VC. Everyone, everyone is shilling their own bags. And that includes me. I am also, if I'm talking about projects, I'm talking about tokens. I'm talking about tokens that I own and I'm passionate about in 99% of cases. You just need to inherently understand that everyone is going to have a bias towards the tokens that they hold. If if you hold the token, uh you hold it because you think it's going to go up. You want other people to get into that token. That is just the nature of the crypto game. And honestly, makes perfect sense. If you believe something is going to go up, of course you're going to own that token. And kind of alongside this, you should understand that when somebody owns a token, they by definition automatically think it's just like the greatest thing ever. Even if it's like a super stupid project, and I've seen this time and time again, it'll be like a super stupid project, but they are convinced it's going to change the world, it's going to make a ton of money, it's going up because of this, this, and this. They'll know every bullish argument for that token. And you just got to be able to discern between like people not knowing what they're talking about. And uh this is why you have to do your own research and kind of learn a little bit about the space yourself because everyone's going to tell you that every token that they have is the greatest token ever and it's going to go up. And most of those people are wrong and just gonna lose money. The ninth thing that I learned along the way is that there are a ton of influencers that run rampant pump and dump schemes, especially when it comes to memes. And you just have to be aware of this. You have to understand that basically every crypto influencer has the one ring around their neck constantly tempting them to do absolutely unhinged stupid things that are going to screw over their audience. Because basically the more willing a creator is to screw over their audience, the more money that they can make, especially in a bull market. And most people just by definition cannot resist the call. They cannot resist the temptation to absolutely screw people over to make millions and millions of dollars, which means you just have an unhinged amount of influencers that are getting paid behind the scenes to promote tokens. They got all these weird deals and back rub things that they're doing to uh talk about this token, talk about that token, send their audience here, send their audience there. The 11th thing I learned along the way is that market cap in FTV is crucial if you want to win. This probably should have been like the number one thing upfront because most people do not understand this and it's it literally is so crucial and so many people get roasted because they don't understand such a simple thing. A market cap is how you determine the size of a project, not its price. Market cap, not its price. Market cap. Not enough people know this. It's for some of you guys who know this, you're like, I sound stupid to you. Uh, but for people that don't know this, this is like a revelation that's going to change your life. Okay? XRP is not cheap. XRP is one of the biggest tokens in all of crypto. And if you don't understand market cap, you don't understand that, okay? Cuz the price literally doesn't matter. You can be a 10-cent token and be one of the biggest tokens in all of crypto because the size is determined by its market cap. That's how you judge how big of a project it is and therefore how much room it has to actually grow. And FTV is equally as crucial. It shows you how much of the supply is currently circulating versus uh how much could be circulating. Basically, sometimes these uh tokens, especially lately, actually almost all tokens lately do this, which is why the market's been so brutal for for alts, is that when they aird drop their token or release their token, it'll be like 1% of their supply or 5% of their supply. Meaning, they're holding back 95% of their supply that they're going to eventually dump on the market. that's going to absolutely crush the price of of that token. It's kind of the equivalent of like if Pokemon released like five Charizard cards and they were, you know, worth $100,000 each and then, you know, but that was only like 1% of the amount of poke the Charizard cards they were going to release and you didn't know this and you spent $100,000 on a Charizard card and then later they release, you know, a million Charizard cards, all the same kind, all the same print or whatever, and now your Charizard card is not worth anything because there's a million of them out there. It's it's the equivalent of that but with tokens. Okay? Uh, so you know, you need to know FDV because it's going to tell you how many tokens are actually in circulation and how many are going to get dumped on the market pushing the price down. Lastly, over the nine years that I've been investing in the crypto space, I have become convinced that crypto is ultimately going to go to hundred trillion plus in market cap. You're going to see the entire crypto total market cap go over $100 trillion over the next decade. I am absolutely convinced of that. But that doesn't mean that your favorite token is going with it. The vast majority of tokens, 99.999% of tokens are not going to make it. They're going to end up dying and, you know, be left as these zombie graveyard tokens for all of existence. There's only going to be a small portion of these tokens that are going to ultimately succeed and, you know, end up growing into something important. If you can correctly identify the ones that are going to be in it for the long haul, you absolutely can make a ridiculous amount of money, but you're not going to make it overnight. It's going that's going to happen over the long run. like Bitcoin over the last decade or something like that. And in my opinion, those plays over the next decade are going to be the stupid easiest way to make life-changing amounts of money. For the other 99.999% of tokens, you have to view them as short-term plays. They are not going to make it over the long the long haul. They're not going to necessarily benefit from this momentum growth that you're going to see over the next decade. And you have to play them smart and carefully because they're going to be flashes in a pan. They're going to they're going to be popular one day and they're going to be gone the next. and you got to have a different strategy for those tokens than you do your long-term plays. If you're interested in joining the Obsidian Council, it's currently closed to new members, but you can join the wait list in the description of this video. In the Obsidian Council, I do weekly market and macro updates. I share my entire portfolio update every time I buy and sell. I do monthly market deep dives, weekly Q&As, and a ton more. Again, you can sign up in the description of this video. As always, none of this is investment advice. None of this is me telling you to do anything with your money. This is just my personal thoughts. I'm not your financial adviser. I'm not a financial adviser. I am not your father. I'm not anyone to you. I'm just a random guy on YouTube sharing my thoughts and the things I'm learning about investing, you know, on my own personal journey. You are a grown adult. Nobody is controlling you. You get to make your own decisions with your own money. But also, you need to own the consequences of those decisions later down the line. If this video is helpful, make sure to hit the like button. If you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comment section down below. And if you want to see more videos like this, make sure to hit that subscribe button and the little bell next to it to be notified each time I release a new video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next