Bitcoin helped fix my gambling addiction

Everyone has a “how’d you get your start in bitcoin” story. Mine is probably one of the more unique ones you might come across, at least for someone willing to share it.

I first bought bitcoin on April 25, 2017. $80 got ya 6m sats back then. I had no plan and didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I had no idea of the value proposition of bitcoin. Just had heard it hyped enough to take a nibble. Getting some skin in the game felt exciting. It’s when the journey begins.

Like many others, I started looking for the “next” bitcoin. I thought there probably wasn’t much juice left to squeeze after it had gone from 0 to $1,500. That naturally led me to Ethereum which I bought a little of. Obviously, after that, I had to “diversify” across the slew of nonsensical shitcoins that were popping up daily. There are some hilarious names I once held thinking they’d make me rich. Electroneum, Komodo, Deep Onion, Crypterium. I was also a user of one of the enshrined ponzis of crypto, Bit-connnnnnnect!!! There were red flags everywhere, but I thought that as long as the bull market was intact, the *totally legit* trading bot would continue to compound my balance daily.

As we know, the bull market ended. A brutal bear market cleaned out the space. Scams collapsed, my shitcoins pretty much went to zero, I tried to recoup what I could from my small ETH balance, and eventually, I sold all my bitcoin too. Even though I was once up ~5x my total initial investment, I ended up round-tripping the dollar value of my investment and walked away with a little less than what I started with in USD. While mad at myself for not taking profits, I thought the whole experience was so thrilling, it was like going to a casino.

I just couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to get rich. I imagined what it would have been like to be able to buy bitcoin in 2010 or to participate in the ETH presale. Basically, hop in a time machine to go to the beginning to accumulate enough money to solve all of my perceived problems.

So after I found out that I wasn’t going to get rich from the crypto bull market of 2017, my mind was poisoned enough to think that turning to online casinos was a good way to fast-track my journey to becoming rich. And the kicker was, certain sites gave you a bonus if you made your deposit in bitcoin.

What happened next was catastrophic for me. I deposited $200 onto Bovada and proceeded to hit up online blackjack, a game I knew pretty well. Within two days, I turned that small starting balance into $20,000. Naturally, I was ecstatic. I started thinking about all of the things I could do with that money. Pay off the car, take out a good chunk of student debt. You know none of that happened.

I became “anchored” to that high-water dollar mark of $20,000. I take full responsibility for my actions, but it’s interesting how pernicious online casinos are in the way they set up psychological traps for players. In retrospect, it was very suspicious how I was initially able to run up such a massive win. Quickly enough, the tide turned.

I started losing hands. In about 10 minutes, I lost $10,000. Losing back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back $500 hands of blackjack will do that to ya pretty quickly. Over the next day, I lost it all.

I could have snapped out of it. I could have walked away. But, the months of playing the shitcoin casino had primed me to be the degenerate gambler I was about to become. By the time I was a month into my online casino bender, I was done for.

Online gambling is different. It’s secretive. No one sees you. It’s not the same as having the camaraderie with your buddies at the IRL casino, getting drunk and laughing about how much money you blew that night. It’s just about the gambling. The unfiltered exhilaration for the next hand that’s about to spit out of that digital card chute. You just hope that the numbers are the right ones.

The worst version of yourself takes control, bringing out the ugliest in you.

Playing online blackjack was similar to trading shitcoins, just on a much more immediate and dangerous feedback loop. I remember feeling so stupid depositing more money onto the site after losing $20,000 but I did it anyway.

The months that followed was my personal trip to goblintown. Ironically, before this, I had been a fairly frugal person throughout my life. I was a dutiful saver and had amassed a net worth that would have rivaled my peers for my age and income level.

I had become a full-blown gambling addict, playing blackjack online for hours a day, on both my laptop and iPhone. The dopamine from gambling seeped into my bloodstream to where I couldn’t go more than 3-4 hours without playing. When going out with friends, I’d go to the bathroom and win or lose $100-$200 playing blackjack on my phone. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and play for hours on my phone across from my sleeping fiancé.

From the outside looking in, I could see how my story is just of a guy who had completely lost his marbles. Duh, you shouldn’t spend the majority of your day online gambling. For me, my incremental bad decisions just set me back a bit each time, but as a whole, they compounded to be the biggest problem of my life. The continuous rush of gambling had me in a fog which distracted me from the damage I was doing to my financial and overall well-being.

My familiarity with buying and sending bitcoin caused me additional pain. Online casinos typically cap the amount you can lose on a daily or weekly basis, etc. But with bitcoin, there was no limit to how much you could deposit. So I’d buy bitcoin and send it directly to my casino account on repeat. I was making around $60k at the time and there was one day I remember I lost $10,000. After depleting my savings, I turned to debt. 2 maxed credit cards and 2 personal loans later, I started eyeing my fiancé and I’s wedding fund.

A gambling addiction is different from other types of addictions. There may be no visible signs that you have a problem. I was able to keep my job, I still hung out with friends. My problem was undetectable by everybody in my life, except when I came clean to my fiancé, about a month before we were set to be married.

Even though my issue had been going on for months, when I told her, that’s when I finally acknowledged I had a problem. It became real. It wasn’t just messy numbers on a screen anymore. I naively thought my financial accounts would be restored in the same way they were destroyed. Telling her was the scariest thing I had done in my life.

I thought there was a decent chance she would break it off with me, and wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. Luckily for me, I have the most amazing wife and she was very supportive. I told her about the damage to my personal finances, but all of the money was there to get us to and through our wedding day. We had our wedding and honeymoon; it truly was one of the happiest times of my life.

There was one final devastating chapter in my search for the bottom of my addiction spiral. After experiencing the elation of our wedding and honeymoon, weeks went by and life started going back to normal. Simply not gambling when I had idle time was very difficult for me because my brain had been rewired to where I was expected to. Despite my best efforts to abstain from gambling, the indescribable impulse of my addiction eventually won.

My self-worth bottomed the day I told my wife I squandered the money we were gifted for our wedding. She gave me a verbal thrashing I was entirely deserving of as I sulked there, a complete mess of humanity. If they weren’t already making a brief cameo appearance in my mental talk track, ‘those thoughts’ were starting to percolate even more at that point. However, I was determined to turn things around.

There are no quick fixes for the type of problem I had. It’s a cliché for a reason, but I had to take it one day at a time. I started going to GA meetings. Going cold turkey from gambling was the best path forward for me, but that didn’t make it easy. I didn’t have the comfort of gambling to distract me from the hard truths of my financial situation and newly accumulated debt.

It helped to have a partner willing to dig in and tackle the problem with me. We teamed up to aggressively pay off my gambling debt, and it felt good to make progress. It wasn’t a linear progression for me, as some days were harder than others. I had to reconstruct my self-worth to a certain extent and I went a couple of years before I was able to forgive myself. Catch me on a bad day nowadays and I’ll still look back on the damage I did with regret.

But for the most part, I’m at peace with my mistakes. I’m a completely different person today than I was back then. I have an immense sense of optimism for the future. I’m willing to work toward that better future and have lowered my time preference to work toward long-term goals. While it was obviously a worse path to take in life, I’ve learned so much about myself and cherish life much more. I’m a much more empathetic person, able to better recognize struggle, and have a higher propensity to help others than the previous version of myself.

My wife and family support deserve immense credit for helping reconstruct the person I am. There is something else that I attribute my turnaround to, and that thing is bitcoin.

I’ve detailed my enthusiasm for bitcoin and how I got my current framework for how I approach the asset in previous posts but have not touched on the events that led me to that approach.

To me, bitcoin is more than an investment asset. It’s a beautiful tool for freedom. The idea that individuals can have sovereignty over their wealth and can store it in a way that cannot be debased or confiscated no matter what type of unfair life circumstances they are born into is an inspiring thing. And, once I did the work to understand it properly, I’ve battle-tested the ideas against the context of the world we live in and have concluded that, yeah, bitcoin is probably going to win.

Maybe it’s because I got my start in 2017 ahead of the class of 2021, or maybe it’s the lessons I learned about myself on how greedy I can get when numbers move around a lot, but my strategy of DCA and buying on dips has kept me in the game. There are many great advocates of this approach in the space, but I knew I needed a methodical strategy to avoid the emotional swings likely to happen with the volatile bitcoin price. My gambling experience humbled me greatly, there’s a good chance that if I had not gone through that, I would have blown myself up with this downturn to $17,500 by trying to take on too much leverage or continue playing the shitcoin game.

Bitcoin is a slippery hog as they say, some people just can’t hold on. Perhaps I was predisposed to holding on no matter what because of my personal experiences. I haven’t sold a sat from the stack I started building in 2019. Coming out of my gambling haze, I needed something to believe in. I studied bitcoin and looking at it through the lens of first principles, I never found a reason to stop believing. If anything, my conviction has only grown stronger.

For me, bitcoin has been an excellent bridge between the person that I was and the person I am today. I’m a better husband and a new father which gives me even more reason to focus on having a legacy I can be proud of. While the world is flailing away, up in arms about the current thing, I’m laser-focused on the right steps I can take to make the future brighter for me and my family.

Michael Saylor says that bitcoin is hope. He’s fucking right it is.